The Inner Game of Football

In his autobiography, Pete Carroll lists Bud Grant and Bill Walsh as the coaches that shaped his footballing philosophy the most. That’s quite the duo of mentors!

But Carroll also suggests Abraham Maslow and John Wooden — neither of whom he knew personally — as having an enormous impact on the way he thinks.

It is predictable, then, that when Carroll was developing his Win Forever mantra that he would develop it into a hierarchical triangle.

While Maslow’s hierarchy culminated in self-actualization and Wooden’s pyramid culminated in competitive greatness, Carroll’s pinnacle was a mental state that he picked up from a guest lecturer at University of The Pacific in the 1970s.

Tim Gallwey was the captain of Harvard’s tennis team in 1960, and by the 70s he’d moved to California to coach. By fusing meditation techniques with his coaching, Gallwey had uncovered a way to teach the technical, tactical, and physiological elements of tennis by approaching his students through a psychological lens.

In 1974, Gallwey wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which remains the #1 bestselling book in sport psychology to this day (Gallwey has no formal qualifications in psychology, by the way).

Shortly after the book was released, Gallwey was invited to speak at Pacific, where Carroll was an enthusiastic grad assistant in his first coaching role in football.

“Tim’s insights would be as important to my outlook in the years ahead as any other single influence,” Carroll writes.

Quieted Mind

The idea that captivated Carroll the most is what Gallwey calls the ‘quieted mind’.

Carroll writes, “Gallwey talked about how human beings tend to enter a state of doubt when faced with the unknown or uncertainty. Physically, when we doubt our ability, we tend to overtighten our muscles. Mentally, we fear failure and can become emotional and distracted.”

Quieted mind is the antidote to a tense body and noisy mind. “We want our players to be free of distractions and totally absorbed, fascinated with the game itself and not necessarily the outcome,” Carroll says.

Here are the four levels of Pete Carroll’s coaching philosophy, top to bottom:

Where coaches get it wrong is they confuse a quieted mind with an under-aroused mind. They assume that great performance in the competitive cauldron only emerges from a state of fear and anxiety.

Rather, a quieted mind is an engaged mind. A quieted mind recognizes that it has the skills to meet the challenge at hand. A quieted mind may still wander, but it is primed to recover faster when it does.

This is true for athletes. And it is true for coaches, too.

Cody’s Notes

• Carroll only developed his pyramid (ie. wrote down his philosophy) after being fired from two NFL head coaching gigs. At that stage, it was unlikely he’d ever get another chance to coach in the league. He writes, “I couldn’t believe that I had been coaching for the past twenty-six years and had never stated my philosophy, let alone written it down.”

• You probably don’t need to write down your philosophy when you’re a first year grad assistant, but you probably shouldn’t leave it twenty-six years, either.

• As a solid starting point for your own philosophy, consider Carroll’s message as he departed the Seahawks: “The essence of being as good as you can be is to figure out who you are. It’s a relentless effort to get clear about what’s important to you, what uncompromising principles do you stand by, what makes you who you are. If you don’t do the self-discovery, you don’t have an opportunity to be your best, because you don’t know who you are yet.”