I have been talking to a few high school coaches lately - the coaches in Minnesota are amazing in their willingness to share. Below are two great ideas on goal setting that I got. The first comes from Mark Gerber of Eastview High School and the other comes from Mark Klingsporn of Tartan High School. Both are very successful high school coaches.
What is a Goal?
When visiting with Coach Gerber, one of the amazing things he hit on was what is a goal and what is a reward? Is winning a conference title a goal? What about going to the State Tournament? According to Coach Gerber those are not goals, they are rewards. Goals are what you can control to get your rewards. Goals are things such as outrebounding your opponent. It is something you can control that affects the reward (winning). That is a great change in thinking about your goals, it goes alot with Don Meyer's idea of NBA (next best action) and controlling what you can control.
Making Players Give Up Their Individual Goals
In visiting with Coach Klingsporn he had a great exercise he does with his players to explain how unrealistic the individual goals can be for a team. He has his players write down how many points per game they think they should average. He then adds them up and shows them how many points per game our team would have to average to achieve those goals.
I did this exercise with my 8th grade AAU group and figured out we would have to average about 130 points per game for everyone to have the average they want. It was a great jumping off point for a discussion on how the team goals are what are important and the individual goals just get in the way.
