Mid-Season Report: Good to Great

Hard to believe we are halfway through our season.

Our record does not reflect how good we are,
and how great our potential is,
but we need to win the close game.


1. Take note of Paul Carcaterra's compliments of these great players - and young players that have acclimated to the college game.



2. Listen to Coach Pietramala's words at the start of this documentary on Hopkins;
he talks about 3 goals:

1. Play (physically and mentally) tough,
2. Play smart,
3. And play together as a team.

(While the season started hot for Johns Hopkins,
it has not been the one they had hoped for... watch Part II.)




3. Over this long weekend, consider the choices that you make off the field.

Read this article about Coach Starsia and the University of Virginia - and how after losing to Princeton in overtime in 1994 and 1996, the 1999 Men's Lacrosse team made a dramatic choice as players - to change the culture of their team - leading to a National Championship.

Starsia says he was not tortured by those thoughts. In fact, he welcomed them. “There is value in the self-examination that comes with losing,” he said. 

In the end, he did change, although both he and Van Arsdale say the alterations have been more subtle than precipitous. But if there is one event to point to as a catalyst, it may have come before that first championship season.

Here's (the beginning of a speech) from 2007 by Coach Starsia talking about UVa transformation from Good to Great in 1999.



In an article by Jim Collins about his book, Good to Great, he writes;

Disciplined action: The “stop doing” list 

Take a look at your desk. If you’re like most hard-charging leaders, you’ve got a well-articulated to-do list.  

Now take another look: Where’s your stop-doing list? We've all been told that leaders make things happen—and that's true: Pushing that flywheel takes a lot of concerted effort. But it’s also true that good-to-great leaders distinguish themselves by their unyielding discipline to stop doing anything and everything that doesn't fit tightly within their Hedgehog Concept.