3 Ways to Kill Entitlement on Your Team

Hi Coach,

Before you dive in, two quick notes:

Best,

Luke

Tons of coaches are struggling with entitlement on their teams.

Entitlement - “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.”

This is a real challenge for coaches and leaders.

A spirit of entitlement from individuals, or as team as a whole, can be cancerous to the culture and performance of a team.

So what can coaches do about it?

Let’s look at three practical things you can do to remove entitlement from your teams and players.

Gratitude is a powerful antidote to entitlement for everyone, not just young people and athletes.

Expressing appreciation for others and recognizing who and what has helped us get to where we are in life provides much-needed perspective.

In The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, they share a research study that was conducted by psychologists studying the impact of expressing gratitude on personal happiness.

The study found that people who took time to write a letter of gratitude to someone and gave it to that person showed significantly higher levels of happiness at that time AND months down the road than those in a control group that didn’t do the gratitude exercise.

Not only does expressing gratitude light up the receiver of it, but it’s really good for the person who expresses it.

We need more athletes that are filled with gratitude for the people and situations that have helped them on their journey.

It’s also important to make a habit out of expressing gratitude for one another as a team.

Take 2 minutes at the end of each practice and game to give shoutouts to players and coaches for where they lived out the team’s core values and helped others succeed.

These are just miniature exercises in expressing gratitude and appreciation.

It helps them see that success doesn’t happen alone.

Coaches should model giving these, then give players the opportunity to do it.

It may feel a bit clunky at first but as it becomes a daily occurrence on you team, your players will embrace it.

Two practical ideals:

Entitlement and selfishness go hand in hand. Nothing stomps out selfishness like serving others.

Take time as a team to serve your school or community in a meaningful way.

There’s an endless amount of ways you can do this.

It might even be worth getting your team together and brainstorming some ideas for how you could serve your community.

You could even empower your players (depending on the age and stage) to contact local organization to get something set up.

You’ll be amazed at the side of your players that emerges when they engage in serving.

A few years ago, a basketball team I was helping coach packed some meals around the holidays for a local non-profit.

The players loved it. They took ownership of the experience and had a blast doing it.

We were more proud of the way they served that morning than anything we accomplished on court that season.

On a personal note, some of the most formative experiences of my life were during my teenage years when I began serving individuals with disabilities through camps and local activities.

It was a powerful teacher of this reality: life is not about me.

Two practical ideas:

*The below thoughts apply to the levels and contexts of sports where playing time can’t be equal. In my opinion, this is junior high (12-13 years old) and above. Prior to that age, players should be playing as close to equal minutes as possible for the sake of development and enjoyment.

We want our athletes to understand that good things in life and sports are earned, not given.

Players feeling entitled to playing time can undermine a culture and a team.

It’s critical that as coaches, we’re clear with players and parents about how playing time is determined.

Then, we must be consistent in following through on that.

If we tell them playing time is connected to attitude, skill, and grades, then we need to be prepared to stick to those measures.

It’s important that we have some data to back up our decision making.

I’ve used Anson Dorrance’s Competitive Cauldron with several teams I’ve coached, which consists of tracking winners and losers in practice, then ranking players based on those results.

It’s incredibly useful to have data for decision making and tough conversations with players and parents around playing time.

Additionally, make a habit of having frequent, honest conversations with players about their current role on the team.

Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind, unclear is unkind.”

Be clear with players about where they are now and what it takes to get where they want to be.

Then, we should be willing to help them get there!

Three practical ideas:

Thanks for reading, I hope this serves you on your journey.

To your growth,

Luke Gromer, RYG Athletics | A NIKE Sports Camp Provider

P.S. If you’re interested in becoming one of our NIKE Sports Camp directors, reply “NIKE” to this email, and we’ll get on a call! You can see testimonials from over 100 athletes that attended our camps last summer.

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