How Well Do You Know Your Team?

In this inaugural episode of "A Pane In The Glass Podcast" for 2026 (Happy New Year to you all) we take a look at how you feel about your team and how your teammates feel about the team. Then, by using that extremely valuable information, I'll help you formulate a strategic and tactical plan that will guide your team in making good strategic and tactical decisions. I end the episode with a sound bite from Tom Brady, perhaps the greatest quarterback in the history of the National Football League. His topic is about the development of scholastic athletes. What Tom has to say is something all parents need to hear!

Chapters

• 19:05 Tom Brady

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

How comfortable are you with lots of stones in play? What about your pre-shot routines? Do you have pre-shot routines? Not rituals, but routines. What about the quality of your releases? How about the comeback ability? What's the state of your brushing fitness? Not technique or system, but fitness. Do you execute shots with execution tolerance? In other words, making sure if you don't make the shot there's an acceptable outcome. Just how resilient are you? How good are you at recognizing scoring opportunities? What about shot selection in critical situations? Do you make good decisions? Do you overcome distractions? Welcome to another episode of a pain in the glass podcast. This is Bill Shearhart, Shredder, Professional Coach with Coaches of Canada, coming to you once again from my, as I look out the window, very snowy home in Grand Bend, Ontario, on the ancestral land of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nations. I used the second person in the English language, you or your. Executing with execution tolerance? Never talked about it. Not even sure exactly what it means. So, well, that would be pretty low on the 1 to 10 scale as well. Resilient? Well, not so much. No, I gotta be honest, I'm not very resilient. I like to get ahead and stay ahead. Recognizing scoring opportunities. Yep, I think I'm pretty good at that. I think I can sense when there's a scoring opportunity. Shot selection in critical situations. Well, I guess I'm about a five out of ten for that. And the last one that you mentioned about distractions, well, I'm easily distracted, I gotta be honest. So that would be just a maybe a three. Well, you see, what we're offering here in this episode is a chance for you, again, singular or plural, you the individual, to rate yourself. And then the real key to this is rating your team. There are teams that never have this kind of discussion. And this worksheet to which I referred is just one of the worksheets in an activity that I referred to way back in season number one, the Strategy and Tactics Workshop. So this is a bit of a reprise about the Strategy and Tactics Workshop. Getting together with your teammates and examining the kind of team that you really are, the shots that you play well, determining the type of team you are from a strategy and tactics perspective, and they're not the same thing, and then making sure that you actually play that way so that you're playing the shots that you play well and you're playing the way you want to play. Well, you see, that's really what strategy and tactics workshop is all about. So, what is the strategy and tactics workshop? Well, I think the emphasis here is on the word workshop, and I'll give you just a brief history. There was a time in Canada where we as a group of instructors, national coaches, national instructors felt that we really weren't handling strategy very well. Now you'll notice I left out the word tactics. Uh there was we would look at different situations and you know, what shot might you play here, and how would you play it? I mean, it was okay, but it really wasn't very effective. And so in our summer technical conference one summer, we decided there had to be a more effective way. And two individuals, one of whom I know you know, Brad Gushu and Paul Webster, who succeeded me at the National Training Center, is now the coach of Team Jacobs, and they're going to be off to Cortina Milan in about six weeks for the Winter Olympic Games. They came up with an idea of a workshop, and they put themselves uh to the task of coming up with a basic idea. And they presented it one summer at the technical conference to the rest of us, and we jumped all over it. We thought this is great. So we put something together, and as the national development coach at the time, I field tested it through the following curling season as I traveled around the country. The next summer I reported back and said, Hey, I think we really are onto something here. This is working really, really well. This is working well, this is working well, but I think we need some work on some of these other parts. So and I did that for three years before, as a group, we felt we really had something useful. Well, that was a number of years ago, and I have uh conducted the strategy and tactics workshop with a number of teams, sometimes in person. I remember one time at the Winnipeg Granite Club, there were 20 teams that, and we all did the workshop together, and I've done it with individual teams on site. I have also done it with Zoom using Zoom. And so if you are listening to the podcast and you reside uh in a country not in North America, uh, I certainly can conduct this workshop with you through the magic of Zoom. So here's what the workshop is all about. There is a brief PowerPoint presentation which describes sort of the basics of what the workshop is trying to do. And the key element here, and I will not vary the lead, the workshop is not designed to teach you what shot to play. That's why the word workshop is there. It is designed to make sure, using relevant data that you will gather from your participation in the workshop, to decide on the best plan, that's the strategy part, and execution, that's using a particular shot that will execute the plan, commensurate with your team's skills and abilities, and at the array of the array of shots that your team plays well. Then there are a couple other worksheets that are going to be necessary for a 12-shot quiz that uh Brad and Paul have put together. It'll be 12 situations, and you're gonna have to select the shot that you think your team might select in that situation. And there's always three: sort of a first choice, second choice, and third choice. And along with your assessment of your team's abilities, and that's the worksheet that we started together at the beginning of this episode, your team will gather, as I said, relevant information, and it's relevant because it's relevant just to your team. The fact that I did this with 20 teams on site at the uh Winnipeg Granite Club, uh, I had no idea what decisions the team made. I was simply the facilitator, and I am willing to be the facilitator for your team if you see some value in the strategy and tactics workshop. So here's sort of the logistics of it. This is how it works. So, coach, I will send you some print material which describes the workshop in a little bit more detail, along with the three worksheets that you will distribute to your players, and of course, the uh the 12 situation activity to which I referred from Paul and Brad. Your responsibility as the coach, and and you can do this that you don't have to have a coach. One of the members of your team can take it upon him or herself to initiate that, and you will know exactly what to do. I will give you all the documentation, and uh, there is a little bit of homework before we get together, as I said, most likely through Zoom, to actually do the workshop. Now, the workshop consumes about 90 minutes, and when we're finished with it, you will find out things about your team that I pretty much guarantee you did not know before. I'll tell you one little story about the worksheet to which I referred at the beginning of the episode. I did this with a men's team in Calgary, and at the National Training Center, I had an office and an adjoining uh uh resource room, seminar room, as I called it. And as I said, there are 37 team skills and attributes, and what the uh players on the team had done was they ranked their team on a scale of one to ten individually. So the U was singular, you see. They ranked that individually. So I'll make up Peter decided that comfort with rocks in play, that number one, uh well, I think he might have given it a seven, but a teammate might have said ten, another teammate might have said four, and another teammate might have said three. Doesn't really matter. So when they completed that, they got together in my seminar room, and my instruction was now I want you to start with number one, and I want you to go through this, and I want you to talk with one another about your team using these 37 skills and attributes. And I said, Okay, boys, uh, you know, I'm gonna close the door here. I'm gonna get some paperwork to do. Uh let me know when you're done, and we'll continue on because they were at the beginning to do the workshop on site with me. Well, an hour passed and no knock on the door, an hour, 20 minutes, no knock on the door, an hour and a half, no knock on the door. I stuck my head in and I said, How are we doing, guys? Oh, great, Bill. We'll let you know when we're done. So, all right, fine. So another hour passed, and this was relatively late in the evening, and the custodian came to me and saying, Bill, how are you are you going to be finished tonight fairly soon? I said, Well, let me talk to the guys and I will let you know. So I knocked on the door and I said, How are you doing? And one of them, I'll never forget this, looked at me, said, Bill, this is terrific. We're doing great. We're already at number six. Number six. But you see, they had never talked like this before. They were so excited about exchanging ideas and defending their position and realizing, well, you know, the, you know, when Tom said just three, well, you know, none of us said three, but Tom thought about something that we never thought about. And the real value of the workshop is the discussion that it initiates with you and your teammates. It's just worth its weight in gold. And the worksheets that you will fill out as you go through the workshop with me, that stays with you. It's none of my business, the decisions that you make. But I've never done the workshop where a team hasn't come to me and said, that was the best 90 minutes that we have spent. Well, this is what I'm offering. And halfway through the season, I think it's a really good time for your team to consider doing this. And all you need to do is arrange for a date, a day and a time, and I will send you all the Zoom login information, and we'll go forward with this. And your coach, who will have all the print documents in file form, will distribute them to you. You print them on your printer, and you know, sort of away we go. And as I said, I will be the facilitator. Now, is there a fee for this? Yes, there is. The fee is a donation to the Sandra Schmirler Foundation, commensurate with your team's budget. You don't have to tell me how much you donate. I just want to know that uh you donated something to the Sandra Schmirler Foundation. So that's it, folks. Uh that's kind of the bottom line. And you know how to get in touch with me, coach. Now, if you're a team without a coach, that's fine. Uh all you contact me as well, and of course, it's coachbill at hey.net. That's coachbill at hey.net, and we will get it done. The date and the time is again entirely up to you. I'm retired, I've got lots of time. I'm pretty sure I can fit it in. The members of the team do not have to be in the same location. Um, most of the time when I do it with teams on Zoom, the coach, the team, and of course myself were all over the place, and and we might be in different parts of the entire world, and which is what makes it uh even better uh from a facilitating perspective. So there's my offer to you. I gave you a bit of a taste of uh one of the worksheets, and uh again, not to sound like a broken record. This is all about you. It is not designed to teach you what shot to play, is to make sure that your team is making good strategic and tactical decisions based on the information that you learn about yourself, and all of that information stays with you. Before I leave you today, I have uh some news uh uh and a sound bite. And let's start with the news. Now, you'll remember last episode I talked about the tail that wags the dog, the importance of last stone draw or the flip of the coin, and I suggested a way to better balance offense and defense, especially in terms of the importance of that last rock advantage in the first end. Well, I didn't have anybody push back, and I did have some people who said, you know, I think there's some merit in that. So, well, thank you very much for the feedback. And if you did not hear last week's episode or you haven't clicked on the hyperlink at the end of the show notes and want to weigh in, I am interested in hearing what you have to say. So maybe it wasn't such a hare-brained idea after all. So now to the soundbite. Uh, those of you who are NFL fans, you perhaps will recognize the voice of uh Tom Brady, who many people feel uh to date may have been just the greatest quarterback of all time, the GOAT. Interesting how the acronyms Bell's GOAT. Uh, a Michigan boy, University of Michigan, uh, one of my favorite uh university teams, and he had something to say about uh young athletes uh of uh sort of late teens, early twenties, and I thought that what he had to say about that stage of one's development was was worthwhile hearing. And so let's hear the voice of uh Tom Brady, one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.

SPEAKER_00: 19:06

With Tom Brady finished his career in Michigan, the rules were the same. It's one of the things that we're doing. It's not the most important thing. And when you have the right values, the right that's gonna continue as you move on through the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_01: 21:09

Well, as you might guess, I really love what Tom said about values and how important it is for parents to teach values. I had a prof in uh in university who uh said uh when people ask him what he teaches, and his reply was, I teach students. Now, the questioner was I'm sure queering about what subject he taught, but it didn't matter. He was teaching students, and coaches were working with athletes, and and Tom, of course, was a scholastic athlete, and that's near and dear to my heart because that's how I started out through my phys ed career. Uh obviously, all of my athletes were students at our school, but when I started. Teaching just curling. I had retired as a professional educator. The athletes that I had were scholastic athletes, and that was important to me. They were athletes, yes, but they were scholastic athletes. So I hope you enjoyed that soundbite by Tom Brady. Well, wherever you are, welcome to 2026. There's not much we can do about it. It's the new year, and I hope it's health and happiness for you all the way through. And don't forget that great North American philosopher Charlie Brown, don't obsess too much on things that make you sad because there are so many things that can make you happy. Until next time, you can see that.