Episode #80: Dan Mickle

🎙️ The Mind Behind the Athlete: Coaching Commitment with Dan Mickle

 In this powerful episode of Significant Coaching, Matt sits down with Dan Mickle—Head Volleyball Coach at York College of Pennsylvania and a nationally recognized performance psychology expert—for a conversation that goes far beyond the court.

Together, they explore how being part of a college athletic program prepares student-athletes for life after sports—jobs, relationships, and the kind of long-term commitments that truly matter. They dive deep into the mental side of athlete development, why mental toughness is more than a buzzword, and how coaches can shape character just as much as skill.

They also get honest about the good—and the not-so-good—of the club volleyball scene and how it’s shaping athletes before they ever arrive on campus.

Coach Mickle’s dual expertise as both a collegiate coach and performance consultant makes this a can’t-miss conversation for anyone serious about coaching with impact.

📘 Be sure to check out Matt’s newest resource for softball families—The Softball Recruit’s Journal. It’s the ultimate step-by-step guide to navigating college recruiting, now available with two awesome covers to choose from.

Visit coachmattrogers.com for books, free resources, podcast episodes, and to schedule your free coaching or recruiting strategy session today.

Transcript

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one of my biggest sayings right off the bat every year for my team is buy-in does not require. Consensus commitment doesn't require consensus. If we sat here and voted on everything that we were going to do, we would get nothing done. Your buy-in is, I trust what we're doing and I trust where you're taking us. Welcome to significant coaching. The show where we go beyond the X's and O's to talk about what truly shapes athletes, college programs and people. This week's conversation is one I hope every parent, coach and student athlete listens to, not just to learn more about the game of volleyball, but to understand something much bigger. The power of commitment. When your child joins a college athletic program, it's not just about playing the sport they love at the next level. It's about stepping into something that if done right will prepare them for. Everything that comes after sports. A team commitment should mirror the kind of commitment they'll one day give an employer the kind of sacrifice, communication, and consistency that healthy relationships, professional and personal are built on. And today with Coach Dan MiCell, we break that down. Coach Mickel brings a rare and powerful perspective. He's not just the head volleyball coach at York College in Pennsylvania. He's also a sports performance expert with deep roots in sports psychology, coaching at the Paralympic level, and working with elite athletes around the world. He understands the mind behind the athlete and the reality behind the recruitment. We also didn't shy away from one of the most talked about yet rarely unpacked topics in youth athletics, club volleyball, the good, the bad, and the sometimes confusing messages it sends to athletes about priorities and pressure. You'll hear some hard truths in this one and hopefully some clarity too. Whether you're a high school coach, helping guide your athletes, a college coach shaping your program, or a parent trying to help your child navigate this massive journey, this conversation matters. So let's get to it. Here's my conversation with Coach Dan Mickel. I. Coach, so great to see you. You and I have had some great conversations over the last couple weeks and months, and it's been a real pleasure getting to know you. I want to dive right into your coaching history because you began coaching when you were 18, like me, right? I. We were both real young. Yeah. You were working, literally graduated high school. Yeah, I did the same thing. You were working with peers just outta high school. How did that unique start shape your approach to being a leader and a mentor? I always say when I bring up that story that I got, I. A good chunk of the bad stuff out early. Yeah. It shaped me because I think I was still in that I'm still a player or I'm still close to that age, so it was easy to learn some of the things of what I went through at that age versus being a coach. I think it would've been really tough starting my coaching career and getting that same perspective later. Having a much bigger gap that tends to happen. Yeah I'm so jealous of you.'cause you're doing a thousand different things. I know there's days where you just feel overwhelmed. You have so much that you're trying to do with all the roles that you play and the big role your wife is working to play in our world, I. I'm jealous because I wish I could take all that information, all that failure success that I learned as a young coach and go back and do it again. I've got a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old, so it's hard for me right now to go back into coaching because they're, they need me so much, and so I really appreciate that experience that I had, and I wish I was using it more today. Let's jump into the fact that you were an assistant at York and then you transitioned to being a head coach in 2017. Were there some lessons that were really pivotal in that transition? Are there things that you've learned that really influenced your coaching style? Being an assistant first? Yeah I guess the craziest part about the whole story was I had zero ties to the school. I live. And have always lived about 30 minutes from the campus, but have was never there. I didn't know the coach. I knew no one there. I just woke up one day after coaching high school for 15 years and I was like, I want something different and new. So I just picked up the phone and called the coach and said, Hey, do you need some hands? Can I help? Can I volunteer? Sue at the time said my, my paid assistant just had to step down. Do you want the paid, you wanna apply for the paid spot? I was like, sure. So I think that was unique in the fact that I went in there with nothing. I didn't know the coaching style of the coach. I didn't know anything about the school, who they played, what their conference was like. Like I just knew nothing. And I think that was the biggest lesson because I had to go in with blind. Like I just didn't have. Any ideas. And I think that stuck with me and carries through the fact of trying to always look at things as if I haven't been there before. And that's been a huge part for me. Each year resetting and looking at it like, this is my first year here. For me I, it's I went through the same thing. My first college job as an assistant, I got a job as a residence life director. But I knew I wanted to coach and I walked into the coach's office and just said, Hey, do you need some help? And he said, absolutely, we'll take you. And so I. I've always been that coach and I think you have been the same way where when somebody calls me and they want to coach and they wanna break in or they wanna get started, I have a hard time saying no to that.'cause I know what that did for me and what that did for my career. Just somebody saying, yes, come in and we'll teach you, we'll teach you how to do this. Yeah I'm always amazed by the stories I hear about closed practices and closed gyms and Tom Tate, who was one of my mentors. Basically founded all of Penn State volleyball. Both the women's and the men's started those programs and went on to be one of the cadre members with me at USA volleyball. But he, he was telling stories about he would go to work clinics and he would try to get in the gym and they were closed and he would leave, he just wouldn't do the clinic. He is like. Why wouldn't you have your doors open? This isn't an environment that I want to coach in or help in if you're that closed. And so I'm always open. I would, I love having players come back to help. I ha I love having high school coaches stop by and just chat. I think at least I. Once a year for the last eight years, we've had high school coaches come in that just come and watch practice. I'm like, no, I don't want you to just sit there and watch. I want you what are you seeing? Like how are you doing it in high school? And that's been fun just making those connections as well. That's great. I see. Am I reading the right, you just hired a new assistant? I did. I did. My previous assistant, who I've known for years before he was even my assistant, had to step down. And we had to do a search. And man, you think it'd be easy, right? Everyone talks about how they want to coach, but it was tough finding candidates, let alone picking a candidate. And just hired Sam young guy. Great. Coached a couple years at high school and club, and. Man, he gets it. Just from that very first time we talked, the philosophy's meshed. But it was very evident that he wasn't going to be like the yes type assistant coach. He's going to challenge me, and that's what I need. I want someone to challenge me as a head coach. Yeah. I'm with you there. I never wanted anybody that was like me. I always wanted somebody, that opposite person that would come in and say, have a different perspective, different way to see things. So that's really cool. I'm interested from your perspective, since you just went through this, were there certain things you were looking for in terms of experience or was the meshing part the ability to, to you just to connect to them? Was that more valuable for you? There were a couple things. The volleyball community is really small. I. And I know that we'll expand more on this, on the recruiting talk that we'll have in a little bit. But for me, the relationships are really important. And when I reached out to people that we had in common, everyone came back with the same thing about Sam. Like he's gonna be a good fit. He's a really good coach, but he also gets the non on the court stuff as well. Yeah. And because of my day job and doing the sports psych stuff, I. Finding someone that has, at least, I don't need full buy-in.'cause I get it. A lot of people don't understand the mental side yet and we're still growing it. But I needed to find someone that wasn't going to be like, no, we can't do that. We need to have court time. So that was huge to me. What does he do off the court as well? I could go watch him, he's a club coach at a local club, so I could go watch him, coach, and I've seen him coach. That's the easy part. I knew he had the volleyball. I wanted to know what it was like when the lights were off in the gym. Yeah. And it also turned out that my daughter is. Playing club with one of his high school players. So there was a little Hey, what do you, and before that player even knew Sam was interviewing, my daughter was doing the, Hey, so what do you think about your coach? Is he a good guy? Basically interviewing through the, through his high school player. But that's a huge advantage. It is and it helps that my daughter is a mini me. Like she is going to make an amazing coach when she's ready to start. So it's crazy how much I trust her judgment as well. So for me it was just asking around I can look at win losses, I can look at what his programs were like, but I just need to know what do people say? When you're out at the bar after a tournament, what are people saying about that coach? Yeah. And he just checked all the boxes. That's great. And for young coaches that are looking to get into the world of coaching or looking to move on to a different job, those references are huge. You're not, when you put those references on your resume, man, you gotta make sure that they're people that are gonna be honest about you. They're not sick of fans where they're just gonna say nice things about you. They could talk about your strengths and weaknesses and talk about your character and how you relate to the kids. So I love that. I wish I would've done more networking like that as a young coach. Like I think my path would've been a lot quicker. Yeah. Had I done that, but like I didn't go to the con, like I went to clinics. I did everything I could to learn the coaching in a sport of volleyball, but I brushed off the social part, the networking and hanging out at the conventions and just picking people's brains. I wish I would've done that more. And I think that's a big component that's still missing. I think that's why you and I have clicked so, so well, is I'm the same way. I did every coaching clinic. I did every camp I could, but I don't remember ever once going, Hey, coach, I would love to coach at your level. I would love to be an assistant for you at some point. If there's anything I can do, I never did any of that. I just got really lucky when I needed a job. I would make a call and somebody like you, somebody needed a, somebody assistant just left and they needed somebody right now. And I got lucky. I, but it's such it's a skill I think to be able to do that. It absolutely is. And I think that's probably where I've grown the most too is. Recognizing when someone should reach out and maybe this person's uncomfortable, so how can I get them comfortable and get them involved? Yeah. Is a skill that I've probably learned the most. I. This podcast has been really good for me because I've had to just pick up the phone and call coaches and just say, Hey, really love what you're doing, respect what you're doing with your program. Love to have you on and talk about coaching, talk about recruiting. And I've just, it's been really good for my soul. I would bet 70%, 80% of the coaches I reach out to say, yeah, let's do it. And the ones that don't, it's typically'cause they're just uncomfortable. They're uncomfortable having these conversations, but most of the coaches have been just really grateful. So that's been really good for me.'cause again, I've never been good at that. And it makes it fun. I wanted to have you on, I wanna, I want to transition here because of your unbelievable background with sports psychology and what you are really doing. In your world and how you're helping kids, how you're helping families, how you're helping coaches, and what you're doing to make this crazy world that we live in with coaching the stress, the anxiety that we see kids go through what you're doing to. Come up with strategies to take some of that pressure off of kids and make sure they're finding that joy. So what are let's start with just daily practices. Now that you get to breathe a little bit, most of your, you just sent your kids home for the summer, right? Yeah. Yeah. We ended well contact days We've been done since middle of April, but school just ended finals were this last week. So talk about that. How are you incorporating, and you mentioned that with your assistant as well, how are you incorporating mental training into your daily practices? Yeah it's tough. Like you would think that, because that's what I do. For my main job that it would be easy. But one of the challenges is it's hard to get the team to look at me as either the coach or the sports psych guy. Yeah. So I try to, I have to find that balance in what we do. And I like to bring in outside people for the sports psych stuff. Some of the stuff that I could easily do, I do we use Neuro Fuel, which I think is an amazing program. It's an app for a whole season. Dr. Larry, like they, they did a great job with it and it's volleyball specific and it's all stuff that I could do, like visualization scripts, breathing, but it gives them a different voice to hear and something different to use. Getting the players to buy into the fact that this is integral and needed, took a while to make that transition. Everyone thinks that it's almost like recovery. Everyone thinks if you're not going full speed in the gym, you're not working hard. We don't think about how much we need to schedule and do recovery. It's the same with the mental side. We can't just pepper it in here and Hey, we're gonna have a one hour seminar here. It really is. We have to integrate it every single day. And for us it's, every practice starts with a five minute visualization and breathing exercise. How we talk, how we communicate. We work that all year long. Our preseason, we start and we lay the groundwork of what, what's it like to be a teammate, how are we gonna communicate with our teammates? And we really spend this year, I think we have nine, nine or 10 days in our preseason. So we'll do an hour a day for 10 days straight, just on what's it like to be a team, what's it good to hold each other accountable? What's our mental, routine, whether it's breathing, progressive muscle relaxation but that's. It varies by year. Some years you have some really high functioning kids that aren't too anxious, so we work on keeping them calm and, keeping their mood swings even sometimes you have really anxious kids so that we spend a lot of time working on pre-game jitters and nerves and the yips. So each year it just takes a while to dial it in and figure out what that team is and what it's going to be like. So things like the breathing and the relaxation. Will happen every year that's a given. Everything else is adjustable and depends on what the player's like. And this year I'm gonna have a roster of 21 with nine of them being freshmen coming in. So that means I got nine people that are gonna have to learn a whole new style of how we do things. And some of our returning players are gonna have to learn new ways to communicate with this class and that's the big challenge I think. I think the biggest problem that we have in this particular space is everyone thinks it's just a one size fits all. Hey, what can we do breathing wise? What can we do? It's just not, it's just like strength and conditioning. It's like everything else. It's personal. Yeah. I'm really curious to what the buy-in looks like now that you've been doing this for a number of years. When do you know that your team is starting to buy in? When you're talking about an hour of mental training and team training. What is the, when do you know they're buying in? I always do something completely wild, crazy weird, just to see if they're like, okay, let's do it. One year it was okay, we are gonna write in our journals today, but everything has to be with your non-dominant hand. Yeah, I love that. And everyone started doing it. I'm like no, I'm, I just wanted to see if you guys were buying in. And that's how, no one questioned it. Yeah. No one was like, why are we doing this? They just realized that if I'm taking the time to do it, then there's gotta be a reason for it. Yeah. And I don't know if this kind of gets off track a little bit, but that goes to my, you mentioned buy-in and that's huge for me, and one of my biggest sayings right off the bat every year for my team is buy-in does not require. Consensus commitment doesn't require consensus. If we sat here and voted on everything that we were going to do, we would get nothing done. That's right. What I need you to do is no matter what we decide, you have to know it's coming from a good place. So your buy-in isn't necessarily always, I'm buying in that this is what we're doing and I agree with what we're doing. Your buy-in is, I trust what we're doing and I trust where you're taking us. And that's a big difference. So many people try and get it to, I just want you to buy into everything. No, I don't mind if you question me, why are we running this offense? Why are we doing this? But I don't ever want you to question whether or not it's valuable to be doing it. Yeah. Otherwise we wouldn't be. Are you finding that you get the feedback you're hoping for, or does that take some time? It takes time. The, I'm trying to walk that thin line of politically correctness, but we get a lot of kids coming in from club volleyball that are broken like on many levels. Yeah. They're not treated with respect. Their opinions aren't valued. They're also super controlled and micromanaged, and that's probably what we battle in our gym the most for the first month or so, is failure, is growth. Like it's okay, we can fix that, but I need you to be honest with me, and it takes a while to get there because you're deprogramming some pretty bad years at times. And it's not always. Sometimes we get, and again, this will go into the recruiting and how we recruit, but sometimes you get those kids that are ready to go and they get it. Yeah. But there's just a lot of time that, you know, kids like tweak the muscle and they hide it from you, and then it becomes a bigger issue because they're afraid because somewhere along the line they knew that, oh, I told my coach, they pulled me and I never saw the court again. Or kids that are struggling with a. Really high level class and they need to take a test, but they're afraid to ask for the practice off to go study.'cause they're afraid they're not gonna see the court. They're gonna get benched because they're not there. And letting them know hey, just because you missed practice, like it's one thing if you're going to a Taylor Swift concert or you're sitting on the couch eating some Cheetos and miss some practice, but you're a student athlete. I know that's so cliche. We're a student first, athlete second, but I truly believe that and getting them to understand that. Going to the trainer and getting treatment doesn't mean you're benched. It means I want you to be the best you can be and let's make sure I will play you if you're hurting, as long as it's not an injury. You know what I mean? If it's not damaging to you and it's just okay, my arm's gonna be sore a little bit because I'm getting worked. Yeah. I'm not gonna bench you for that. Now it's different if you know you got a joint thing or something's going on. There's just this mentality of, I'm weak if I tell you I need a break. Yeah. And that doesn't help anyone. It's, and it is so sad, because so many kids when they go to college, I. They have no idea how to have a relationship with a coach or at least a healthy one or a learning relationship. So I found myself over the last four or five, six years, the first thing I say to my kids in the preseason when we do the individual meetings is, your job right now, your number one job is to figure out what kind of relationship you want with me.'cause that's the relationship I want with you. It's not, this is how I want you to play. This is how I want you to react. You're gonna do it this way. It's, you decide what you want. That relationship you want to be, you want it to be fun, where we're teasing each other and we're high fiving, and I, you make a great plan. I can push you and you know that I'm proud of you because I'm pushing you. Or is it, is it hands off? Especially when you're coaching women, right? Yeah. Do you see that as an important part of performance coaching? Absolutely. That's on both sides. The mental performance side and just the volleyball coaching, that's a huge component. Getting to know those players and being a male coach of a female sport, what are those boundaries? And it is pretty much unique for everyone. I have some players that it's like, Hey, we're gonna fist bump, we'll talk at the whiteboard. Then I'll have some players that are like, Hey, I'm coming up to your office and we're gonna watch this film and we're gonna hang out. But both of those relationships are huge for me, and neither one feels slighted by the other. Like they understand this is what I need. I don't care what anyone else needs. It's okay that one player is always up with coach. I don't need that. And they don't look at it as an advantage or a disadvantage. It's just that's the relationship that we have. Yeah. Yeah. And that's so cool. That's what we want, right? This is, that's why we do this. And, I'm not a, I'm not a yeller. In fact, every year with my performance review, it's always the same thing. You are so stoic on the sidelines that maybe at times it's a detriment. Like I'll let my assistants go crazy and I want to be the, the rock, right? But I tell my players. The very first week or so, because it's a mix, right? High school, college is so different than everything else, even club, because you are truly pulling people from so many different demographics and social, areas. Whereas like high school. Most of the people are the same because they all live in the same area, so they might be different, but they still have some of the same common grounds. And same with clubs. You only pull from so many miles. So even though kids may not go to the same high schools or middle schools, they still kinda have the same sense of things. With college I'm pulling from all over the country, even international at some times. So it's like just setting the tone and letting them know where you stand. And one of the first things I say is, Hey, look I'm not a yeller. I don't swear a lot, but I will. But if anybody is going to be offended, just let me know and I'll try really hard to curb it. And usually it's, no, we're fine with it. You know what I mean? But, and I also tell them like, if you need pushed more, tell me. Don't be afraid to come up and be like, you need to push us more. Now's the time to drop the hammer in. And that happened twice last year, my assistant coach had to leave. I really think we were maybe 10 matches into our 30 match season, and he had to step down. So it was me and my volunteer or, and my other assistant Brandy, who is awesome, but she's super limited. She's a mom of two kids. She's a school board director. Like I was lucky if I would get her one or two days a week. Yeah. So most of the season from mid-September until November, it was just me. My team was so awesome at coming up and saying, you need to be harder on us. You're not pushing us hard enough right now. Or, Hey, we're slacking off. Blow the whistle. Make us do something to refocus. That's great. Me, that's goes back to like where you went when we started this. When do you have buy-in? And to me, when your team, and not just the captains. When your team is not afraid to come up to me as a coach and say, you're not pushing us, or This is what I need, that's when I know that they're buying in. I think there's so much maturity in that because we talked about how a lot of kids don't know how to have a relationship with a coach when they get to college, or they only know one relationship with a coach. Yeah. And it may be different with you and it may be, it maybe needs to be different. Yeah. But I think the idea of your kids saying, I wanna be pushed harder is a testament to not only you, but maybe the diversity of where you're recruiting from and what they're coming in with and the tools that they're coming in with. And they're realizing maybe I didn't like before being pushed hard, but now I'm starting to realize how important it is that I do get pushed, that somebody is pushing me past where I think I can get to. Do you, are you seeing that? Yeah. Yeah. There I think there is a misconception of coaches dictating or demanding what they want being pushing a kid, and that's not always the case. Yeah. There's a huge difference between music A coach yelling and making the kids do this and doing that. Versus finding out what my player's limits are and then pushing them that way. But I think people automatically assume a coach. That's tough and a coach that's yelling is pushing a kid, and that's not always true. Sometimes it's damaging, but sometimes it's just beneficial, so it's just, again, taking that time to, to learn coaches and this is what I tell club players all the time, is you shouldn't be waiting for the offer. To ask about the coach. That should be one of the things you are like, if you are thinking about, ah, I might switch club this year, you better be scouting the potential coaches at the new club that you're looking at trying out well before tryouts.'cause you're gonna have two or three days of two hours to try and get to know a coach that's gonna basically be in front of you for nine months outta the year. And I just don't think there's enough research on that side either being done. I agree. And boy does club. Club make it so hard, especially where I live in Denver, where we have a hundred different clubs within two hours. There's just what we do to these kids' brains before a season in the middle of the season, at the end of the season, the off season with how they're, how they have to make decisions and when they have to make decisions. It's, I don't know how you can be a 15-year-old volleyball player anymore and not have some sports performance issues because of it. It's crazy. Like it just, we switched, I think it's been three years now that we switched to summer tryouts. We used to, our region used to have tryouts in November after the girls' high school season. But we switched to a end of July now, and I just remember we got back from nationals in, the very end of June and beginning of July at 15 U and we had one week off. Then it was open gyms and then tryouts for the new club season. And it's tough and I don't know, I don't know that there's a solution'cause there's so many dominoes with that. It's really easy to say, they should just push tryouts back like they used to be. And I get that. Except, these big tournaments and these big qualifiers require payment and you gotta book the hotels and for years in our region. We were paying entry fees and booking hotels before we had tryouts. So you hope that you were filling those teams, you hope those teams happen, and then if they didn't, you had to beg to get your money back from those torment directors. So there's just so many moving parts. I just don't know what the solution is. Other than and I per, I, I actually said this years ago and I got laughed out of the room and whatever. We should just all do it together. I was watching Friday night, tykes, the football thing on whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like how San Antonio does it. Every kid that's going to play Midget Peewee football in San Antonio shows up to the same arena, like the Alamo Dome or something on the same weekend. And every team that's in that region is there. And you get to meet with them, interview with them, and do all that stuff. Sounds smart to me. But the problem is. I can't have the side deals, the back deals. Yeah. We can't have those discussions to try and lure you to my club because it's all out in the open. Yeah, and I don't know if there is a good fix. I think for me, the best way to fix club volleyball is to just shorten the season. I think way too long. I think if there's no volleyball from November 1st. To I, I'd even go as far as February 1st, where, the season starts in February. We play till May Nationals are in June, and you're done. I think that would be the best thing.'cause then kids are getting a break after their high school season, then they can go play basketball, they can wrestle, they can they can have a track season, they can play tennis, whatever that may be. Everybody wants a multisport athlete until that multisport athlete's on your team, and you have to figure it out. That's right. Everyone will tell you every handbook. We love multisport athletes and we love working with the basketball coach. Until that kid's on your team Yeah. Then you never see them until the season begins. Yeah. And then it's a challenge. I have a track jumper. One of my main outside hitters is a track jumper. I told her like, don't show up at all for any spring. Like you're in track season. Do whatever you need to. That's right. Again, it's not like you're sitting at home not doing anything. You are practicing, running and jumping. We'll get the volleyball. Yeah. You know what, and this is why you're a good coach and the this, and there's, I would say there's 65, 70% of the coaches in the country are like you and me, where they're gonna say that even though deep down you want them to be at spring practices and you wanna be able to integrate and there's team, you know what's best for that kid is for them to focus 100% on their team, their track coach, and whatever they're doing to get ready for that, for those meets, right? Yep. As long as we're putting those kids before our own needs we're at least winning the day there. And when I was coaching club, I would always call or email the other coaches, Hey, my name's Dan Jenny's playing volleyball for me this year. I understand she's on your high school basketball team. That's absolutely a priority. I just wanted to see these are our key dates. Can we work something out? And it was always a negative response. Always. Always. That's so sad. It's just so sad. No. Jenny knows the schedule and she needs to be here for all those events, and yeah. Okay. And then we're making kids choose between basketball and volleyball or softball and volleyball. It can be worked out, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the days of the one one day events are gone. Everything's a travel event, everything's an overnight event. I, no one talks about it. Like we see it all the time online, like forums where everyone's complaining about the travel costs and another weekend away from home. And my ma my grass isn't gonna get mowed, but there's a whole population that never sees their kid play. Or like my grand. My daughter's grandmother hasn't seen my kid play in four years because everything's a travel. Like my parents aren't gonna travel to see their granddaughter play in Georgia. I'm with you. I wanna talk about your great blog that you write and specifically you wrote one called, you wrote a blog called How I Grew to Resent the Sport I Love and you talked about burnout and I think everything we've been talking about at this point kind leads up to this. Are there things that you're creating, developing to help with that burnout? When we're talking about multi-sport athletes, we're talking about kids that are basically playing year round. Is there ways that we can give these kids a break when there's really not a break build in? Yeah. One of the things that I've been working on is like, how do we do that for everyone? Because it's the kids, it's the coaches, it's the parents, everyone gets burned out by it. So one of the things I've been really working on is what science is behind burnout. And we know that there's a lot of things that help it. Again, the normal stuff, you need more sleep, you need to meditate or, whatever. For me, I think it's more about we gotta get to the point where we can develop boundaries and just say, no, I'm not training today, or This is too much, or. Just kinda looking at scheduling it out. I think a lot of burnout comes from people not looking big picture scheduling wise. Like for example, you know that you're gonna be playing in a qualifier this weekend and we have two practices this week, so that's not a problem. We're gonna practice Tuesday and Thursday, catch our flight on Friday, play Saturday, Sunday, but. No one's thinking about what am I going to pack? When am I going to do my school stuff? So taking a time to look at the schedule and saying, okay, maybe we don't practice that Thursday. What are we really going to gain for that 90 minute practice before a qualifier? Technically by practicing versus giving my kids time to pack, get their homework done, get things done, so when they're traveling and they're gone. And I think for me, that's the biggest thing is we gotta start looking at what's involved with these events. Because our kids aren't eating well at these events because food's horrible. You can't bring your own food in. Some of these kids get there for a two o'clock match. You're running two hours behind, so you're not getting out of the venue until 10, 11 o'clock at night and you're in a town that nothing's open. And if anything is what's gonna be able to handle a team of 11 or 12 all at the same time, at 11 o'clock at night to eat. So there's just so many factors that we don't look at and we need to build in those breaks. Yeah. Yeah. I was really impressed this year with my daughter's club season. We had a couple tournaments early on where, there's always that morning and afternoon session where there were no games from 11 to 12. So if you wanted to drive down the street a couple blocks and go get something to eat, or if you wanted to bring your own food and have a little picnic outside, or, there was a little bit of space inside where you could do that, but at least there was that time where like, all right, everybody's gonna take an hour off. Everybody's gonna breathe, everybody's gonna go eat. If you wanna take a nap, you can take a nap. So I, it was so small. Insignificant in nature, but what I thought that did to the girls and their mentality and the coach's mentality, I thought it was, I thought it was so smart, but I haven't seen it since. I haven't seen anybody do that since. Yeah. And when you look at the schedules, some of these schedules are crazy. You have kids play, work, play, work, play off, like just. There's no you think, okay, working, we're not playing, but like your lines, people are standing there, they're literally standing there for an hour right after they just got done playing and then they gotta play again. Or you can't eat at the score table while you're doing the scoring. There's just so many things that are just going against the athlete that I think if we really sat down and said, how can we look at this? How can we make this schedule better? Yeah, we probably could. I and maybe I'm being naive here, but I don't think there's enough of that national tournament mentality where, all right, we're gonna put everybody in groups. You're gonna compete in your group for this many months, and then we're gonna take, the top two are gonna go to this next level, and the next two are gonna go to this level. And we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna be smart about how we pyramid this. There, there just doesn't seem to be any of that. Now and there won't be just because of all the different governing bodies. 10 years ago on the boys side, let's say we were 98%, 99% USA volleyball, now we're 98% a U or JVA,'cause some things happened and people weren't happy. We're gonna go over here and a u's gonna help do it the way we wanna do it. So there isn't a lot of collaboration between the governing bodies, which then trickles down that there isn't much collaboration, between the clubs. Yeah, it's you and I. We could have a whole podcast just on that topic. I want to, I wanna dive into your coaching with the Paralympic games and the great work you've done. Winning some gold, winning the gold, the silver medals. Talk a little bit about how you got into coaching the Paralympics, what that's done for you as a coach, what that's done for your soul. Yeah, so that whole story is really interesting. We. At one of the convention, one of the A VCA, the American Volleyball Coaches Association. They do, yearly conventions and it's always on site during the final four week for women's volley division one at that host city. And I got to meet. And really become friends with some of our sitting volleyball players, our national team players. And I really wanted to get involved, but at that time I was doing a lot of beach stuff beach, high performance, beach coaching, education, all that. And we were approached in Pittsburgh. There was talk that they were going to start doing. Para of beach volleyball, which would be standing, not sitting, volleyball in the sand teams of three. And Bill, who is the women's coach for the sittings team, and basically the director for the para teams said, would you and John who's a great friend of mine that has still to this day, does a ton of work with para-athletes. You are the beach guys. Would you guys interest in being like the para of beach guys? And so it just started and we were looking at, okay, who do we have on the sitting side that we could transition to the beach that would be able to do both? What's this look like? Because everything, curriculum wise has always been written for sixes, sitting or standing sixes or doubles, beach doubles, but there was nothing for trips. Like how do we, and luckily I grew up in Pennsylvania, we play a lot of grass triples. So the strategy, was like, okay, what do you know? How do we do and what we do it? We got some grant funding and we were training and the crazy part was, we're training our beach teams, but we had to do it in Oklahoma because that's where our sitting teams were and that's where all the staff and the resources were. So we're in, March, April in Oklahoma is cold and. Rainy and miserable. But we were out there training at one of the facilities had two beach court, it's two sand courts with their indoor facility. So we were out there training and we just started going. And the biggest holdback or problem was a lot of it's self-funded. So when it was for world championships in China we only had such limited money, so a lot of it was gonna be out of pocket, so that, that's been the holdback and. Para beach didn't, has still has not gotten sanctioned as a world para volley, I forget what they call it, but it's not an official Olympic sport. Like we didn't make it into LA 20, we didn't make it into France and we didn't make it into to LA as an official sport. So because that we don't get the same funding. So when COVID hit and money started getting tight, everything got cut down. Yeah. But. All that to say, it's probably been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.'cause it, it is completely different and it's great and it's amazing, but it's, I don't know, like there was so much growth from me as a coach. What do I do? A story I tell, which is funny, is, we had to drive from the dorms where we were staying at central Oklahoma or UCO, I think it is, university of Central Oklahoma to the courts. So we'd have to, all get in the rental cars or the vans and drive the players over. And it was like day one. And we're driving over and we got five miles. And one of the girls was like, I left my arm back at the dorm. I was like, wait, what? And she's literally, I don't have my arm with me. So we had to like, turn around and, go back and get it. You don't hear that every day as a coach. And things like. No one, like none of us, even the athletes, no one really thought too much about it, but like sand getting into the hydraulics of the leg, the prosthetic legs, and gosh, how to keep that clean. Like things like, we just never really thought about that. It was more, we were so worried about like, how do we do trips and who do you put at the net? Do you put your more mobile athletes at the net or do you put your more, like how are we gonna do this? So that's so wild.'cause those kids Yeah. Wanted to play and they knew they had some skill and, yeah. Yeah. And we just started doing more camps. We got a great funding from the n re foundation out of Florida. So we moved most of our training camps down to Hickory Point the Florida region and Steve Bishop. Worked their tails off to get us money and we got to work out and train there, partnering with the A VP. So they would do an event there and we could do a showcase in between the event so people would get awareness of it. That's great. So it was amazing. It's just, things are coming back, but it's still been tough with COVID. We weren't a sanctioned Olympic sport or a Paralympic sport, so we're not getting the funding much like snow volleyball, before be before the pandemic. Snow volleyball was getting a big push as well. We had teams that medaled LOY ball and a bunch of those guys that medaled in the indoor Olympics went on to play and medal in some of the snow volleyball stuff. But again, the, just the funding and how it worked, it wasn't there. So from the para beach side, things have been on hold a little bit, so hopefully that'll be coming back. Cool. I'm glad you had that experience. It sounds wonderful. It just sounds like a just a great thing for a group of un unprecedented can't think of the word I want to use, but the kids that don't get the attention they deserve and yeah. Underrepresented mis underrepresented, that's the word I was looking for. Wanna go rapid fire with you? Do a little, do some fun stuff. Just get your thoughts real quick on certain things. What's one word that describes your coaching style? Chill. That's, that that's what the word in my gym is. I'm the chill coach. I love it. What's the most impactful book you've read as a coach? It is Zen. Zen in the martial arts. Love it. Joe, the guy that wrote it, was a student of Bruce Lee. So it's all about the teachings of Bruce Lee, but how to put it into real life. And I read it every single year before the season starts. I've never read it, but I've been, it's been referred to me a couple times. I, I gotta go get a copy of it. I love it. Pre-game routine, you can't skip. Is there something that you do every before, every game? Yeah. I eat a hot dog. I don't know why. It just it started when I started coaching high school. Just the time constraint of, coming from a job or doing something coaching. And I just, I always, if it's a game day, I guarantee I've had a hot dog. I'm the same way every time I go to Wrigley Field. I understand. Biggest coaching, pet peeve. Tradition. We're doing this because that's the way we've always done it. I am in the same boat with you there. That drives me crazy. If you weren't coaching, and this is hard because you do 90 different things, if you weren't coaching, what would you be doing? I'm addicted to video games, so I'd be a streamer playing video games probably. What's your go-to? I'm a Call of Duty guy. I'm probably two to three hours a day like it. It's a true addiction. Does it relax you? I. I don't know if it relax me, but it lets me anonymously yell at like little 13-year-old kids over the microphone that don't know who I'm. So it's an outlet. Do you want to give your handle just in case somebody wants to battle you? Nope. Nope. Coach, thanks so much for doing this first segment with me. You're fantastic. I highly recommend everybody check out dan mickel.com. He's got a great podcast. He writes an unbelievable blog. He is a great mentor. He is a great mental performance coach. The way, if he didn't realize it in the last 40 minutes, how how his mindset works. So please check out dan mickel.com and I know you'll get a lot out of it. Coach again, thanks for doing this. Hope everybody comes back on Monday'cause you and I are about to do some recruiting talk, so thanks for doing this. Excited for it. Thanks. And that's a wrap on today's conversation with Coach Dan Mickel, one of the few people in our profession who can speak with authority on both what it takes to build a college team and what it takes to develop the mind of a high performing athlete. I hope today's episode challenged you in a good way if you're a coach. I hope it reminded you that developing athletes isn't about building stronger bodies or better skills. It's about shaping stronger minds. Teaching athletes how to handle adversity, stay consistent under pressure, and commit to the process even when the results aren't immediate. Mental performance isn't a bonus. It's the foundation if you're a parent or athlete listening in. I hope this helped connect the dots between being a good teammate today and becoming a dependable employee, a loyal partner, and a grounded leader tomorrow. And before we go, let me give you a heads up on Monday. Coach Michel and I continue the conversation over on the Significant Recruiting podcast, and I'll be honest, I'm apologizing in advance if it offends anyone. That's not our goal, but we're talking about some taboo topics in the world of recruiting. It's real, it's honest, and we're okay. If it sparks some debate, you won't wanna miss it. As always, you can subscribe to both the significant coaching and significant recruiting podcasts wherever you listen. And check out all of my books, including my new book, the Softball Recruits Journal, now available with two awesome covers to choose from. You can also find tools, free downloads, and more resources for families and coaches@coachmattrogers.com. And don't forget, if you want to schedule a free strategy session for coaching or recruiting, just head to my website. I'd love to connect. Until next time, lead with purpose, coach with significance. Thanks for listening.