Sports Therapist Advises Coaches To Forget About Winning
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Josh Medcalf works with college coaches. His theory: That you get more out of people if you don't make winning the ultimate goal.
In other words, you win more by emphasizing it less. The Minnesota high school athletic directors brought him into speak on just that. Mike Max was there.
Josh Medcalf played sports and works as a sports therapist. His message to the group of Minnesota High School Athletic Directors is simple: Forget about winning. Focus on enriching athletes' lives.
"People don't actually have a stomach for it because it's hard," Medcalf said.
Difficult because we are a society that measures sports success by wins and losses and statistics. But if you don't ask them to focus on the score.
"Everyone is going to play better whenever somebody takes the pressure off them and lets them know that their value comes from who they are and not from what they do," Medcalf said.
In other words if you don't focus on the results, you have a better chance of achieving your goal.
"Because if you've surrendered the outcome you're freed up. You're freed up to trust your training, to act instead of react. You're freed up to be at your very best," Medcalf said.
The whole genesis to the program is that fear is our greatest motivator, more than success.
"That's what is the most used motivator and the weird part is love attracts energy and fear consumes it," Medcalf said.
At the end of this session, he hopes he has changed minds about what athletic directors should ask of coaches. But in the world of sports, it will take a lot of convincing to shift the focus from the wins.
"At the end of the day there's a lot of people that know this stuff in their gut and they won't live it out," Medcalf said.
