Episode #185: Dr. Tracy Davenport

Season 4 of the Significant Coaching Podcast begins with Dr. Tracy Davenport, performance expert, executive coach, and author of The Sustainable Assistant Coach: Preventing Burnout and Building a Lasting Career in College Sports.

Tracy and Matt tackle a belief that has been passed down through generations of coaches: to be successful, coaching has to be a grind. They discuss why so many talented assistant coaches burn out, the difference between working harder and working smarter, the critical role sleep and recovery play in performance, and why coaches must stop treating their own health, relationships, and lives outside of athletics as optional.

Tracy also challenges head coaches and athletic leaders to take greater responsibility for developing and supporting their assistants—not just as coaches, but as people. From better communication and mentorship to creating healthier boundaries and expectations, this conversation asks an important question: Can we build great programs without burning out the people who make them great?

Season 4 starts with a challenge to coaches everywhere: success and significance shouldn't require sacrificing yourself along the way.

Significant Recruiting Resources — Take the guesswork out of college recruiting with Significant Recruiting: The Playbook for Prospective College Athletes, sport-specific Recruit’s Journals, and the Significant Recruiting Launchpad. Practical tools to help families research schools, stay organized, and build a smarter recruiting strategy. Learn more at CoachMattRogers.com.

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Welcome to season four of the Significant Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Rogers. I'm so excited about this season because we're gonna break the mold a little bit without reinventing the wheel. We are still going to have great coaching guests from around the country, but I'm gonna be mixing in experts in different fields more often in season four to provide significant coaching and leadership advice in different avenues for coaches, for athletes, and parents. I'll be doing a lot of consulting personally, speaking on college campuses for the remainder of 2026 and into 2027, and my energies are gonna be more focused on coaching coaches and helping them build healthy programs and, more importantly, healthy lifestyles while still supporting athletes, families, and coaches with college recruiting resources and direction and mentoring. My guest today is the perfect complement to the work I will be doing with coaches in the upcoming months. Dr. Tracy Davenport is a performance expert, executive coach, and author who has spent her career studying how people perform at high level without sacrificing their health along the way. She holds a PhD in human growth and development, has worked with thousands of college athletes and professionals, and has co-authored US Rowing's coaching education program. She's the real deal. Her newest book, The Sustainable Assistant Coach: Preventing Burnout and Building a Lasting Career in College Sports. This book tackles something we don't talk about nearly enough in athletics, how coaches can build meaningful, successful careers without allowing the profession to consume their lives. I was one of those coaches whose life was consumed by that grind, so I very much appreciate her perspective and her expertise. I've started getting some coaching from Tracy myself, and I wish we would had met 30 years ago when I started my career, because she has already made such a huge impact on me in so many ways. I am confident you will feel the same. Please welcome Dr. Tracy Davenport to the Significant Coaching Podcast Welcome back, everybody, to the Significant Coaching Podcast. This is season four, and I'm so excited about season four. We're gonna do some things a little bit differently, but we're gonna start with the unbelievable Tracy Davenport is here today, and she is the author of The Sustainable Assistant Coach: Preventing Burnout and Building a Lasting Career in College Sports coaching. Tracy, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you. Ah, it's so great to be here. Well, you and I have had some really great conversations. We have a mutual friend in Jordan Willis. And you've been working with coaches all across the country, which I love, and we're kind of going parallel in how we're working with coaches. We're both in that mindset where we want them healthy and we want them happy. So let's start with kind of a big question. It's going to be our significant question of the week. What is one thing we've accepted in coaching that you believe needs to change? I think that people have a story that's been passed down that tells them that coaching is a grind, love it or leave it, and you'll have to sacrifice a lot, long-term relationships, your health personal relationships with friends, your own, interests. If you become a coach, it's 24/7, and that's the life you've chosen Yeah, and it's, it's, it... And we all get into it and we're so passionate about it because there's so few jobs. You know, I, I, I was working with a young coach the other day and I said, and, and she's a soccer coach, and I said, "You're one of 1,400 people in our country that have this job." That's so rare. You know, there's hundreds and thousands of teachers and doctors and lawyers, but only 1,400 people can say they're a head college whatever. You know, and it's, it's so rare, so it really becomes our identity, um, almost to a, to a fault. Yes. Um, when we look at what you're working with, are there things that separate those coaches who are really living that healthy lifestyle and those that you're seeing are on that track to burnout? Absolutely. I think the ones who have lasted in their career, there are a couple of differentials. A lot of times it's resources. So you may see a Division I coach at the top of his or her game, and they have a lot of pressure, undoubtedly, a tremendous amount of pressure, but they also have a lot of resources. Yeah. So that can be one difference. And then the other difference is respect of the position. When a coach understands this is a lot, they absolutely respect it, I'm gonna need to have a lot of support here, this is like no other gig, then I see them lasting. I see the ones really hit bottom hard, or I think you and I were talking and I said the people I work with, it's like the train is off the track and it's heading into the woods by the time I see them. Right. You know? It's, the train is- Yeah, for sure on the track, but it, it's just going in a really disastrous direction usually by the time I'm talking to somebody. Um, and so there's this lack of, I, I see the people who aren't making it, maybe that's a better way, whose health is impacted, whose emotions are impacted, who don't have the respect for the position. None of their fault. They just didn't realize, uh, the toll that it could possibly take. And, you know, I was thinking this morning on a walk about our podcast, and I was thinking about how important, something happened to me a couple months ago, and how important it is to share that. I was on a flight, on a Southwest flight, and I happened to sit next to a pilot that was going to his next flight, and he was old like me, and he was playing on his iPad, and we got to chatting. And he showed me that, he was looking at the tops of the storms on his iPad for his next flight, and he was heading to Dallas. And I said, "Does it still scare you, the th- the thunderstorms?" And he looked at me and he said, "I respect that." And immediately I thought, "That's a man who's gonna be in his job a long time." And then he went on to tell me that, "I always have a plan B." He said, "If the tops are too big on the way to Dallas, I always have the other airport I can go to that I plan out." And he showed me the other airport on his iPad. And that was really striking to me, thinking about how so many coaches, especially assistant coaches, they, they don't respect it. They don't understand the things that they're working with, the people they're working with. A lot of them are, are pretty, um, high-maintenance situations. Whether it's a lacrosse ball hitting somebody in the head, or somebody breaking a bone on a football field, or a college student oversharing with some really traumatic or personal information, or not having the money to buy healthy food each week, or not having a decent living situation because you're in university housing. We don't give a lot of coaches a heads-up that you're gonna need to have some supports in place. You're gonna have to be like that pilot and understand where the tops of the storms are. Yeah. I, I love the word respect in there and, and how you framed it. 'Cause I look back at my coaching career, and I, I would imagine the first three or four years I was a hothead. I was getting five, six technicals a year. And, and when I look back, I don't know if I was respecting my opponent. I wasn't respecting the officials. I wasn't respecting the game. I wasn't leading with how I wanted to present myself for my players. And I think that all changed about year four or five. All of a sudden, I wasn't getting technical fouls anymore, and I was building really good relationships with the officials. I, I was picking up the phone and calling older coaches that I respected and said, "Hey, I'd love to talk coaching with you." And, uh, everything kind of changed for me when I stopped seeing everybody as an opponent a- and started realizing we were all kind of going down the same path. Yes, we were competing in games, but there was such a shared, um, purpose for everybody involved in the game. And when I started dipping my toe into that, I started getting healthier. I started enjoying the game more. So I love the respecting the, the thunder and the clouds and the weather and, you know, there, there's a, there's a consistency there, isn't there? There is, and a longevity there. Yeah. And when you were talking about, you know, getting technical fouls, immediately, you know, one of the first things I do with coaches is we work on changing our emotional state, being able to do that on demand. Because- It would blow you away to know how many coaches are running at 100 miles an hour with their central nervous system, and they don't even know it. Mm-hmm. And they have to work just to bring it down and not be running 100 miles an hour inside all the time. And- Mm health wise, that's not sustainable- No in anybody's playbook. And I think for me using that, that same analogy is when I started changing how I viewed opponents versus supporters and people that I was doing this together, my players started changing. You know? The, th- they started relaxing. They started having better conversations on the floor with the referees. Th- there, there was a difference in how they came to practice when... And I wish I would've known this. I wish I would've been able to articulate it this way 20 years ago, that these... None... Yes, they're gonna be our opponent on the floor, but everybody, we're all doing this for the same reason. And if we respect that, and I always talked about that we respect our opponents, we respect the game, but I don't think I backed it up well. Um, you know, and that, and, and, and I'm, I'm angry at myself about that, you know? I, I, I had all this power, and I wasn't, I wasn't understanding how to frame it with my players. Now, I, I wanna, I wanna stay on this assistant coach journey, because I was one for a very few years, and then I was a head coach for a long time. I got really lucky. But I was an assistant coach, and I understood that grind. If you could eliminate one belief that assistant coaches carry about building a successful career, what would that be? What would that look like? I think, you know, one belief is that I have to work harder than everybody else instead of I have to work smarter than everyone else in order to win. And I think the harder and the smarter, we don't spend enough time differentiating those two Talk a little bit about that. Give, give some examples of w- of what an assistant coach is doing where they're working harder instead of smarter. Um, they maybe will get up and instead of taking care of themselves, go to the office early and watch film and, of their opponent, and then they'll go to their game and maybe get home at 10 o'clock at night, and then maybe stay up till one o'clock watching more film and critiquing themselves. And at that point, they're in a sleep deficit for the next day. So it's like having, putting cheap gas in your race car. Yeah, you saved money. Yeah, you, you watched nine hours of film, but you didn't do anything. You, that race car's still going to underperform with cheap gas. If you're staying up and you're not sleeping, you're never gonna perform at your highest. It, it's like, not only that, but I was talking to a client yesterday and he said, "But if I, if I'm not jacked up on dopamine and cortisol, won't I not be as good a competitor?" And there's two things to think about. One is that if you're having somebody do a deadlift or a squat, do you want to be in balance or out of balance for them to get the maximum weight? Well, absolutely you want them to be in balance to get the, the best weight possible. That doesn't all of a sudden change when we're talking about mental or emotional performance. We have to be at our best and centered. And so running this race out of balance and just putting in work, putting in work, putting in more hours, it's not beneficial to you. You're never gonna lift the maximum amount of weight. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it, it's making my brain, you know, work so fast because I'm, I'm going back in 30 years of coaching, I'm going, all those things where I was, I was off balance and I wanted my kids and my players and my assistant coaches to be on balance, but I wasn't. I even think today, I do some umpiring here in our, in our town, and I train... I, I, I'm also a basketball trainer, and I'll tell the kids to go drink some water 'cause it's 95 degrees and, and humid and, and I'll remind everybody to drink, but I'll, I'll umpire that whole game and I won't even go for my bottle, you know? Or I'll, I'll train a kid and I'll, every 10 minutes I'm making sure they get water and I never go for my bottle 'cause I d- you know, I've just, I've trained my body. I t- I don't need it. What, what's going on in my head that I do that? 'Cause I don't think about it. Well- It's not I'm g- I'm trying to be tough or anything. I just like, I don't need it. It's, it's habitual, right? Yeah. It's, these habits have been ingrained in us, and it's about relearning. And so we have to untangle that ball of yarn- And wrap it a different way. So- Yeah if you're somebody who doesn't tend to drink water when you're outside, then it's time for a bigger support. It's time for, there are water bottles now that light up when you're not drinking enough. Yeah. So if that's your tendency, let's know it. Yeah. Let's respect it. Let's see how high the tops of the clouds are, right? Yeah. Let's, let's plan for it. So it's about that mental preparation that you have to go in eyes wide open. You have to respect the job that you're gonna do. Yeah. And if that job is umpiring and it's 95 degrees out, what does that look like for you? How much would that pilot be preparing? Why should he do all the prep work and a coach do none? Yeah. That makes no sense to me. Yeah. That we would just roll out of the car into a day of responsibilities, when you have the pilot studying the iPad for every thunderstorm. It's about understanding and educating yourself, and knowing, you know, "This is a real downfall for me. You know, I need to, I need to really plan around this." It, it's, it's something I'm excited to work with you and, and get some coaching on you because I'm like that with sleep, you know? I'm just, I, I'm, I'm to the point for the last 25 years that I feel like I can go on five, six hours of sleep. So I, and, and I don't think about enough if I did get those eight hours, how much better would I be for my family? How much better would I be for the people I'm working with? How much more would I get done? Uh, I feel like I have an ADHD mind and, you know, how much more focused would I be on my day and day, uh, day and day, uh, uh, responsibilities if I got that sleep consistently? Well, we know. Right. That's the thing, we know. And, you know, Maya Angelou said, "When you know better, you should do better." Yeah. And a lot of this is excused because we didn't know better, but then once we get the information, then it's up to us to bring in the cavalry and bring in the supports that we need. Yeah. So- Yeah that's what I try to... You know, that's why sleep education works because once people understand the benefits... You know, going to sleep isn't punishment, and it's not a timeout, and it's not a time of rest. It's an incredibly active time for us, and so many things happen when we're sleeping. And that's why, you know, when people understand how it can benefit their performance, they get a lot more excited about going to bed at night, and not, not doing more, but understanding they are gonna do more if they're getting the appropriate rest. What do you say to the coach who says, "I just feel like I get so much more done at night when it's quiet and there's nobody around, and I don't have the responsibilities of my kids 'cause they're in bed, and my wife or my husband's asleep, and you know, I, I just feel like I'm more creative late at night, and that's why I stay up." How do, how do you, how do you handle that, that coach and that perspective? 'Cause I'm sure that's a, that's a fairly- Yeah consistent answer. Well, it's very consistent actually with moms who have kids all day and need that- Yeah time for their own brain space. But here's the thing. It's, we know it's like drunk driving. We know that we don't have a good measure on our abilities when we're sleep deprived. We can prove this in the lab over and over and over again. And in fact, Matt Walker out at, I think he's at Stanford now, he's put out the challenge to any CEO in the country to come to his lab and get four or five hours of sleep, and they can do a pre, post analysis on them, and they're not performing better. So you are telling yourself a story that's not true. We see very few people fall outside of the seven to nine-hour window for adults. There are exceptions to every rule in the human race, but that's not anything that's common, that you would only need four, five, or six hours to perform at your best. We just don't see that. And the other thing you have to keep in mind that I really try to emphasize with students and coaches is that it's not about just today, is that w- I, we didn't talk about my background, but my PhD's in human growth and development, and what I majored in was what I answered. You have to answer one question to get your doctorate nobody's answered before. And my question, I defined integrated healthcare. So I had to study disease and the disease process a lot. And what people need to understand is that you don't get cancer on a Wednesday. You don't get Alzheimer's on a Thursday. These are disease processes that are happening many, many years. Rheumatoid ar- um Arthritis Arthritis. Yeah Yeah, like I have, I have, um, immune problems, so I'm like, "Why can't I say this word?" But we- I'm the same way. Why, why can't I say this? Um, but we see these processes happening over time. And so you think tonight I will just stay up all night or tomorrow night. Actually, we have a study from the National Institutes of Health that shows that just losing one full night of sleep will increase your risk of dementia. Now, when we talk about medical research, we're only talking about increases in risks. So here's a really simple example. If you smoke, we know that smoking and cancer are very closely related. They, they live together. They live under the same roof. So but if you smoke one cigarette and I smoke 12 cigarettes, I'm more likely to get cancer, higher risk than you are. But you may get cancer and I may not get cancer. There are a lot of other factors at play here. But whenever we do these behaviors, whether it's smoking, staying up late, not exercising, eating fried foods, when the science is clear, we are just adding to our genetic risk that's already there through our lifestyle factors. So there are some things that we can play with and some things we can't play with because we have the information now. Sometimes the general population doesn't have the, the information, but the scientific community has it. That's what makes me so passionate. So many of these things we understand now, and over time it's really important if you're a coach and you wanna be able to carry your grandkids when you're 80. You wanna be able to do the things. It's about today. It's about Tuesday of 2026. That's when these disease processes are happening today. Yeah. And, and I grew up where my parents owned a restaurant, so it was... I literally saw two people get up at 4:30 in the morning, work all day long, and their evening was a quick dinner and fall asleep in a chair. You know? And it wasn't good sleep and, you know, and, and then they'd get back up and do it again, and that was kinda my mentality. And I still kinda have that. You know, you, you just, we work through it. And, and I don't think we realize... You know, you talk about a cigarette, but there's so many different ways you're poisoning your body, whether it's a lack of sleep or a lack of water or a lack of good food like we talked about or, or just the stress that we're putting on and we don't know how to deal with that stress. Uh, I'm gonna go back to assistant coaches and, and kinda use that a little bit. Why do so many great assistant coaches burn out long before they ever reach their potential? What, what's, what are some of the ingredients to that burnout? Well, it can be really systemic with assistant coaches because they end up being these amazing athletes that a lot of times the coach at their institution wants to keep them around because of their spark, because of their coachability, they're fun to be around. So sometimes they stay at that institution, sometimes they move to a different one because of their love of sport. But what happens is that, uh, I'll say 85, 90% of the time, really high percentage of time, those assistant coaches are not given supports when they get there. They're not given training. They are maybe attend a head coach meeting about NCAA regulations. They're maybe given training from HR about their 401. But they're not given the day-to-day information of how to work 80 hours a week. On a small salary. Some assistant coaches at a D1 institution have a larger salary, but that also means they're on the road, maybe home three nights out of the summer. How do you maintain your health on the road? So we're not giving assistant coaches what they need for sustainability. Right. Any kind of mentorship, you know, you're very lucky if you get a head coach who's a good mentor. But that also, that, a lot is involved, like chemistry and time and interest. I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into a good mentorship relationship that it's just not there a lot of the time. So the assistant coach, what they do is they're usually these really highly energetic, highly intelligent people who go in and just think, "I succeeded everything. I got good grades in college. I was a starter. Everybody loved me. All I have to do now is just please this assistant coach." But what's being asked of them isn't possible. Yeah. So they work harder, they work harder, they work harder, and suddenly they begin to feel a little bit depressed. They start losing their friendships. They start losing interest in the things that they used to do. They start having symptoms of anxiety. They start having symptoms that they're not good enough for the position, and now they don't know what they're gonna do for a living because they've chosen this path, which doesn't seem sustainable because they haven't been given the tools. You know, it's like throwing a raft guide out into the rapids without a good boat, without a good life jacket, without, "Here's what happens when you reach Pillow Rock Rapid. You need to go to the left, and then if you lose everybody in your boat, we're gonna be picking you up on, down below." You know, my husband's a raft guide. So many hours of training goes into all the possible scenarios when you're a raft guide. How much training is going into assistant coaches? Like I, I get s- Hardly any, yeah I, I get so passionate about it because when I work with one-on-one clients, I get off the phone and I come in, and every time I tell my husband, "These are the best people. These are the cream of the crop here that we're killing. They're the best." Yeah. "They're the best of the best. They're smarter than I am. They're a harder worker than I am. They just don't have the tools to hang in there." Isn't that the truth? A- and it's, you know, you and I connected so quickly 'cause we're really on the s- like I said, we're on the same track. I'm talking to presidents and athletic directors about the fact that when you hire a coach, are you teaching them how to manage their budget? Are you giving them, uh, spreadsheets and walking them through, this is how we order equipment, this is how we, we order buses, this is how we plan our travel? Are you giving them those tools so they know how your university works and what your expectation? It's amazing to me how many head coaches I talk to and I, I go, "Walk me through your recruitment strategy." And they go, "Oh, we try and go to about eight or 10 tournaments a year. You know, when we see a kid that we really like, we try and do home visits. We do, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I go, "Okay, where's the strategy in there? Where, where are you going, Thursday nights we do a power hour. You know, from 7:00 to 8:00 we call our top 10 recruits, you know? Um, that next Thursday we write a handwritten letter to those. But we do it in a power hour, you know? I want my assistant coaches to have their nights free, so you know, we break it down." I don't hear any of that. I don't hear- Well, that's when you're talking about the example of smarter, not harder. Right. Let's, let's work smarter. Let's understand... And, and here's the thing, you know, that I always try to emphasize to coaches and players. No matter what version of iPhone we have, no matter what our paycheck is, no matter where we live, we're all part of the human race. Right. We are all human beings. We all have certain basic needs. I don't care if you're a D1, D3, if you pick up garbage, if you're a plumber, we all have the same needs. We have a spiritual need. We have an emotional need. We have physical needs. We have to have good nutrition. We have to have good sleep. We have to have time to come up and we have to have time to come down. We have to have time to grieve our losses in this life, whether it's, you know, older parents losing their abilities or taking care of young children. These needs don't change. We can put them under the rug all we want, and then we get into this idea of dis-ease, disease. And, and here's just something for your listeners to keep in mind. Disease is a train out of control. In this country, chronic disease is on the rise in a way that we never imagined. We're expecting Alzheimer's disease to triple in the next 30 years. Of course, some of that's demographics, but that doesn't explain it all. Our lack of self-care is putting us into an out of control situation with disease, and you pay a price. It may not be today, but we're really setting ourselves up for midlife and then 70s and 80s, your independence or not, and a lot of that's gonna be brain health and what did you do to your brain when you were in your 20s and 30s and 40s. We have a cellular memory, and every day we're building a footprint. We're building a plan forward for ourselves. And once people can understand that, they can make better choices, I think. I agree. I agree. It's such a, it's such a great way to look at it is this is, this is our one life that we have and, and what are we gonna do with it, and how can we maximize, uh, the, the potential that we have. And it doesn't have to be in a weight room five days a week or running marathons. We can have a really healthy life and be our best if we, if we just make some systematic changes that are, are healthy for everybody. Um, when I think of assistant coaches, I think of how important it is to be loyal and committed to your head coach, 'cause that head coach might be the reason or very likely is the reason you get your next job. You want that person speaking for you- Yep when it's time to go to apply for that head coaching job and to move up At what point does being committed to that coach, to that team become harmful to yourself? And how do we, how do we, how do we change- Yeah our mindset with that? That's a great question. And in the book, Bill Jurgens, who's in the Athletic Directors Hall of Fame, he actually speaks about that, about how it's not all on you as an assistant coach. It's on the head coach from the very beginning in the interview process to know whether or not that head coach has your best interest in mind. And he says that if that head coach doesn't have your best interest in mind, you shouldn't go there. Now, let's say you're already there, and you're in the middle of it, you really have to be a good communicator, and you have to learn phrases like, "My goal is to be there in April for you and be my best self. In order to do that, I've got to make sure my home life is stable. So tonight, I'll be leaving at 4:00." You have to become the kind of communicator that a mom is with a toddler. We're going to be leaving in 10 minutes, and we're going to put boots on. In four minutes, we're going to put boots on because we're going to be leaving in three minutes. You have to become an amazing communicator. And if you're s- listening to this right now, and you're a, uh, an assistant coach, and you're thinking to yourself, "Oh, I could never do that. My head coach would just fire me on the spot," I challenge you to make sure that that's a true story or not, or is that just something that's folklore that's come through the ages? And if you're a head coach, and you have assistant coaches, let's be honest, I'm a grandma. They need a life. They need a, a relationship, a solid relationship if they want to have their own children and grandchildren, and we have to make time and space for that. It doesn't matter that you had that time and space or not. We're not there anymore. We're here now, and we have to meet people where they are. And if you want the best from them, you're going to have to look out for them, and you're going to have to know things ahead of them, and, and some of their needs are included in that. Absolutely While we're on the topic, let's give some advice to some head coaches. L- Are there two or three things that you think they just need to be aware of? Because we have a lot of head college coaches that listen to this. Are, is there some things that maybe they take for granted because they remember what it was like to be an assistant coach, and, uh, and, and maybe they haven't made the changes they wish somebody would have made for them? Give, give some tips to some of those head coaches out there. Well, the first tip is to get your own house in order And by that I mean if you're a head coach and you're not taking care of yourself, you're eating poorly, you're not taking time to plan a menu, you're not- you have no social life outside of work, you're not doing anything, your artwork, your woodworking, things that feed your soul, you're not present with your family at the table, you're looking at your phone instead of you're, you know, connecting with your teenagers, that's gotta be the first thing. Because until you figure it out for yourself, it's gonna be really hard for you to help your assistant coaches. I would say that's first and foremost. And then what I would say is try to be proactive. Try to think of where we are in 2026, you know? That's one thing. You know, I'm, I'm older, I'm in my 60s now. I've had a life. I have grandchildren. And it's not like it was 20 years ago. Things are very, very expensive now, and the salaries at teaching institutions, they haven't matched that. We all know this. So a lot of times, you know, assistant coaches are pinching pennies just to eat healthily, and that's something we can check in with them about. How are you doing? Is the meal plan working okay for you? Um, which al- isn't always healthy. A lot of times it's high fat, high sugar, high sodium. Um, do you need any extra time midweek to get to the store, get some meal prepped? Um, some of you might be thinking right now, "Oh, we don't have time for this. This is so soft." These are very outdated ideas, and what we need to do is we need to understand sustainable health. And who do we want these people to be six months down the road? Do we want them to be moody? Do we want them to feel, like, fatalistic every time a mistake happens on the field or in the pool or on the river? Or do we want them to be level-headed and healthy and supporting you, which is what they were hired to do. But in order for them to do that role, we have to understand what their basic needs are, and we have to make room for that. We have to make space, and we have to support them in that. Just like you would support your children that are going to college or getting their first apartment. You know? You're, you're right there with them. You're not doing it for them, but you're like, "Let me run to the store, and let me grab some stuff I know you're gonna need." Right? It's just about- Yeah having that emotional intelligence of what's needed next for the staff. And it's so important that we see it as a priority and we work it into our weeks. You know, I, I know coaches that they're in their 60s, some of them are even in their 70s, and they're still playing pickup basketball with their staff once a week. You know, it's the competition, it's the exercise, but it's the, it's the camaraderie that comes from that. Or, hey, every Monday we're gonna go to breakfast together, or we're gonna eat in the cafeteria together and we're, we're gonna talk, or we're gonna go golfing, or, you know, we're... This is our day where we're gonna do some breathing, we're gonna do some yoga to- together. I, I think, you know, I was one of those coaches that didn't make a lot of money. I, I, you know, I was, I was just trying to pay the bills as a head college coach, and there wasn't, you know, there wasn't that big paycheck. I, I often had to work an extra job or w- had to work all summer camps just to kind of- Yeah make up for the lack of income. And it was hard for me to go, "Okay, I gotta find 50 bucks to take my staff out to breakfast once a month." You know, I got... It, it was hard to go, you know, that 50 bucks could be going to my mortgage or my rent, or it could be going to that car payment. You know, how do we deal with the finances- As a coach, the, the limited finances most of us have in terms of how do we look at that to say, "I gotta take care of my staff a little bit better and we need to do these things"? But, you know, where, where does that come into play? I think that's such a great segue to talk about. In the book there are nine voices, just friends of mine who are very experienced head coaches chimed in, but one assistant coach, um, her voice, Pua, who is the assistant volleyball coach at Florida Tech, her voice is in there. And she talks in the chapter, it's pretty much her chapter, about maintaining a relationship. And she talks about the struggles of worrying about her head coach, which you talked about, because they're your future, they're your paycheck, uh, but then coming home and being emotionally available to her boyfriend who has She's moved him across the country several times now. Right. Right? He's had to restart, as every spouse of a, a coach understands. So my point is, what I'm getting at is I don't think it's about the money. I think it's about communicating. I think it's about having that one-on-one. In each chapter I put discussion questions at the topic that you could use. I think it's about having a conversation one-on-one. "Hey, John. How's it going this week?" "Good." "Any place that you're struggling and you wish you weren't? Is there anything that you wish I knew that I didn't?" And then- what you do though is it's not about just asking a question. It's about being a responsible listener. Yeah. And you take their words. I always say the best thing I can do is take care of people's words. If you tell me something, first of all, it's between us. That goes without saying Then the next thing is I need to honor what you said and respect it, even if it wasn't my issue. I may say, "Well, my wife made dinner for me every night. That wasn't a problem. Why can't you figure it out? Why can't your spouse make you dinner?" It's about honoring what you heard, and not making it about you, but making it about them. That's just like a really important skill when you're helping to develop people. And you know, my, my graduate degree's in psychology, but I'm very fortunate that my PhD is in human growth and development. So what I do is I studied people across a lifespan, and a lot of times assistant coaches, not so much at the D1 level, but at the D3 and D2 level, you have people in their 20s and 30s. This is a time they're learning to keep house for the first time by themselves. They're learning to figure out their yard work. They're trying to figure out how to pay their power bill online. They're trying to make student loan repayments and figure out the interest on that. They have a lot going on. And so just being there for them and giving them the opportunity to tell, you know, "Where are you struggling this week?" And then just being a good listener, and then asking, "Is there anything I can do to help?" First of all, this goes, "This is just between us." And then the next thing is, "Is there anything I can do?" I don't think it's about pulling out your wallet. Yeah. I think it's about when you support people, it's about having an awareness that this is where they are in their lifespan. You and I both shared that, um, we've had elder parent struggles. My mom had Alzheimer's. Your parents are elderly now. My father's 93. If anybody knows me, one of the first things they ask is, "How's your dad doing?" Right. Because that's where we are in our life. I don't need you to give me any money. But you need to know where I am right now, and you need to know what's a struggle right now. Yeah. So just opening up your heart and your mind, I think, is a lot more important than opening up your wallet I completely agree, and it's, it's something I'm, I'm trying to be more conscious with 'cause I have the elderly parents, but I also have two kids in my house that, you know, I have two teenagers in my house, and I have a wife that works full-time and really carries us financially. And, you know, I, I, I, I try to be really aware of that. One of the things I'm working on, and I'm, I'm j- I'm sure you'll have some great advice for me on this, when I'm working at a university or I'm working at a college and I'm working with their athletic department, it's, it's funny how many times, yeah, I'll ask an athletic director about their staff meetings, and she go, and he or she will go, "Well, I try not to do a lot of those. I feel like it's, you know, we try, we try not to do a lot of one-on-ones and staff meetings 'cause my staff doesn't make a lot of money, and a lot of them are working other jobs full-time, so I really try and stay out of their hair unless they need me." And I, and I kind of switched the tables there, and I go, "Well, what if they wanted that? What if they really need you to understand what they're dealing with? And what if they need that time once a month, bi-weekly, to hear from you?" And what I've started doing is creating rubrics for the athletic directors and saying, "What if once a month each of your coaches knew they were coming in to meet with you, and they were gonna get a chance to hear from you with shared goals about recruiting, and you were teaching them executive function skills about when to recruit, volume of recruiting. You were helping them with their timelines around their, their busy schedule that they have. How, w- when they need to just put the university needs on the shelf and say, 'You're not gonna worry about the university and, and your athletic department for these hours of every day.' What if you were doing that, and they knew on a piece of paper these were the things you were gonna address, and you were gonna help them with that?" They go, "Well, I hadn't even thought about that from that perspective." And it's, it's amazing. I wish somebody would have done that for me. I wish an athletic director would have said, "All right, Matt, let's talk about your recruiting strategy. You know, how many kids do you want? How are we gonna get there? What's our strategy to get there? How do you want to take care of your assistant coaches? Let's talk about their health. How do you want to treat them?" So for me, I'm finding that if I can build some rubrics, and there's some executive function skill a- a- in detail in their life, I, I'm finding that they accept that w- they can make a difference with that lack of time and that lack of money and, and, and be a helper. Is, is that something you see some value in? What's... What, like you said, it's working smarter, not harder. And what we do is we get into the rat race of people get to work, and they're just literally out of breath. They're literally out of breath when they hit their office already- Yeah and their day hasn't started. They just ran up the stairs. They're out of breath. Then they yell at everybody, "We got to get so-and-so here today. Then we go to their family. We got this call." There's just reactionary, and when you're reactionary, I don't know about you, I function really poorly. Sure, I'm a smart person. Yeah. I, I can, I can handle whatever, but not- Right for a long time, and I'm not gonna give you my best. I can tell you that right now I'm just not That's right And I don't, I don't think many people can give you their best if they're in reactionary mode all the time. And the other thing to think about these assistant coaches, most of them are superstars. Yeah. That's why you hired them. And so you've got to allow them time and space to think. When I was getting my PhD, my advisor, who is an amazing guy, and he's, he does the managing up chapter in here, and he told me, he said, "When you graduate, make sure you get a job that allows you to think." I had no idea what that meant until I got my first job as a professor with 150 students a week and I didn't have time to think. Yeah. And I realized what a horrible job I was doing not being able to think. And he was older. He was 10 years older, and he'd s- he'd had a lot of jobs, and he knew that was a pitfall. Of all the advice he gave me, you know, that's what he felt that was the most important. And so you need to give your staff time to think and not just hit them with the million things that need to happen because- Yeah it's, it's not super productive. Right. It isn't. It's, it's funny. Uh, I saw a clip the other day of President Obama had the wom- the WNBA all-stars at his, at his presidential library or s- something like that, and he was talking to Caitlin Clark. They caught it on camera, and he told her, he goes, "You know, the great thing about me is nobody knew who I was until I was 45. You know, I wasn't famous till I was 45 years old. And so I had a lifetime to figure out who I wanted to be, w- what my convictions were, how to handle chaos, you know. So by the time I was famous, I, I knew who I was and I wasn't g- nobody was gonna shake me from that." And, and it was just, it was great advice to this, you know, this young superstar that's everywhere. You know, Caitlin Clark. Yeah. You can't, you can't turn on the TV without- Yeah seeing her on a commercial or somebody talking about her or somebody have an opinion. Same thing with Taylor Swift, you know. And I think for me, it got me thinking about the conversation we were gonna have 'cause- I think as college coaches or even a high school coach, when we have assistants, it's, it's letting them know that you're gonna fail a little bit, expect you to make mistakes, you know? But through this, I want you to figure out who you are, and I wanna have conversations about who you wanna be and what that perspective is. Uh, how important is that for our leaders on a campus- Hmm to be having those conversations with the young people we're hiring? Not so much, you know, obviously they gotta talk about, "Here's how we do things. Here's how I wanna help you. Here's what healthy looks like. Let me help you figure that out." But how important is it that we're talking about the process of youth and what we're gonna go through? Well, let's just go back to what you said about mistakes. I'm laughing inside because I have a client that I worked with yesterday. He's five weeks in in a really stressful job, and we- I give homework every week, and his homework last week was to tell me what, um, Play-Doh, Corn Flakes, uh, X-rays, and sticky notes have in common. And the thing they all have in common is they were all discovered through mistakes. So- Great we have this mentality, and you know, it, it happens in high schools now, it happens in college. I went to Florida Tech in the '80s, and we were failing classes like it was our day job. I mean, I don't mean C minus. I mean 33% F. That's what. Hit your dining room table at Christmas. A 33. Yeah. And there was nobody to call and complain, right? We learned how to fail. Right. I'm not one of these old people that's saying, "We had it better then." We failed, but we had it better then because we learned to fail. And we have people now in their 20s and 30s, and they're having symptoms of anxiety because they don't understand the value of a mistake. And you're talking about being a head coach and getting technicals, and losing your stuffing when people make mistakes. And- Yeah we're, you and I are gonna do a session where we're gonna talk about beliefs and emotions and actions, and these actions are based on beliefs. So if your inherent belief as an assistant coach is, "I can't make a mistake. Mistakes are bad. I never make a mistake. I always get an A or a B. That's who I am," and then you make a mistake, where are you? You're in a really bad place. I make a s- mistake, and it's just another Tuesday. 'Cause that's the way I was trained as an engineer. Yeah. "Oh, you gotta do that again. Good luck. See ya." And off you went- Okay to do it again. We really do a disservice to people when we don't address mistakes with them. I have this, like, five-point question exercise that I do with clients. It's about grace, and it's really about giving yourself grace. But I don't couch it that way because, you know, assistant coaches, they're not gonna buy into that process if I tell them what it is. But I ask them questions like, "Do you believe your child can make a mistake? Do you believe your mom can make a mistake? Do you believe your mistakes, anything ever comes of a mistake, anything good? Do you believe mistakes can be a source of discovery? Do you believe you can make a mistake?" And then I give them a week to think about it, and then they come back and they say, "First of all, I hate you. And second of all, that really sucked because I had to admit that I'm not allowed to make a mistake." That, that's hurtful, right? That's hurtful for me to hear. Yeah. But it's what they're feeling. Yeah. And imagine what wouldn't have been discovered if we hadn't allowed mistakes. Right. Right. I love that. I just, uh, it's... The older I got, the more I would, y- you know, three minutes to go in a game, I'd call a timeout- And maybe I hadn't done it all year, or maybe I hadn't been, I, I hadn't even talked to my assistant, but I go, "This is your time out." And they would look at me with their guys and, and I was like, "You gotta learn somehow. Get in there and get in there and go. This is yours." "But Coach, we're up two and there's three minutes to go and we need this game." "You, you gotta learn." You know, and, and the older I got, the more I felt comfortable with I've taught these kids how to play, they know our system, our, my assistant does. I need him to be able to articulate it and start thinking or I'm not getting him or her ready for that head coaching job I know they want. And- You know? And with growth, with growth comes mistakes. That's right. They do not live separately. Yeah. They are in bed together. They are cousins. They are next-door neighbors. They are. You can... It's called, one of the questions in my Grace series is, uh, do you know what experiential learning is? Yeah. I mean, and, and one of my clients, he has a one-year-old, and I'm like, "Watch her walk. Tell me what experiential learning is." That's right. That's the way we develop as humans. There's no- That's right we're needed as humans. We are experiential learners. We learn from our mistakes, and then we do it differently the next time. We hold onto the coffee table a little bit longer. We open up our legs a little bit farther. We take less of a step. That's the way we're programmed to learn, through mistakes. So if we begin to take mistakes out of our learning process, we better have a real good substitute, because that's worked for a long time. Right. A- using that same analogy, has, has there been any research, let's say a child is born to a parent that has a leg issue and they walk with a limp, and that's what that child sees how walking works. Has there been any studies done that that child will walk with a limp, or will they learn how to walk the right, you know, without that limp? Yeah. Well, I'm not- You know? familiar with any of those studies, but what I do know is that we are a self-healing organism. We always figure out the best way for us- Right if at all possible. If we have a knee injury, we're always gonna be looking to heal that injury. We- Right we are just preprogrammed that way to, to be at our best. And so if we can just allow people that natural process of trying and failing, "Oh, what'd you learn there?" Right? Yeah, you try not to do that again, right? You know? Right. Do it differently next time, huh? 'Cause that one really, that was no fun, huh? That's, that's the way we're designed to learn. Yeah. So if you have someone, an assistant coach, walking around afraid if they make a mistake they're going to lose their job or not get a good recommendation, man, have you shot yourself in the foot. That's right. All the discoveries that aren't gonna be made is just really hard to handle. Yeah. I, I'm gonna finish with a question we could probably do an entire episode on, maybe two or three episodes on. So I apologize I'm gonna do this to you right at the end, but I, I, it's, it's something that just has popped in my head in the last 10 minutes as we've been talking about it. How much is AI hurting these things that we're talking about? 'Cause I'm finding myself when I'm writing, I've thrown some of the things I've written into AI and said, "Will you clean this up for me?" Or, "I'd like to, you know, polish this a little bit." It'll come back and it's cleaner, but it's lost its soul. Yeah. And I s- and I see so many kids that instead of trying to figure things out and learn it, will thr- will go to AI and go, "How do I do this?" And, and they're taking it verbatim that this is how they do it, so there isn't that failure, they just... There's that 100% confidence that AI is going to do this for me. Yeah. Or make this- Yeah, well, there, there is, there is potential failure, but they're not educated enough to know that it's not right. Right. That's like the real danger because- Right AI said it, Claude said it, Chat said it, therefore. Right. Right? They don't have that background knowledge. It, it, one of the things, I was talking to somebody who writes also, and she's actually in one of the chapters. She does a nutrition chapter, and we were talking about interviewing people and she said it's a lost art form. And it made me really even more excited about my interviews for the book because these voices AI can't replace. AI can do- Right an amazing search of the internet, but they haven't talked to me and they haven't talked to you. They don't know how I'm thinking in the next minute or you're thinking in the next minute. And that part we have to hang on to, these real voices, either through podcasts or books, because that will never be replaced by AI. AI is amazing for processes and searches and procedures, but we have to be able to know the difference between what's correct and what's incorrect. Yeah. I, I, I, I was, I was, I was an English major, so I was raised, you know, that first draft is probably gonna be garbage. You, you may not get to something you like until the third draft 'cause you have to read your writing. You have to go, "Gosh, that, that doesn't make any sense. I, I, uh, or I got this here, I need to move it here and," you know, or, "This needs, um, my thesis doesn't match the beginning and the end." And, and until you learn to do that, especially as an interviewer, I've learned doing 180 some of these, these podcasts is I tell people this before they come on the show, and I'm sure I talked to you about it, I usually have 20 or 30 questions I wanna start with, and I might get through question one or two, and I'm like, "I like the conversation you and I are having. I have questions now about what you just said-" Right that are so much better than those questions that I came up with." And there's, there's that learning because I'm learning how to be engaged as an interviewer. I'm learning how to listen to what you're saying and, and grow from it. So- I think that's a part of coaching, it's a part of parenting. The more engaged we are, the more we're listening, we're finding out where that growth needs to go. And if, and if we're not engaged and not paying attention, we might be taking them down a road that is unhealthy for them and, and is stunting their growth. And, and you also have to understand the complexity of human beings in that you and I cognitively speaking, intellectually speaking, we could have started, you sent me questions, I looked at them this morning. I tried not to answer them ahead of time just to get a flavor for them- Mm-hmm so I could let that happen organically and naturally of where I was feeling in the moment. But then what happens in a conversation is that ask any cardiologist, there's electricity, right? There's- Right vibration, there's electricity. There is... You and I are having a very soulful conversation based on a lot of combined years of experience, and you have to leave that door open for that to happen, to have a really rich conversation with somebody, and that's all you and I did today. There's nothing that AI could have done to replicate this. It's just two humans connecting, which kind of gets us back to being a head coach and an assistant coach. Sometimes it's just about opening your heart and connecting as a human to the other person, and here's my set of strengths and here's your set of strengths, and let's share them for a few minutes and see where it gets us Dr. Tracy Davenport, thank you so much for your time. I am so excited about our new friendship. Um, I hope, uh, I see you very much as a friend and somebody I want that friendship to grow. I'm so excited about it. I hope you feel the same way. Um- Yeah I'm looking forward to, uh, the coaching we're gonna, you're gonna do with me. And, um, if there is a college president, college athletic director, a VP, i- a head coach, a high school principal, superintendent, if they're out there going These things I needed to hear, I need this help with my staff, I need some direction with this, where do they find you? Um, tracyshealthyliving.com, T-R-A-C-Y-Shealthyliving.com and phone number's there. They can, they can catch me there. No worries. Um, phone number, email, Instagram, @drdavenport. Um, I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. I love my work, and if I can make a little bit of difference, then it was a good day today. Give them your book title one more time and tell them where- Yeah they can find your book as well. Show them that. Right here. The Sustainable Success Coach. Success Coach, yep. Amazon, you can listen on Kindle on a recruiting trip. Uh, it's 90 minutes I think on Kindle so you can plan accordingly for snacks. And I hope you enjoy it. I, I hope the discussion questions at the end can open up some dialogue with you and your staff, especially if there's a generation gap. Um, our family keeps having babies so I keep having kids and then they have kids so I, I keep being connected, but if that's not your story it can really help to kind of understand where that next generation, the 20-year-olds are right now. Um- Yeah I have a 23-year-old that keeps me real straight all the time. Yeah. So that's helpful. I have a se- I have a 17-year-old that does the same thing for me. Yeah. Uh, um, as a fellow author I will finish with this. For those of you that listened to Tracy today and just got something positive from this or you are gonna read her book, leave a review. Um, it's so important for us authors that we get feedback 'cause number one, we want to... We, we don't write our books to just throw them out there and make money. We write them because we really believe in it. We believe in these ideas. We believe in the research we've done. We want to share it with you. So if you're gonna read Tracy's book, leave a review, tell her what you think, be positive, be constructive 'cause like Tracy I'm sure she wants to write another book if, if it's, there's one out there. I'm writing more books. Yeah. So give feedback. Um, leave a message for me. You can go to our, to my podcast. If you look at the podcast details you can leave a message. You can send me an email. You can say, "Hey, this is what I thought of Tracy." We'd love to hear that. So thank you Tracy so much. Um, and I look forward to future conversations. All right. Appreciate you. Bye. A huge thank you to Dr. Tracy Davenport for joining me and helping us kick off season four of the Significant Coaching Podcast. I hope this conversation challenged you to think a little differently about what it means to build a successful career in coaching, and whether the way we've always done things is really the way we should continue to do them. Be sure to check out Tracy's book, The Sustainable Assistant Coach: Preventing Burnout and Building a Lasting Career in College Sports. You can find that and my book, Significant Recruiting, at amazon.com. If you know a coach who needs to hear this conversation, please share this episode with them. Don't forget to leave a comment and let us know what you thought. As always, thank you for listening to the Significant Coaching Podcast. Until next time, stay focused on what you can control, stay humble, and keep chasing significance