Happy Holidays and welcome! To assist with preparing coaches and athletes for the New Year, the December coaching & sport section of pelinks4u brings coaches useful performance articles, information on a new TV show, and links to the following topics:

	FSN Debuts Great New Show for Coaches: SportScience
	TEAMWORK, 16 Steps to Building a High-Performance Team
	The Making of a Corporate Athlete
	Sports Nutrition
	Personalized Holiday Gift Links for Coach and Athletes

As always, reader comments are welcomed at djcat@clemson.edu on this month's section, and topics you would like covered in future sections. Here is wishing you a special holiday season and a healthy, productive new year! Your December Coaching & Sport Section editor this month is Deborah Giehl-Cadorette, Coordinator of the Athletic Leadership Program, Eugene T. Moore School of Education, Clemson University.

Fox Sports Net brings the worlds greatest athletes together with the brightest scientists to explore biomechanics with cutting edge technology!

"Motion capture technology (CGI) records distance over time in a three-dimensional space to analyze the most astounding movements in sports, measuring everything from impact to velocity to aerodynamics.

CGI allows for a computerized look at previously unseen body movements during competition. High speed cameras capture precise details of hockey shots, pitches and a quarterback's eyes after the snap. Shooting footage this way will illuminate things in completely new ways.

Numerous types of pressure sensors, which calculate the amount of force per square inch of impact, will be utilized throughout the series. These censors can give specific mathematical responses to everything from calibrating weight distribution to impact areas to reaction times."

(FOX Sports on MSN – Television – FSN announces debut of new show SportScience)

This fall I had the pleasure of watching SportScience for the first time. I was riveted to the screen. Half an hour is too short. It is a must-see for coaches and athletes who want to improve their performance. Share it with your coaches and athletes. They will come away with an understanding of the game and their performance as never before. Log on to fox sports net in your area and provide your zip code and cable company to get a listing of dates and times SportScience airs.

16 Steps to Building a High-Performance Team

Pritchett & Associates, Inc. is a Dallas based firm that specializes in organizational change. Price Pritchett, Chairman and CEO has authored more than 20 books on individual and organizational performance. He holds a PhD in psychology, and has been a consultant for major corporations for over two decades.

Pritchett delivers the same message in "TEAMWORK," as authors Loehr & Schwartz do in "The Making of a Corporate Athlete." These authors contend that coaching human beings to success in the work environment involves more than cognitive recognition. Successful employee training recognizes the importance of physical, emotional, and spiritual development of human beings, in addition to mental acuity. The following is what you will read on the back cover of "TEAMWORK: The Team Member Handbook."

"Learn the magic that moves your team beyond mediocrity and into the winners' circle. From the big league of the NFL to the little league in Carrollton, Texas - from CNN to NASA to the Indy 500 - the fundamentals of teamwork remain the same, regardless of the setting.

	Why you are the answer
	How to protect your position on the team
	How to win the support of your teammates
	What it takes to build a championship team

Use Price Pritchett's 16 guidelines for turning your group into a high-powered team, making it a tightly knit unit that achieves outstanding results."

In both TEAMWORK and The Making of a Corporate Athlete, training of employees is paralleled to training of athletes. Think of what this means for the athletes we train and coach in our secondary and college athletic programs in terms of preparation for performance in the classroom. Coaches who develop their athletes physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually are preparing athletes for performance, period...in academics, in the workplace, in the community, and in life.

Two excerpts from TEAMWORK (2 of 16 Steps to Building a High-Performance Team):

PRACTICE: "It's one thing to show up for work every day and do your job. Or to show up on game day and go against the competition. But it's another thing to show up for practice. To drill. To rehearse. To run through your plays time after time, watching the people perform as a team and pushing for better performance.

Practice, so the saying goes makes perfect. Maybe, maybe not. But you'll notice that nobody offers any hope of perfection without it. Regular, disciplined practice gives your team performance gains it could never achieve by merely 'doing the job' or 'playing the game.' Practice gives you a chance to work purely on performance, without having to worry about actual results at the same time. You can experiment, foul up, learn, make corrections, try again.

People can work on new routines, try out in different positions, do things they could never afford to do if it were a 'live' situation instead of just a practice session. It takes practice to develop the team's true potential. To develop that 'edge' that lets you outperform the competition. To meet the challenge of tough, non-routine problems that might pop up. Consider this: The true professionals never stops practicing. Neither should you and your teammates."

PUSH FOR HIGH QUALITY COMMUNICATION: "Communication breathes the first spark of life into teamwork, and communication keeps teamwork alive. Nothing else is so crucial to coordination of effort. No other factor plays such a precious role in building and preserving trust among teammates. Communication is THE make-or-break issue.

It's not enough for the right hand to know what the left hand is doing. The right hand need to know what the left INTENDS to do. People need a keen sense of what's planned if they are to execute with precision. There's no hope of orchestrating a coordinated team effort unless good communication precedes action.

Everybody in the group needs to know what's going on. The information network should connect all the players, wiring everyone into the team's nerve center. You and your teammates need to meet, talk, engage in very open give and take. Encourage people to air their differences, to go public with their opinions. That's the only way the team can achieve understanding, hammer out the best approach, and end up with 'buy-in' by everybody

You need to serve as a relay person, helping transmit information to teammates. Anyone who is left out of the loop - who gets information too late, or doesn't get it at all - can foul up coordination or cause disaster. Also consider yourself a quality control point in the communication process. Do your share to make the data accurate, up-to-date, and meaningful. Any teammate who makes a move based on misinformation can wreck the group's results.

Jammed up information pipelines and warped messages cause conflict and cripple the group's performance. Don't settle for second rate communication, or you give the kiss of death to high quality teamwork." (Price Pritchett, PhD)

The books available at www.PritchettNet.com are about building successful people and teams from the inside out. Athletes are people before they are anything else. Some sports movies that drive these same lessons are essential teaching tools: Remember the Titans; Coach Carter; Glory Days; Rudy. Incorporate them into your program. Create expectations for your athletes, and hold them accountable. Their eyes are on you Coach, so be the role model they can look up to. Utilize powerful, professional resources that help you do the job.

The Harvard Business Review on Developing Leaders had an interesting article about corporate leadership that caught my eye in the airport bookstore. Actually, five of the seven topics in the book would be helpful to coaches, and one in particular - The Making of a Corporate Athlete by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

The author's theory for developing top level executives was based on their experience of over two decades in training world class athletes. People (athlete or executive) are most productive when able to perform at an optimal level of arousal. That equates to the person (athlete or executive) who is provided enough stimulus to be challenged without anxiety. Loehr and Schwartz refer to this "optimal level" as The Ideal Performance State (IPS).

As coaches we identify when athletes are in the zone, or IPS, but do we truly comprehend what it takes to get them there? Loehr's and Schwartz's research resulted in what they call the performance pyramid. People (athletes and executives) reach the Ideal Performance State based on their performance in each stage of the hierarchy pyramid, opening the door for them to reach the next stage.

Through their research with world class athletes, they found that each stage significantly influences the next. Failure to address any one stage will have a negative influence on performance. These stages include the body, emotions, mind, and spirit - in that order. The base stage of the pyramid is physical, followed by emotional, then mental, and the top level of the pyramid is spiritual.

The following excerpts from the book by Loehr and Schwartz give a brief description of each stage:

PHYSICAL CAPACITY: "Several decades of sports science research have established that the key to increasing physical strength is a phenomenon known as supercompensation - essentially the creation of balanced work-rest ratios. In weight lifting, this involves stressing a muscle to the point where its fibers literally start to break down. Given an adequate period of recovery (typically 48 hours), the muscle will not only heal, it will grow stronger. But persist in stressing the muscle without rest the result will be acute and chronic damage. Conversely, failure to stress the muscle results in weakness and atrophy. In both cases, the enemy is not stress, it's linearity - the failure to oscillate between energy expenditure and recovery.

Regardless of a person's talent or level of fitness, without appropriate routines for recovery they become more vulnerable to frustration, anxiety, and loss of concentration - and far more likely to choke under pressure. The same lesson applies to the corporate athletes we train. The problem, we explain, is not so much that their lives are increasingly stressful as that they are so relentlessly linear. Typically, they push themselves too hard mentally and emotionally and too little physically. Both forms of linearity undermine performance. The corporate athlete doesn't build a strong physical foundation by exercise alone, of course. Good sleeping and eating rituals are integral to effective energy management."

EMOTIONAL CAPACITY: "Just as positive emotions ignite the energy that drives high performance, negative emotions - frustration, impatience, anger, fear, resentment, and sadness - drain energy. Over time, these feelings can be literally toxic, elevating heart rate and blood pressure, increasing muscle tension, constricting vision, and ultimately crippling performance. Anxious, fear ridden athletes are far more likely to choke in competition.

Music has powerful physiological and emotional effects. It can prompt a shift in mental activity from the rational left hemisphere of the brain to the more intuitive right hemisphere. It also provides a relief from obsessive thinking and worrying. Finally, music can be a means of directly regulating energy, raising it when the time comes to perform, and lowering it when it is more appropriate to decompress.

Body language also influences emotions. Effective acting produces precisely the same physiology that real emotions do. All great athletes understand this instinctively. If they carry themselves confidently, they will eventually start to feel confident, even in highly stressful situations. Close relationships (family) are perhaps the most powerful means for prompting positive emotions and effective recovery, and are closely associated with the Ideal Performance State."

MENTAL CAPACITY: "The third level of the performance pyramid- the cognitive - is where most traditional performance-enhancement training is aimed. Our training aims to enhance our clients' cognitive capacities - most notably their focus, time management, and positive and critical thinking skills.

Anything that interferes with focus dissipates energy. Meditation, typically viewed as a spiritual practice, can serve as a highly practical means of training attention and promoting recovery. Practiced regularly, meditation quiets the mind, the emotions, and the body, promoting energy recovery. Visualization is another ritual that produces positive energy and has palpable performance results. Neuroscientist Ian Robertson of Trinity College, Dublin, author of Mind Sculpture, has found that visualization can literally reprogram the neural circuitry of the brain, directly improving performance."

SPIRITUAL CAPCITY: "The word 'spiritual' prompts conflicting emotions and doesn't seem immediately relevant to high performance. So let's be clear: by spiritual capacity we simply mean the energy that is unleashed by tapping into one's deepest values and defining a strong sense of purpose. This capacity we have found, serves as sustenance in the face of adversity and as a powerful source of motivation, focus, determination, and resilience."

The book is available through the Harvard Business School Press at www.hbspress.org. Type in the title of this book, Harvard Business Review on Developing Leaders, in the search select books only tab. It was printed in January, 2004.

The holiday season may find some coaches and athletes in the midst of a competitive athletic schedule (winter), or a welcomed break following the close of a season (fall). Either situation will benefit from links to valuable resources and information about nutrition. The holidays traditionally revolve around food, drink, and celebration. The holidays may also provide an opportunity for rest and recovery for those who plan wisely.

If we are aware of the benefit of foods once consumed, and understand what they do for our bodies, we are more likely to make wise decisions about what to eat. Facts are motivation for actions - to either indulge, or avoid based on results. When it comes to athletic performance, results speak for themselves. A list of nutritious foods, with a simple explanation of what the food (fuel) will do to improve performance, may be convincing enough for athletes to improve their eating habits.

Have your athletes keep a written log of everything they eat for a week. Provide an online resource that will track the number of calories, fat, and protein in the food items they record. There are web sites available (such as www.fitday.com ) that provide us with a method of evaluating food consumption. All the athletes have to do is plug in the foods and amount eaten. They need to be knowledgeable about food portion sizes.

Most young people are unaware that a single serving of a food item is small. They are used to witnessing the large amount of food delivered in some family restaurants, for example, when they serve a portion of country fried steak with gravy!

Have athletes evaluate their diets. They should understand what constitutes a calorie and how many their body requires each day, along with the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat in the calories. Help them learn about their current eating habits: how often they eat, how many athletes eat breakfast, and what they drink throughout the day that contributes to hydration. Have them record their diet for at least seven normal, non-holiday days. Do this in the off-season as part of a conditioning program. Educating athletes about nutritional consumption and performance is an essential ingredient for an athlete's success.