Sunday, June 19, 2016
"Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Jesus Christ.".
1 Thessalonians 5:18
"Many different events or moments have led us to where we are today and where we will be tomorrow. Trusting in His plan and honoring the gifts He has given us, can teach us another lesson unseen in the near or late future.We must be constantly reminded that we must first put Him atop the throne before we can truly begin to express who He really wants us to be and the maximum capacity of our potential to help others."
I hope everyone was able to watch Chile destroy Mexico in Copa America. If you didn't, find a way. Forget about the score, the thing that immediately stood out for me was how Chile was absolutely relentless from the start. TENACIOUS, INTENSE and ABSOLUTELY FUN TO WATCH. Every player was locked in to how they wanted to play from the opening whistle and they didn't stop until the final whistle. I love it.
Food for thought....
Example of Pochettino's Tactical Philosophy
"The underlying principal is simple – when in possession, patience and purpose in your passing, pace and dynamism in your attack. Without possession, persistence and pressure on a level you’ve never been asked to reach before. Under Pochettino, not all players need to know how to attack, but certainly, they all need to know how to defend."
I think as a team, we struggle to buy in to the way we want to play. Every time you are with a ball, at a training session or in a game, the focus should always be on our Technical and Tactical Philosophy.
I think as a team, we struggle to buy in to the way we want to play. Every time you are with a ball, at a training session or in a game, the focus should always be on our Technical and Tactical Philosophy.
Continue to pray for Zambia Team. Couple of pics of guys in Zambia taken by our good friend Daniel Daka
Thoughts from Co-captain Kevin Nimmo
"In my opinion, for a team to reach their goals, whatever they may be, you have to have a team full of players that want to make each other better. We need to focus on that more this next season. I think the first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem. Over the last two seasons, one of our problems is that we got complacent. Towards the end of this last season, we weren’t hungry and we weren’t pushing each other to be the best team we could be. That being said, there were a ton of positives from this past spring. We are starting to gel and play better as a team. We won all of our spring games and we did well in the Bethel tournament. I’m not bringing up this problem to discourage us, I brought up the problem because I believe our team can be a great team if we are all completely committed to making each other better every time we step on the field. We can build on the progress we made this spring. We have to be focused, committed, and willing to make sacrifices for each other and for the team.
If we come into preseason with the mindset that we will do whatever we can to make each other better and make the team better, we will get a lot more out of this season. We have a lot of talent, but we need to stay hungry all season, and never become content with where we are at. This means we constantly push each other in training and in the weight room even when things are going well for us. Even if we are undefeated, we have to focus on improving and making each other better.
We have to have every single person on the team committed to making each other better each and every time we step onto the practice field or the game field and the only way this will work is if we also have every single person on the team be able to take criticism from each other. When someone on the team says something to you, you have to keep in mind that they are telling you these things because they want you to be better, and they want the team to be better. This kind of team requires humility from every player. Every player has to be willing to accept the fact that they might not have all of the answers.
This spring, we played some good soccer. We have a lot to be excited about this season. We have a lot of very good additions coming into the program this year and we have the opportunity and the ability to make some noise in the WHAC this year. However, in order to do this, we have to strive to make each other better. This has to be our focus at every training session. " Kevin
This weeks thought from Jim Collins-Good to Great
"Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action: this framework captures much of what separates greatness from mediocrity. The Army has long embraced this concept with its own framework of leadership: Be-Know-Do. This framework runs through these chapters, like a thread of DNA. The beauty of this book lies in the dualities of leadership—knowing when to follow and when to not follow, the responsibility to question and the responsibility to execute, dedication to mission first and dedication to your comrades above all. These dualities highlight the point that disciplined action does not mean rote action. Disciplined action means that you begin with a framework of core values (be), you meld those values with knowledge and insight (know), and finally you make situation-specific decisions to act (do). Leadership, the chapters in this book teach, begins not with what you do, but who you are."
Nine years ago, business authors Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, along with a team of 20 researchers, set out to answer this question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?
The 20 Mile March
Collins and Morten dubbed the slow and steady approach taken by Southwest and other 10X companies “The 20 Mile March.” They took this moniker from imagining a man determined to walk across the United States, and how he could accomplish his goal faster by committing to walking 20 miles every single day — rain or shine — rather than walking for 40-50 miles in good weather and then very few miles or not at all during inclement conditions.
The pair later came upon the story of the race between Robert Falcon Scott and Ronald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole, and they were amazed to discover how the differences in the way the two expeditions were executed also aligned with their 20 Mile March idea. Amundsen beat Scott to the Pole and had a pretty smooth and uneventful journey both there and back. Scott reached the Pole only to face the crushing realization that the Norwegians had been there first, and he and his four men perished on the grueling 700-mile return trip. Collins and Hansen found that among the many other lessons comparing the two expeditions can teach us, is that much of Amundsen’s success can be traced to creating his own plan, and then carrying it out with methodical, disciplined consistency. In other words, sticking with his 20 Mile March.
Your 20 Mile March
As I read Great by Choice, I was struck by how applicable the 20 Mile March principle was not simply to corporations or polar expeditions, but to individual lives as well. Many of the people I see struggling to improve themselves usually tackle their goals through an inevitably fruitless series of fits and starts. They get all excited about a new goal or program for themselves and throw themselves into it with gusto, only to soon get burned out, sidetracked by the next cool new thing, or demoralized by a setback. This pattern leaves an unending trail of unfinished projects in their wake.
I completely sympathize with these people, because I’ve done that too! But as I evaluate the times I’ve been successful in life, I notice a pattern. It usually wasn’t through big Herculean efforts, or snazzy new productivity plans that I achieved my goals, but rather through steady, consistent efforts. I reached my goals by throwing on my knapsack every single day and setting off on a 20 Mile March."
Brett McKay-What's Your 20 Mile March? January 2013
Jim Collins Podcast
Important Reminders
- Send in your Test Results for Kopion Run...Once again, Report all your actual times. You will be ranked again. Are you attacking the workouts or just getting through them? Your results will let the coaches and your teammates know. Results come to me no later than Saturday evening.
- Monday Nights: 7pm on Bradford or Baseball depending on the field.
- Physicals Update: I only have 1 official Physical confirmed-Ben Stump
- PLAYNAIA: Completed process-Joshua Busscher
- SCOR Training. I will need as many guys as possible to help run training sessions for SCOR Club in Rockford. Here are the dates: Starting Tuesday 6/28-6-7pm is U6 through U11s. 7-8pm is U12-U18. Sign up with Captains and cc me on the email. The Club is making a donation to the soccer program and I need everyone's participation. We will be running conditioning exercises for the group.
