BOOK OF THE WEEK: "Stick Together" by Jon Gordon - BUILDING CHAMPIONSHIP TEAMS

Being a coach is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult and grueling task. 

Your main job as a college coach is to bring - depending on the size of your team - 15 to 30 young adults together. That is not an easy thing to do, most of your players were the stars of their high school teams or excelled in the previous programs. Meaning they all have egos and it is your job to soften those egos and get them to believe in your mission. 

Championship coaches and championship teams are all have one thing in come they are able to quell those egos and the best way to do that is to take a page out of Jerry York's book. If there was ever a coach who has earned the right to have an ego it is Jerry York. The man is the all-time winningest coach in college hockey and has won four national titles, but he doesn't have ego and that is the most important part. If you're asking your players to check their ego at the door, then you need to do the same.

In Jon Gordon's most recent book, "Stick Together" he highlights this fact. A high school coach faces the dilemma of bringing his team together and having them play up to their potential. As a coach, you can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't know how to use that to your advantage then you will never be successful. 

See the 2019 Red Sox. They had a talented roster of all-stars, but still finished third in the A.L. East and missed the playoffs. Not a good showing for a team who won its fourth World Series since 2004, especially when the 2018 was just the opposite of the 2019 squad. 

Both squads were virtually the same and had the same core players (Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Andrew Benintendi, Xander Bogaerts, Chris Sale, David Price), but the one big difference was drive. With a new, young manager in Alex Cora at the helm in 2018, it signaled a fresh start for the ballclub. They entered the 2018 campaign as underdogs, a unified bunch that set the franchise record for wins and won the A.L. East on their way to another championship title. 

Compare that to the 2019 team that believed all they needed to do was "throw their hat on the field" and they would come out victorious. Speaking to the media on his first day of the 2019, Cora mentioned how he really didn't want to turn the page on 2018.  Hindsight being 20-20, we saw how well that worked out for them. It didn't. 

The thing is, no matter how much success you have had in the past it doesn't matter when the next year rolls around. It's the concept of Coach York's 24-hour rule. Whenever some good, or bad, happens, you have 24 hours to feel that emotion then it is time to turn the page, move on and not look back. Nothing good ever happens from looking back. It would be like driving a car staring into the rearview mirror the entire time. (I wouldn't advise doing this.) 

One thing that 2018 team had, as well as the three other championship Red Sox had, was a sense of connection with each other. The 2004 team were the care-free, Idiots. Led by Johnny Damon and Kevin Millar, they got the guys to rally around the fact that it didn't matter that their backs were against the wall with no team coming back from an 0-3 hole in the American League Championship Series and advance to the World Series. "Make History or We're History" wasn't just a catchy tagline, that team lived it. They played care-free, which is how all champions play. 

The 2007 squad wasn't the Idiots from three years prior. This team was built on young professionals looking to make a name for themselves. Look at the players who made up this team: 

• Jon Lester, making his return to a major league roster after a year-long battle with lymphoma
• Dustin Pedroia, undersized his entire life and told he would never make it to the majors and even when he did people were underestimating him. Remember the security guard at Coors Field wouldn't let Pedroia in because he didn't think he was player? 
• Jacoby Ellsbury, made his major league debut in June and a virtual nobody, but by October the entire country got a free taco from Taco Bell because of him.
• Jonathan Papelbon, he had more experience in the majors than the other three, but 2007 was when he really made a name for himself between doing an Irish jig to "Shipping Up To Boston" and striking out Seth Smith in Game 4, baseball finally knew who this Papelbon guy was. 

In 2013, it was rallying around the city of Boston after the Marathon Bombing and subsequent manhunt in April. We recall David Ortiz' famous "this is our f'n city" speech before the first home game after the bombing, but it was rallying cry and so too was the phrase Boston Strong. It wasn't a tagline, they truly believed it. 

And the same happened in 2018.  Despite winning 93 games in 2017 and winning the A.L. East, they were ousted in four games of the Division Series by the eventual champions. (Now with hindsight continuing to be 20-20 you don't how much unethical activity was done by the winning. team in that series, but for this post let's just move past that caveat.) A new, younger coach gave the team much more of a personality and let them be themselves, which pushed them over the hump with the best record in baseball with 108 wins and a new franchise mark. 

In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care" and a team with a lot of love and passion doesn't need a lot of rules.