This episode dives into the foundational lessons derived from kindergarten that are applicable to athletic coaching, team dynamics, and really adulthood in general. The SOS team explore the significance of standards versus rules, emphasizing that effective coaching parallels effective teaching. Through the lens of childhood lessons, coaches can advocate for a more structured approach that prioritizes character development alongside athletic achievement.

Mentioned This Episode:

Video: How Elite Teams Define Their Standards

Website: The Captain Class

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Website: LCC Athletics

Related Podcast: Coach Cut’s Corner

It's time for Stars on Sports, a

podcast radio show dedicated to sharing stories about our athletic program at lcc. Past and present.

Lansing Community College athletics has a strong tradition.

25 national championships, over 190 all Americans, 19 MCCAA all sports trophies.

Stars on Sports will introduce you to individuals that have contributed to our program success and give you the backstory on what it takes to develop it.

We'll also dive into and break down the topics and issues facing athletic departments across the nation and region. Right here at lcc.

This is Starz On Sports. Hello and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sport.

I'm joined today by our A team, our assistant athletic director, Steven Cutter, and our producer, Dadalion Lowry.

And gentlemen, I've been gone for a couple weeks, so one, I'm excited to be back here, but two, I'm really excited about this topic we're going to talk about today, one we've been kind of hitting on for a long time. And I'm also excited because I'm not even 100% sure what direction we're going to go with this because it could go a couple of different ways.

But there's a poster and book out there. That's not where I got this from. Coach Kutter sent me an excellent video on what drives winning. And it's about standards.

But the standards, it can be summarized in everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten. And I never thought of it that way when I think of standards.

But as I look at more of team standards and I look at, you know, as we switch from rules to standards in society, and I think sports teams are a little ahead and have been doing that for recent memory, you can really break it down to kindergarten rules. And there's a couple directions we could go.

We could talk about standards and what those kindergarten rules are or also the teaching of those standards, which, you know, give a shout out to elementary teachers. As, you know, as I prepare for this podcast, I have a lot more respect for kindergarten teachers and the things that they have to teach.

And I have grandkids at home, one currently in kindergarten.

And, you know, I take for granted and I've been in education for 30 years to know, you know, what it's like to be in a classroom with a bunch of kids full of energy or different personalities. And again, that carries over to sports. As we talked a lot about sports being a large classroom for learning.

But again, when you break it down simply and that's what you're really doing, you're breaking it down to the Simplest form, they're life lessons.

And that is something we've talked a lot about of educational athletics is teaching life lessons that will carry them on for the rest of their life, such as play well together, share your toys, clean up after yourself. And again, we can dive into those, how those apply to athletics or bowling leagues. But you know, it starts with teaching them.

It starts with, you know, the clearer you teach someone, the more productive or the better the outcome will be.

And I've shared this before, one of my biggest pet peeves in this business is, and you know, I've coached a couple different sports, but basketball was one of them.

And when a kid didn't know how to do a left handed layup, if they're right handed, and so all the way they grew up, no one stopped to correct them and just accepted that they could just throw the ball up instead of doing a fundamentally left handed layup. And that always bugged me. And that's, I think, a simple premise of what we're talking about today is teaching, teaching kids to do the right thing.

And again, we've talked about this book before, the Captain's Class by Sam Walker, but you mentioned it the last couple of times in our office. That's hit me hard. There's no bad teams, bad leaders, and right now in the world of sports we're seeing that magnified.

I mean, we just saw the worst college football team in history win a national championship in two years with an excellent leader. So I went on a way long monologue there.

But again, I have so much to say about a lot of things, but this topic intrigues me so I want to get your feedback on it and let's see where this discussion goes. I hope it's a good one.

I think you definitely spoke about a couple of the standards for kindergarten, but everything really does start there. Everything from like you hit on a few of them, but like just get in a straight line.

Yep.

And when it comes to coaching, whether it's in the civilian world or in the sports world, what you're trying to do as leaders is you're trying to train behavior. Sometimes that trained behavior is very simple. We need you to be here by 8am and so you're training that behavior.

Sometimes it goes much deeper where the standards and the expectations are higher. You need to accomplish X, Y or Z by noon or whatever it might be. But it boils back down to elementary and your training behaviors.

Yes, that's a great point.

And you know, in our business, I listened to a podcast and I thought the personal said that I don't think the good ones watch the games, they watch the behaviors. And that's one way of helping manage safety and health is by seeing the interactions or the excitement or the frustration. But one thing is watching.

The other thing I think by watching you can know them, how to put a plan in place to educate them to train those behaviors. We've talked a lot about sportsmanship on this podcast. So yes, I think it is training behaviors.

And, you know, John Wooden used to teach them how to tie their shoe to do it the right way. Nick Saban talked about, you know, there's not a lot of choices if you want to be successful because you don't reinvent the wheel there.

There's so many things that you limit that be all in and be successful. But it does come down to teaching. And we've talked about teaching before and how coaching, I believe, is synonymous with teaching.

But I think we get lost in the X's and the O's or the strategies or the scouting reports. And I think the great teams now, and I think they're getting more recognition for it, is those standards.

In the video you showed me, Mike Kruzchewski, Tim Corbin, the successful baseball coach at Vanderbilt, like their first meeting with a team isn't even ball related. It's going over their standards, cleaning the dugout, showing them how to clean the dugout when they are done, when they leave it.

And you hit on a few kindergarten rules. You know, it'd be interesting, I think back to my kindergarten day that I think of this and those things that.

Yeah, walking down the hallway in a straight line and, you know, single file, picking up after yourself, how to share, how to get along with others, how to write with a pencil. So, Dalian, real quick, what do you think of your kindergarten days?

I've been waiting to chime in just because I want to say, first of all, one of the things I learned to do was not eat glue. So there's that. The other thing is that naps are absolutely awesome. So that's the second.

But seriously, going beyond that, I can actually tell you that you actually threw a couple of things out right at the top of everything that applied to last night because I had my bowling league last night.

We love bringing it in.

And you said clean up after yourself.

So I will say that I walked around with my wet shoes on, the area that you shouldn't walk on because you're bowling, you know, you're sliding around, you don't want wet shoes. So I went, oh, that was a mistake. I need to clean that up. So I did that.

The other thing that I did was play well with others, because I make it a point after every game, no matter what, whether we win or lose, to take the time to say, hey, good game. Now that having been said, the other thing that I would say that I learned from that is two things from kindergarten, one being to tell the truth.

And there was a point last night where I actually. My ball hit the gutter, came out and got the final pin. Nobody saw it. And that technically is not a legal move.

I did not know that I could

have walked away and said, oh, yeah, I just got. And it was. It was a spare if I had kept it. But I said, that was a lot of points. I said, no, that's not fair. And so I took that off my score.

So that's one thing.

The other thing that I think I learned probably more than anything, and we are told this even beyond kindergarten, is treat others as you want to be treated. And pretty simple golden rule.

Yep.

Yeah, good stuff. Way to tie in all those rules to kindergarten and sports.

And again, you hit on some things that I think, you know, sports do a pretty good job of shaking hands after games. And we've talked about the good and bad of that in the past.

You know, we're really, I think, emphasize with our teams at LCC to clean up their space when they're done with it, leave things better than you found it. So, again, clean up your mess is more than that. It could be a mess.

Not the physical, tangible mess of a cup on the floor, but even a mess with a relationship or body language or yelling that, you know, what. Is that how you behave in kindergarten? And you would get reprimanded.

Reprimanded again, I wanted to find a more positive word because, you know, even in sports, we're trying to move away, you know, by having standards instead of rules. You're moving away from punishment. Like, you know, encourage to offer punishment. Encourage is a good word. Yeah.

No, but it's more, you know, just changing the way you deal with it. And it starts with relationships. It starts with trust, with things we've talked about.

The more you have that, the more I think you can, you know, work through constructive criticism and feedback and truth and genuineness. So I think those are emphasis, and we're seeing those highlighted with successful teams at all levels of sports.

But until this video or until, you know, we've had a lot of talk about standard, but we haven't connected it to kindergarten. And that's what I wanted to do today. And again, you mentioned, like, three or four rules that you learned in kindergarten.

I'm struggling to get past the glue one, but I guess that is one. You know, there are some kids, I think you want glue to zip them

up and don't sniff the glue, is definitely something you need to know.

But knowing your role, knowing how to share, I mean, again, there are just so many tangible analogies between being five years old and being an adult that between that time frame, we lost sight. And especially in sports, where, again, I think the pandemic helped us about toughness or the Persona that it's okay.

We talked about being competitive and being caring or being kind, and you can do both of those. It's not soft in sports.

And I think, again, if we tied more into those kindergarten days, it would help us even move forward with some of the better things that, you know, when I talk about competition brings out the worst in people, that it would help us compete better, compete with more sportsmanship, compete with more consistency and continuity. And I think that's a big word, is the consistency, which I know is.

Is one of your superpower words, but I think that's huge in having standards and following those rules is consistently enforcing them, consistently applying them, and consistently making sure we're not punishing them, but we're bringing them back to why it is a standard and not a rule. So any kindergarten rules for you, coach, or anything, the way you tie it in, can you continue to today?

Yeah, I think we covered most of the kindergarten things that I can remember.

I just remember it felt like it was a lot of structure at that point, and it wasn't overwhelming or anything else, because I do feel what I remember, it was a fairly encouraging part of structure. And I do believe that I've been able to take that into my coaching as well and really try to use some of the stuff that I did learn in school.

Things like questions can drive discussions. Instead of just going out and saying, this is what we need to do and this is who we're going to be. Generating questions can drive the discussion.

And then I think about something else when we talk about trained behaviors.

I noticed early on with our team this season that when we had speakers come in or we had maybe it was RDK or, you know, just anybody would come up to the room to speak in front of them. I noticed that a lot of the student athletes were just not really looking at the speaker.

They were looking at maybe the board or maybe the ground or their shoes. Or whatever. And so we ended up having some discussions about that.

And we told them that it was very important, that even if they weren't able to fully lock in, that they paid attention to those that were speaking in front of the room. And some might say, well, you know, is that really important because of respect? Or why is that so important? And I tied it into being present.

Being present is one of the single biggest things that we can do as human beings. And it also happens to be one of the most challenging things that we face on a daily basis.

And so it's just when you start having discussions like that and start teaching that kind of stuff, you can now look at a room full of baseball players.

When somebody's in the front of the room, you're going to see full locked in, maybe not completely mentally locked in, but they're going to be staring at the speaker. And so that is trained behavior.

Well, again, a lot of things you touched on that will lead us to a direction.

But I'd like to give you credit because I had two baseball players in my office last night after one of your leadership team and one of the sophomores who'd gone through this book presentation before emphasized how what different this year is paying attention to. To the reader, paying attention to the person up top.

So obviously they caught on and it then trained with them, who's one of our great student athletes anyway.

But that was the one point he mentioned too, is paying attention and having the different readers, you know, in the past where he used those same words that you just talked. So I mean, again, it is carrying over to them being present. I think that's a tough thing in our society now, and even tough in sports.

Like last night in basketball, there were two big games at the college level, at a high level, and both teams have an even bigger game, per se, on Friday. But staying present, staying with where you're at. And I think in sports that's tough with, you know, with your schedule and that.

And again, one of the things you had taught me a couple years ago is be where your feet are.

And, you know, that's a big saying even for anxiety people, because anxiety is like worrying about the future or, you know, remembering the past, where staying where your feet are can really help.

Anxiety, depression, there's a lot of things that live in past or future things,

but I think our society has gone away from that.

And again, I think sports can even emphasize that in a negative way because we're always looking ahead or dwelling on our result from the past that sometimes we forget and I think some of the most successful coaches, including the Indiana football Kirk Signetti, who we have not talked a lot about the big thing in him. You don't see emotion on him.

You know, there are a lot of memes out here if there's a great play or bad play, you know, we talked about, we haven't talked about be a goldfish yet. That's gotta be one of our podcasts. But you know, 10 second rule and staying present.

But I think that especially with our so many distractions, so many things going on in our world with technology and that I think that's become harder to staying present.

That to your point is that is something we have to train and that is something that is so important in sport is focus and you know, that next play, you know, and we talk bowling.

But I think golf is such a big example of this of you have that one bad shot or that one bad putt that just lives with you and the good ones forget about it and move on. It can make such a big difference. But it is about training people on how to handle that.

And I truly believe it's helped even me personally with anxiety of staying where your feet are. Don't get caught up, bring yourself back, which we've talked about. Breathing methods have helped with that.

And then the last point you mentioned is about training, is about teaching, is about educating. And that's where I think we get lost a little bit. Because you know, what you allow is the standard, what you accept it or you correct it.

And so you can't complain if you accept it. And then that's an Allen Stein analogy, another great mental performance person. So back to the bad teachers, good teachers thing.

That the good teachers do correct it. The good teachers do make you do a better layup. The good teachers do have you bowl the four step spinball if that's what you want.

That they don't just accept it, that you have to be deliberate in changing it. That back to this video is, you know, it's not bad teams, it's bad teachers. And I'm not calling out bad teachers.

So we've all had, you know, again, some of the best coaches have had bad teams that they just didn't relate with or you know, just didn't gel with.

And you know, I had to emphasize that in some of my previous job that you know, the different team every year that you experience expect the coach to always be there. But sometimes it's just that, but it does start with the teacher and what they are deliberate about. Training these behaviors.

And it's a very tough statement. There are no bad teams, just bad leaders. But it actually started with the Navy SEALs. And this is where this came from.

And this came from something called boat crews. And in Navy SEAL training, they would have these boat crews race out to six or seven guys in a boat and one leader in the boat.

They'd race out to this buoy, paddle in around the buoy and come back in. And what they started experiencing was the same thing you see in sports. One team is first and one team is last.

And a lot of times you see consistency, whether it's in the NFL, the NBA, Major League baseball, college football, you know, college basketball, whatever it is, you see that consistency. There's some really solid teams and then there's some teams that aren't.

And so what they would do is that first place team that was pretty consistent, they would take that leader and put it in the last place team. And this is where that came from. That last place team all of a sudden would start coming in near the top with just a switch and a leader.

So that's when you hear those words, that's where it came from.

Well, thank you for sharing that. And you had shared that with me before.

And again, I know you've done a lot of studying on military training and it is very impressive how they've studied it and embraced it and help the rest of society. Right. So, you know, one of the things this video was talked about is how clarity is important.

If they're not understanding it, you're not defining it well. And at least that's a great productivity.

A great word is clarity.

Because if you think about a kindergarten teacher, and if the kindergarten teacher puts out 35 standards or 35 rules, you're not going to be able to fix and get everybody, hold everybody accountable for all those. So you've got to have some clarity on what's most important. And I think that's what the best teachers and the best coaches do.

They don't have a whole laundry list of rules or standards. It's the most important ones. This is what moves the needle most for our program or our business or whatever it might be.

And you kind of stick to those because you're not going to be able to manage all these rules. And that's what I found, like the best teachers going through my stuff was there was clarity and simplify.

And there's a book out there about everything, you know, you need to learn in kindergarten. There's a poster with like 16 rules on it. And I think that's a good point.

To transfer it back to athletics, it's not to have 16, but to have three, four, or five. And take those three or four or five and, you know, talk about core values and standards for your team and adjust them each year.

Back to your point of Even each kindergarten class is different depending on the behaviors of that room.

But it is important to have clarity, because being more productive and defining what you expect from my coaching staff, from our coaches to our student athletes, that will end. They'll lead to being better than we were yesterday and being successful not only on the scoreboard, but in life. So probably go on for more, but,

you know, it's time for recess.

Yeah. So. And again, I'd like to thank. I had a great kindergarten teacher. My kids had great kindergarten teachers.

I had one kid that cried every day when we dropped them off. So I feel bad for that kindergarten teacher. She still doesn't like school. But again, they're the first impression can be of our educational system.

They're usually very caring people, and they're great role models for what I want our coaches to be. So very good. We'll carry on with standards and kindergarten in the future. But I know this is the moment dadalion's been waiting for.

So I got a good one today. I'm glad Dadalion's back. So I have been holding on to this one. There was a study out there, and we've talked about this before.

If you could only have one food the rest of your life. And I know both of you are pizza. So this is what's exciting. They did a survey out there, and here are the top five. Okay. Okay.

Number five is chicken tenders. Number four, pizza. Number three.

They surveyed the wrong pizza, but we'll talk about it.

Number three, grilled cheese. Number two, french fries, which surprised me a little. And then number one was hamburger. So you guys are number four with pizza.

I actually have talked about grilled cheese on here, and hamburger is probably what I eat almost every day. So my point is taking pizza out of there. You two. What? That other one for you on that.

Out of those four.

Yeah. Or a different one. I guess you can go all out.

I definitely tell you French fries would be out of that.

Yeah, I didn't. I was surprised.

I don't even see that as a. Yeah, I didn't.

I love french fries. But that wasn't.

I feel like this was an 8U survey.

I didn't listen to the 8. Um, room. So come on. I need an Answer.

Chicken tenders. That seems like that'd get boring again.

I. I'm gonna have to go with hamburgers only because you can create a different variety of hamburgers, just like pizza.

Yeah. And they have. I mean, I like the barbecue burger right now with onion rings and barbecue sauce.

Olive burgers.

Yeah, I know. I'm that big.

Olive burger. I love me an olive burger.

Okay. What about you, Cutter?

Yeah, I would go with the burgers because I've actually had pizza burgers.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I can see that. Yeah.

The amount of things you can do with burgers.

Yeah.

I have not had one of those in a while. That sounds delicious.

You know, we have a food truck here that does kind of like a pizza sandwich.

And to the point of, like, we've talked about west side Deli before, and we know we don't, you know, have fonts or whatever, but their pizza sub is one of my favorite things. So a pizza on bread. And we're going to talk more pizza in the next time we're crust and such. But so are you disappointed that people.

Pizza number four on this list.

You know? You know, it is.

It is disappointing. It's crazy that grilled cheese and French fries are ahead of it, which I

like grilled cheese and the french fries are what really. I mean, the burger doesn't really surprise me. That makes sense.

It's a pretty common. Yeah.

Even the grilled cheese, because you're talking about comfort food, but the fries make no sense to me because I just. I'm not a huge fry.

And again, let's not get into food chemistry here. But you guys made up a good point about how you like pizza because you get.

There's so many different ways you can create it, and that is true now with hamburgers and grilled cheese. I. I mean, they're common on more restaurants because they put different ingredients on those to, like, give a different variety. Well.

And even french fries have got their own vibe these days. What? Everything from bacon to loaded fries, cheese

and that, you know, I loaded tots, which are different, but okay. I have been holding on to this list because I know you two pizza lovers should be disappointed at number four. So good stuff.

Looking forward to the next one. Until then, go stars. Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ studio. Engineering and production assistants are provided by d' Alion Lowry.

And you can listen to the episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand@lccconnect.org to find more information about our athletic program, visit lccstars.com thanks for listening. Be sure to join us next time for more stars on sports.