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Creating A Vision Of Excellence
All coaches are competitive in nature and are looking to achieve greatness. You cannot expect success if you don’t know what success looks like. Therefore, lack of vision will keep you from achieving greatness. As a coach, it is imperative to surround yourself around people who share similar beliefs, values, goals, and the same vision as you. Your vision must:
*Be Future Oriented
*Reflect your program’s values
*Set Standards of Excellence
Future Oriented
People often use the terms “mission” and “vision” interchangeably; however, they both serve different purposes for your program. A mission statement describes what your program wants to do now, whereas a vision statement creates a mental image and outlines what your program wants to be in the future.
Where do you see your program three years from now? Five Years? Ten Years? If you can’t see past this year, you need to sit down with your leadership team and create a vision which reflects the beliefs and values of your team.
Reflect Your Program’s Values
Stay away from having a product oriented vision. By having a product oriented vision, you start to lose the culture you worked so hard to create as you try to win at all costs. If you fail to win a championship, you will view the season as unsuccessful even though a lot of great things happened. Rather than focusing on winning championships, focus on developing champions.
Your vision should be simple, clear, bold and reflect the values and beliefs of your team. This is essential if you plan on uniting all team members and rallying them to achieve the ultimate goal. What is your ultimate goal? Is it to build athletes of character? If you answered yes, then have a vision that focuses on character development. It may be academically motivated. If so, then have a vision where academics is the priority?
You may change course over time as you see necessary. Each year you must go through extensive evaluation and decide what you did well and where you fell short of expectations.
Set Standards of Excellence
If your goal is to play mistake free, you will never take your program to the next level and become great. Once you achieve this goal, people will become complacent and have no desire to get better. You need to create more urgency and focus on the desire to be great and excel. Make the desire to be great your number one priority; you will never become complacent. You will seek out opportunities to learn, grow and improve.
I understand the ultimate goal is to win championships. If that becomes your vision, you are setting yourself up and your program up for failure because only a few teams accomplish that feat. By having a well thought out process driven vision, you will accomplish great things. Success in terms of wins and losses will be a product of a great vision.