Tudor Collegiate Strategies

Where college coaches come to dominate their recruiting competition.

Coaching Life ·

Reflect, Analyze, Improve!

by Mandy Green, Busy Coach

No matter how good or bad your recruiting or performance results were during this past school year, you can always do better as a coach. Yet the single biggest key to improving both performance and results is ignored by almost everybody. If you want to be at the top of your game, you absolutely must learn from what has already happened.

Now that graduation is over and our student athletes have headed home for the summer, I spend a lot of time having fun with my family, I try to rest and recover, and I try to get caught up on things that had to get pushed off during the busy spring. But I also use this time review the progress I’ve made on my goals during the year. I do that by:

  1. Reviewing my tracking journal entries — a full year’s worth of recruiting, energy, and communication entries from the tracking journal I created.
  2. Reviewing my yearly, monthly, and weekly schedules to get a better understanding of how productively I was working throughout the year.
  3. Reviewing my business card file to remind myself of all the new contacts I’ve made.
    “Evaluated reflection turns experience into insight.”
    -John Maxwell

    The routine of reviewing the past year and preparing to set my goals for the coming year gives me a great deal of knowledge. I see what I have accomplished, I see where I fell short, and what I love the most about reviewing the previous year is that I get to see how much progress I have made.

    It is also very practical. It gives me a general feeling for how I’ve been spending my time (relative to my priorities). It helps me note any bad habits I might have fallen into. And I am reminded of all sorts of ideas I had, projects with my team or staff that I initiated, and relationships I started that need follow up.

    So now that 2nd semester has wrapped up for most of us, no matter what else you have planned for the next couple of days, set aside a little time to revisit the past year. I think you’ll come up with all sorts of good ideas about things you can do next year… along with the inspiration to get you going on them.