In a brand new episode on The Rush Podcast Network, Pablo Toledo, Rush Soccer’s Sporting Project & Coach Development Director connects with Daryl Brazeau, Iowa Rush’s Senior Girls Director and a specialist in Leadership studies, to chat about leadership concepts, indicators, and best practices from an inter-disciplinary standpoint, as well as discussing fundamentals to have your team adopt desirable values and behaviors without burning the players out. Must listen.
Below, some of the many concepts that Daryl shared with us:
Leading a Player: “Three fundamental concepts that I follow to lead the player are to see in them more than they even see in themselves, to guide them in the discovery of their own answers, and to create an open dialogue environment”.
“When I refer to open dialogue, I mean it beyond the trust that is needed to lead. For example, when it comes to evaluations, I’m against the yearly cycle, it’s too long and the reference of our feedback can be too far already and the player hardly remembers it. Instead, I think small and more frequent calibrations are more effective”, he added.
Daryl also share insights on how to shape a team’s culture without burning the players out:
“I’ve learned over the last couple of years that you can try to ingrain a behavior like competitiveness in your team culture, but you can’t do it all the time, in every session and activity, because it would burn the players out. You need to give them a space to break it out, but what you can do to favor it is highlight the behavior when you see it. ‘Catch them being good’, like Tony Di Cicco said. Rush is very good at that by promoting the 4:1 ratio of coaching positive to instructional”.
