After the Whistle: How Great Coaches Build Their Staff

Hiring is one of the most important decisions a coach makes, but it's rarely discussed in a public setting. In this After the Whistle segment, we build on insights from Arizona State head coaches JJ Van Niel and Molly Miller, both of whom emphasize that being intentional about who you hire and finding staff who complement you as a leader. This episode explores why "fit" matters more than resumes, how great leaders build complementary staffs, and why your hiring process is a direct reflection of your culture.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

There's a critical component of coaching that I think often doesn't get discussed enough, particularly in public. Coaches make tons of decisions surrounding things like their players, their systems, their culture, and so on. But the truth is, all of those are downstream of the people you hire into your program. The people you hire on your staff, they don't just support the system. They are the system. They create the environment for the system. And yet hiring is rarely talked about at the same level of intentionality as everything else. So today on the Win More Live Better podcast, and in particular this After the Whistle segment, we're going to discuss why hiring might be the most important and one of the most overlooked leadership decisions you can make as a head coach. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callenly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callenly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. Now the inspiration for this episode came from my recent conversation with JJ Van Neal, the head volleyball coach at ASU. Now, one of the things that I really uh appreciated that also stood out to me was how open and honest he was about hiring and some of the lessons that he had, particularly some of the mistakes that he had early on in his um transition to becoming a head coach. He talked about it not just as part of the job, but hiring being the lifeblood of your program.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

I honestly think one that that people don't realize is maybe the lifeblood is is you're just who you hire. Um and I think when you're in the business world, it it's like very clear how important that is because when you lose like an elite performer, you don't know if you're getting an elite one back. And then if they're not good, it's very costly to the business. And because other people are spending resources trying to help them. And maybe they're just not on the right seat on the bus, you know, it's kind of cliche, but uh it doesn't mean anyone's a bad person or whatever, but like you gotta find the right people on the right seat on your bus.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Now I think it's easy to approach hiring from the standpoint of like let's just find the best candidate, which often means who's got the best credentials, who's got the best pedigree, who's got the best acumen of uh or knowledge. But instead of one of those, uh sometimes the best hire you can make is the one that complements the environment and the people that you already have within your team.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

She's a really good human being and a good coach, and it just wasn't the right fit. Um I think I was so focused on a name hire, the person that's a no-brainer without actually discussing enough about how I coach what my personal like my personality was not good for her, um how I train, how I thought about it, how they did, or how they thought about it. And and she had been doing it for a year, you know, she's a very successful player, very successful coach. Um and I was just so busy, like, oh, I just gotta get this, you know, highly experienced person will just figure it out. And uh, you know, that was a complete mess up on my part.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Now, one of the things that I thought was kind of cool about this conversation with JJ is I've interviewed one other ASU coach that was the head basketball coach Molly Miller. She also talked about the importance of her staff and who you hire and finding people that can compliment one another. Now, maybe that's just the coincidence, but I think this signals the quality of some of the coaches that ASU has brought in and how intentional their athletic director, Graham Rossini, has been in bringing in not just high-quality coaches, but human beings to lead each of these respective programs. Now, Miller, in my conversation with her, talked about being incredibly intentional about building her staff around her weaknesses, finding coaches that kind of help supplement or augment the things that she felt like she might have been lacking in. Here's how she described it in our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

I've got a staff that I hired that are very, I mean, over 125 years of coaching experience on this staff. So ex and O's knowledge is there. But why I hired them is because they're good human beings. Steph Norman, who I mentioned, she's really been phenomenal and just her recruiting tryce. She and Daniel Barber both came from P4 schools. So Daniel was at Clemson and then Pitt State, and then Steph came at Louisville. They've been so helpful in my transition. And I knew I wanted to augment my strengths and offset my weakness. My weakness was very clear. I had not coached at this level yet.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

So now I want to bring these two sound bites kind of full circle here with these two highly respected and really rising leaders in their respective sports. And I want to kind of build on their perspectives because I think this is again something that just for whatever reason, it doesn't get talked about um sometimes enough. And I think some of this is like historically for many years, the the route to becoming a coach was like, did you play? And who did you know? Now that's obviously become way more nuanced, way more um layered now. And you're seeing people with all different backgrounds, um, all different skill sets, uh, upbringings, playing experience, and so on that have now entered kind of the coaching realm. But again, I I'm not sure that it gets discussed enough. And I know in over the years, I remember even when this was going back to when I was at IMG and having conversations with coaches who um they had never been part of the hiring process before. And they were then asked to try to find people um to bring apart a part of their team. And for many, that was a bit of an adjustment curve. They weren't used to that. Um, and I think in my own career, I would say that I'm often asked about the biggest challenges that I've kind of encountered working in professional baseball. And I definitely think that one that I probably don't talk about in great detail publicly that all that often. But privately I talk a lot about how difficult it has been, you know, hiring, uh, particularly given not just trying to hire full-time mental performance coaches or interns, which I've had to do a lot of over the last eight years or so, but also being part of coaching hires for like the major league staff, um, coaching coaches within the player development staff, um, but also even front office executive roles. Now, I don't know if this makes me crazy or what, but I actually think the hiring process is exciting and it's fun. I love getting to know people, seeing how they respond, not just the specific questions, but really the process itself. And I like imagining how someone might fit into the existing team and how they might complement the others in the group. Now, part of the challenge with hiring, though, isn't necessarily that there's a lack of good candidates, it's finding the right fit. And this is uh a much more complex equation than I think we sometimes give it credit for. So I just wanted to kind of compile um in response to my conversation with JJ, just some of the insights that I've taken uh from my time being involved in hiring processes and just how I kind of think about it. And I think the first is um I I'd kind of basically describe this as like I think clarity probably should precede the fit. So if you want to make a great hire and find a great addition to your staff, I think it starts with clarity. Clarity on your current staff. What do they do well? What are their gaps? What's missing? What's maybe redundant? Fit isn't just about the person you're bringing in, it's also about how well they connect to what already exists. And if you don't have a clear understanding of your team, you're not actually hiring for fit. You're kind of just guessing. And a lot of times that's when you end up making something like a resume hire, somebody that looks good on paper, but that doesn't always mean that they're going to solve the biggest problem that your team has or that they're going to create uh competitive advantages, or they're going to create some sort of competitive advantage because they're bringing in something uh that's unique or something that your other staff don't already possess. Second insight is how important it is to hire the people that can complement you. Um, you're not trying to duplicate yourself, you're trying to complete your staff. And those are two very different things because it's easy to hire, I think, people that are like you, coach like you, see the game like you, maybe match your temperament. Like those are all comfortable to surround yourself with. And there can be instances where the redundancy or the consistency here is useful, but it can also be a choice um made from comfort and not actually intentionality. And and I'll be the first to say that I think there are instances where there's uh room for redundancy or consistency of a certain type of person or or fit across two different people has value. But it can also be a choice, again, made much more out of comfort than being intentional. And these ones aren't always the ones that are going to make your team better. The third insight is I think the hiring process itself is a really good reflection of your culture. So who you involve in the process matters immensely because it sends a signal. If you say you value collaboration across different departments, but then you make decisions in isolation or you don't involve some of those people in the actual hiring process, that's a contradiction. This is the same as I remember having a friend that I spoke with years ago uh working in baseball, and he was a little frustrated because um he felt like in on one hand, they had an organization that said they value the mental side of performance and mental performance training in of itself. But he's like, we're not involved in some of the hiring for different things. Now, again, there's a lot of different circumstances, a lot of different variables that can come into play there. But again, I think it can tell you something because the people involved is gonna directly reflect what's important to you as an organization. Um, and again, whether you realize it or not, candidates are also gonna be evaluating you just as much as you're evaluating them. And then the last one, the biggest one, hands down in my experience, is that shared ownership of the decision usually will drive better outcomes. So as we kind of just talked about, part of this is yes, 100% getting the right people involved in the decision. But the other piece of it is that when you involve people in the process, and again, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna have equal weight or they're gonna have um the final vote on the decision necessarily, but when you get them involved and you take genuinely in their feedback and their thoughts, and that you use that to help guide the decision, it's important because it shifts the it basically creates more ownership of the outcome. It shifts from somebody on your team being like, well, that was your hire, to like, no, this is our teammate. And instead of questioning the hire, people are gonna be more invested in making that person successful. If I've been involved in the hiring process and I've put my stamp behind somebody, then I'm gonna make sure that I've done my best to support them, advocate for them, and help them integrate into the system. And this is also gonna increase the likelihood that this hire actually works and it actually pays off in the first place. So, again, that's to me the biggest lesson is um in my experience, when you have to make some of these decisions, the best, your best friend as a leader is the team. So if you're in a position to hire, I think here's where you start. Get clear on what you have, get honest about what you need, and be intentional about who you bring in to help close that gap and make the hire. If hiring really is the lifeblood of your program, as JJ Van Neal said, then I think it's worth asking are you treating it that way? Are you rushing it? Are you delegating it? Are you defaulting to what looks good on paper? Because every hire has the potential to raise the standard for you and your program.