You Have to Have a Team of Coaches Before You Can Have a Team of Players
Every morning, coaching staffs across the country sit down for the same meeting. Film review. Depth chart adjustments. Practice plan for the week. Important work — but it’s usually missing the work that actually builds the kind of staff players want to play for.
I’ve sat in hundreds of those meetings. And I’ve come to believe the most important fifteen minutes of any staff meeting is the one nobody schedules: the conversation about who we are becoming, not just what we are doing.
The One Question Everyone Answers
We do this constantly. Almost every week, I bring one question to our staff meeting and every coach has to answer it out loud. Not just the ones who feel like talking. Everyone.
The questions change depending on what we need that week:
- What was the best thing about today?
- If you were the head coach, what would your message to the team be right now?
- Who is someone that needs encouragement that we’re missing?
- What’s one thing we can do better, or do more of?
- What’s an issue or challenge you’re seeing with our team that we haven’t addressed yet?
None of these are complicated. That’s the point. They’re not designed to be clever — they’re designed to make sure every voice in the room actually gets heard, every single week.
Talk Becomes Ownership
Here’s what I’ve learned watching this play out over a season: a staff that only talks about scheme and personnel stays a group of individuals who happen to work together. A staff that has to answer the same honest question, out loud, in front of each other, starts becoming something else. Closer. More single-minded. More willing to tell each other the truth.
And something happens the moment a coach speaks a concern or an idea out loud in that room instead of just thinking it privately — they take ownership of it. It stops being a passing thought and becomes something they’re now invested in seeing through. Multiply that across a full staff, every week, and you don’t just have a collection of assistants running their own corner of the program. You have a staff that owns the program together.
That only works, though, if the room is actually safe for it. If the head coach is doing all the talking, or shutting down whatever doesn’t match his own read on things, the exercise dies fast. It has to be led by someone willing to be a humble servant leader — someone who’s genuinely looking to have the program improved by the collective wisdom in the room, not just looking for validation of what he already decided. When that’s the posture at the top, the process gets better because more eyes are on it, more voices are shaping it, and more people feel responsible for it working.
Why This Matters More Than Another Drill
Coaches are wired to fix things with technique. Better footwork. Better leverage. Better scheme. All of that matters. But culture isn’t built with technique. Culture is built in the moments where everyone in the room has to be honest, out loud, about what they actually believe and what they’re actually seeing — the player who’s quietly struggling, the standard that slipped without anyone noticing, the issue nobody wanted to be the first to bring up.
A staff that never has that conversation will still win some games. But a staff that has it regularly builds something that outlasts any single season: coaches who trust each other, a shared language for what actually matters, and a program that doesn’t fall apart the first time adversity shows up.
You have to have a team of coaches before you can ever have a team of players.
How to Actually Use This
If you want to try this with your own staff, don’t treat it as a one-time experiment — make it a habit.
Pick one question, bring it to the start of your next staff meeting before you get into anything else, and make it clear that everyone answers, not just whoever feels like talking. Give it a moment of silence first; people need a second to actually think, not just react. Then go around the room.
The first few times might feel a little stiff. By midseason, it becomes one of the most valuable fifteen minutes you spend together all week.
Where I Pull My Questions From
This is part of why I wrote Beyond the Goalpost the way I did. All 54 chapters — across coaching, leadership, and life — close with a reflection question, written to make you stop and answer honestly, one chapter at a time: toughness, trust, sacrifice, identity, purpose. I use them in my own quiet time, and I pull from them when I’m looking for something honest to bring into a staff meeting.
But here’s where they work best: if your whole staff reads the book together. One chapter a week, same as you’d run any other study. Everyone reads it on their own, then you bring that chapter’s question into your next meeting and everyone answers it. The question wasn’t written as a group icebreaker — it was written to make one person think hard about their own life. But when an entire staff is reading the same chapter and sitting with the same question at the same time, it becomes something more. A shared starting point. A reason to talk about things you wouldn’t normally bring up on a Tuesday afternoon.
That’s the difference between handing someone a book and building something with a book. The second one takes intention. But it’s worth it.
If you’re leading a staff, pick the book up together. One chapter a week. One honest question, answered out loud, every time you meet.
Beyond the Goalpost includes 54 chapters across three sections — Winning in Coaching, Winning in Leadership, and Winning in Life — each closing with a reflection question. Built for personal growth, and ideal for a coaching staff reading it together one chapter at a time. Bulk pricing is available for coaching staffs of any size. Learn more here.
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