By Tilden “Zack” Fleming, CSCS
What equipment, schedule, and set-up do you need to develop high performing student-athletes in your situation? You can develop high-performance athletes simply by working with what you currently have–as long as you have effective organization.
Dr. Charise Ward, MD, MPH said, “The Bottom line is, if you do not use it or need it, it’s clutter, and it needs to go.” In a world of gathering as many tools for your toolbox from clinics, conversations, and social media, we might need to pump the breaks, declutter, and organize what we have currently accumulated.
The longer I coach at the high school level, the more I believe that effective high school strength & conditioning is more about effective organization than optimal X’s and O’s. Now why would I say something like that? Well, I think we can all agree that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, we all have a room full of different needs, training ages, injury backgrounds, etc. The reality is, both people who do and people who don’t back squat have won championships. I err on the side of simplicity and organization because I’ve answered the question, “Do we need LUNCH TRAYS for LUNCH TRAY hamstring curls?” no less than 1 million times during my coaching tenure. If we can’t get past those basic questions, why would I try to move our kids to more “complex” issues?
I consistently train 50-80 high school student-athletes in our 1,600-square-foot weight room (well past the NSCA recommendation of 100-sq.-ft. per athlete). We have a “fat guy in a little coat” issue when it comes to training space; so many kids in our space that one wrong move and we’ll bust at the seams. Simplicity allows us to quit worrying about things that don’t matter (or we can’t control) and focus on executing at a high level.
In 2022, Heidrick & Struggles, a premier provider of executive search, corporate culture, and leadership consulting services that works for more than 70% of Fortune 1,000 companies, conducted research to identify an elite set of organizations that consistently outperformed their peers based on Compound Annual Growth Rates for Organic Revenue. CAGR is a metric that can be useful for investors, analysts, and company management to assess the Company’s Long-Team Health and Potential for Future Growth.
What does CAGR have to do with strength & conditioning? The findings of this research have a lot or practical application for us. Heidrick & Struggles research found a +52% difference in simplicity score between low-accelerating organizations (4%) and high-accelerating organizations (56%). In other words, the simpler the processes, the faster and more efficient the organization operated. Additionally, their research found that the percentage of people who felt they had an efficient process for low-accelerating organizations was 20%, while the percentage of people at high-accelerating organizations was 56%. Again, when employees, or in our case athletes, know the processes and how to efficiently execute them our operational ceiling is significantly higher. Finally, the percentage of people who felt that their structure and metrics were simple for low-accelerating organizations was 36% while with high-accelerating organizations, that percentage was 67%. Again, we see high-accelerating organizations outperforming low-accelerating organization by focusing on well-executed, simple processes.
What do those stats mean and how do we utilize them?
Look at your strength and conditioning program. Do you have efficient processes? Do you have simple structures? Do you have simple metrics? Let’s define these terms.
Efficient processes
Process Efficiency is the amount of effort or input required to produce your desired outcome. Heidrick & Struggles identified two major components of process efficiency: (1) Reduce wait times in customer service; and (2) Streamline on-boarding for new employees. In other words, how much down time or waiting do athletes have in your program? Maybe it’s by design, maybe it’s not, but I know that no one travels to a Disney theme park to stand in lines… they go to ride the rides. Streamlining “new employees” is simply answering the question, “How long does it take to get a new kid acclimated to your program?” When you inevitably get a new transfer student who walks into your class five minutes before you start a session, what do you do? Do you have to forsake the rest of the class to teach them? Do you just tell them to “hop in and follow along?” What is your process for that? When we have efficient process in place, we can add, or subtract, pieces without missing a beat. If we hold so tightly to our process that we don’t let our athletes take ownership of them we will significantly hinder any real development. Allowing them to be a part of, and executing our processes allows us to act almost like an administrative assistant that floats from issue to issue to fix what needs fixing and ensure the rest of our program is running smoothly.
Simple Structures
Heidrick & Struggles defined “Simple Structures” as a basic organizational design structure with:
- Low departmentalization
- Little work specialization
- Wide spans of control
- Centralized authority
- Little formalization or rules that govern operations
Let’s look at these one by one.
- Low departmentalization means that there are not a ton of sub-groups within a program. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any… just a low number. I get that we have 27 different sport teams at my school, but I don’t need to write and facilitate 27 different programs.
- Low work specialization means that a majority of your participants can do a majority of the things in your program. If you have a large amount of “specialized” strength and conditioning programs, then you need to be prepared to be pulled in many different directions at the same time.
- Wide spans of control imply a flat structure, or an organizational structure with fewer layers of management. In other words, do you enable your athletes to make decisions? I call this “Less structure, More Organization.” If I’ve done my job and organized the program in such a way that decision-making is easy, then I can enable my athletes to make their own (coach-guided) decisions.
- Centralized Authority implies that there is one person at the top that makes all of the decisions and the “employees” are expected to carry out those decisions. At the end of the day, I want to enable my athletes to run the weight room, but there has to be an ultimate authority. It needs to be clear who that authority is, but I do not have to “rule with an iron fist.”
- Little formalization or rules that govern operation is very similar to what we will talk about later in regard to selecting metrics. Select a few rules/expectations for your weight room and for your program. Make them known and let the athletes take ownership of them. They can’t take ownership of something they can’t remember. So, if have a 33rd rule on your list, it likely won’t move the needle on your program.
Simple Metrics
There is a quote that I heard for the first time at the first NHSSCA NatCon in Atlanta in 2016: “What gets measured matters.” What a great quote. If it matters in your program, it needs to be measured. If it’s not measured, then how can it impact the decision-making for your program and ultimately drive optimized performance for your athletes?
While I agree with this quote, however, there is another quote that we must also remember: “In your thirst for knowledge, be sure not to drown in all the information.” So, while I agree that “what gets measured matters,” we can’t measure EVERYTHING. For our program to be simple AND effective, we must identify a manageable number of KPI’s to track that lead to real change in our programming. In our program, we track Attendance, Vertical/Broad Jump, Bodyweight, Upper-Body Strength (usually Bench Press), and Lower-Body Strength (usually a Squat). That’s it. Could we do more and get really precise? Sure, but we don’t have the resources to do it at my school. So, for now, we focus on these KPI’s.
After reading this article, you are hopefully inspired to simplify and reorganize your program. If you do, how will you know if you’ve succeeded?
I think there are three main traits that you can measure to determine the success of your decluttering and simplification:
- Scalability – Can you easily scale or shrink your program to 2,3,4, or 5 days of training?
- Density – Can you easily lengthen or shorten your program to 30, 45, or 60 minutes?
- Flexibility – Can you adjust your program on the fly without losing your values?
If you feel confident that you can easily do all three of these things, then you’ve got a simple, well-organized program. Don’t mistake simple for poor. As an example, Pal’s Sudden Service, a fast food restaurant in my community, received the Baldrige Award in 2001. Since then, the quick-service restaurant chain’s founder, Pal Barger, has repeatedly shared why he considers his company’s heavy investment in simplicity and employee training to be cost-effective—despite high turnover in the industry. Other business leaders reportedly ask Pal, “What if you spend all this time and money training someone and then they leave?’” His response to them: “Suppose we don’t, and then they stay?”
Coach Zach Fleming is the Strength and Conditioning Coach at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tenn. He was selected as the NHSSCA 2022 Tennessee High School Strength Coach of the Year, Region 1 Southeast, and is a member of the NHSSCA Tennessee Advisory Board.
