Stop competing and start winning

"The pairing of a business consultant with a Division I head coach may seem unusual, but management consulting has many lessons to bring to coaching. Conversations between friends connected by their love of volleyball developed into innovative ideas about how coaches can run the "business" component of their program, stay connected with their players, and elevate their team's success. Over the past five years, the authors have worked together to bring select concepts and tools from the world of business into the University of Utah's volleyball program. We have presented our approach to numerous coaches' groups, and, based on the positive feedback from coaches at all levels, we have decided to collect these concepts and tools into this book. Many coaches share a similar career trajectory. They started as players, entered coaching as a volunteer assistant coach or as a director of operations, earned a promotion to assistant coach, and, eventually, were hired into a head coaching role. What they learned along the way depended on who they had to learn from. If they were fortunate to learn from great thinkers and communicators, they were well prepared when their turn came to run a program. If they had less capable teachers, they had to learn by trial and error and by developing their own approach to managing a program. But no matter how effective the coaches they trained under, they learned lessons from inside the world of their sport. Because of this, many coaches have similar bodies of knowledge. A given coach may be better or worse than their competition, but they are all drawing from the same storehouse of ideas. Winning as a coach requires incorporating ideas wherever you can find them and blending those which make sense to you into your program to make it more effective and more efficient. If you can access relevant ideas and tools from outside of coaching (whether from business, politics, healthcare, charity, volunteer work, or other fields), you will provide yourself with lasting competitive advantages"--