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| Head Coach Geoff Braun looks on during preseason fitness testing in August |
SUNYAC stands for State University of New York Athletic
Conference. It consists of ten teams at public universities in New York, one
being Fredonia. That gives us nine opponents in our conference -- nine teams,
nine challenges (details).
Some of the challenges are extremely difficult. Run a mile
in 7 minutes and 25 seconds. Perform a rear-foot elevated split squat with 110
lbs. Sprint four lengths of a volleyball court 18 times (pictured). It causes
athletes all sorts of anxiety.
But the difficulty isn’t what makes The SUNYAC Challenge special. It’s special because it’s a game. And
games have rules.
The first rule of The
SUNYAC Challenge is that every challenge needs to get done. On a 15-player
roster, 135 challenges need to be completed (15 x 9 = 135). Everyone gets two
attempts at each one.
The second rule of The
SUNYAC Challenge is that if a player can’t complete a challenge in two
tries, another player needs to do it for her. This is where we coaches tend to
cringe: “Some of my players are lazy. They won’t be able to do the challenges
and they’ll just let other players do it for them.”
That valid objection brings us right to the heart of what college
is for: motivating people to learn.
In this case, learning to be self-directed.
It’s easy to motivate through punishment. “If you don’t pass
the fitness tests, you’re not playing.” “If you don’t get a ‘B’ in this class,
you won’t graduate.” Used sparingly, punishment is an effective tool. Used
frequently, student-athletes become punished people. Better to learn
self-direction.
In 2014 we made the challenges too hard. Some of them were
so unmanageable (6:59 mile!) that the fear induced in the team made volleyball
a distant afterthought. 2015 was much better when we eased up a bit. More athletes
passed, and the ones that didn’t were putting forth more effort.
This year was different, though. Not because more athletes
passed challenges (which they did), but because for the first time nobody
expected a teammate to do a challenge for them. If an athlete failed, she was
much more likely to attribute it to her own preparation than to the
impossibility of the task. She was genuinely disappointed and didn’t want
someone doing it for her.
Because of that, the athletes who had to repeat challenges
for others were more understanding, and they pushed themselves just as hard the
second time around. When two athletes had to repeat a mile, they churned out
times of 7:04 and 7:05. When a group of four combined to run for an injured
athlete, splitting it into quarter-miles, they sprinted to a 6:20 finish! After
three years, that’s when I knew with certainty that the system is working.
To my knowledge, we don’t have a metric that measures this sort
of transformative change.
[The idea for this
system came from Amber Warners’s presentation at the 2013 AVCA Convention. We,
and several other teams, stole it.
When I interviewed Warners in April, she explained why she’d share something so critical to her
team’s success: “I just shared the conditioning program with some high school
coaches and they said, ‘Why would you want to share that? Why would you want to
give away your secrets?’ Well, this is about doing a job that’s really, really
difficult. And if it can be a betterment for athletes and help the game be more
positive, what’s more important than that?”]