Handle Hard Better

Two years ago, Duke Women’s Basketball head coach Kara Lawson went viral for delivering this truth to her team: “Life isn’t going to get easier. What happens is you handle hard better.”

It’s a mindset shift that feels particularly poignant right now. The world is going through massive upheaval — politically, socially, technologically, athletically — and these seem destined to continue, if not accelerate, in the foreseeable future.

But it’s not just our athletes that need to handle hard better, it’s also for us as leaders. It’s in times of rapid change that leadership is needed most, and if I’m honest we’re not exactly covering ourselves in glory right now.

Rather than complaining that coaching is harder now, this is our time to step up and meet the difficulty, not wish for it to be easier.

Here are my 3 ways to handle hard better:

Train Hard Better

One of my major criticisms of how we prepare athletes is that we train movements, not moments.

We do lovely flow drills (movements) that help our players conceptualize the ideal patterns of play, but rarely do we add back in the critical elements of the game (moments).

We expect them to know what to do when scores are level with 8 seconds left, against an opposition they’re intimidated by, who’ve just come back from 20 points down.

But where is this moment in our training design?

For our players to handle hard better, we’ve got to train hard better.

I’ll give you an example:

There’s a famous story of how the US military killed Osama Bin Laden, but what’s not well-known is how poorly the mission started.

The objective was to fly two Blackhawk helicopters into the compound where Bin Laden was hiding, have the soldiers raid the compound, and return to the aircraft to complete the mission.

However, the first helicopter crashed into the wall of the compound, and had to be destroyed. The crash also meant that second helicopter had to land outside the compound, with soldiers having to climb over the wall themselves.

Despite dropping the soldiers in a different spot and having to destroy one of their helicopters, they were able to complete the mission successfully. Do you want to know how?

Because they had trained to crash one of the helicopters.

Before deployment, the US military had built a replica of the compound on home soil and one of the scenarios they trained was to lose one of the helicopters. They anticipated moments that might be crucial to the success of the team, and replicated those moments (rather than perfect movements) in their training environment.

They trained hard better.

Lead Hard Better

Coaching is also going through its own large scale change.

There’s NCAA rules and re-alignment. There’s massive growth in women’s sports. There’s large investments being made into pro sports. There’s shrinking investments into some Olympic sports. There’s large increases in head count, which increases the complexity of organizational dynamics. There’s new media. There’s new technology. There’s modern parents, modern athletes, player power, lack of support, social media, generational changes, and the list goes on…

This is before we even get to our teams, and helping them to navigate the new levels of hard that come along with each step of their team maturity.

But are we becoming the types of leaders who handle hard better?

Or are we going to slip into the old trope of telling others what they should be while making none of those same changes for ourselves?

To lead hard better, we must commit to being a steadying force amongst the upheaval. In the face of the hardest things our sport can throw at us, it is imperative that we continue to embody the calming influence of a caring and decisive leader.

When things get hard in games, how do we respond? When an administrator won’t give us what we want, how do we respond? When a player asks why we’re doing something, how do we respond?

Smooth seas never made a skillful sailor. And easy seasons never made a skillful coach.

If we want players who handle hard better, we must be coaches who handle hard better.

Plan Hard Better

One of the reasons we defer to easy is we plan for easy.

I’ve seen dozens of strategies from both coaches and clubs, and I’m yet to see any consideration for when things get hard.

For the most part, we all take a ‘don’t look down’ approach to strategy. But superstition isn’t the optimal way to plan for success.

Besides, there are clues all around us as to what happens, and much of the ‘hard’ is entirely predictable.

For instance, sports with a salary cap and draft are specifically designed for you to lose top players when you win. So if you’re planning to win, why are you not planning for hard better by having a plan to replace your top players?

The same goes for coaches and support staff. By winning, they receive offers from other teams. So if you’re planning to win, why are you not planning for hard better by having a plan to replace your coaches and staff?

Similar patterns exist as your team matures and learns to compete — there are clues and patterns to the types of moments they will begin to encounter. (Which, in turn, becomes how you Train Hard Better).

The way to win is to plan for it. And the way to win after winning is to plan for it.

But your plan must include how to handle hard better.

How do you become someone who handles hard better?

1. You train hard better

2. You lead hard better

3. You plan hard better

If you haven’t seen Kara Lawson’s original video, here it is: