Stimulating competition in the off-season – what’s your method?

Whenever off-season workouts start to get slightly mundane and I find myself scurrying up and down the hallways of our school grabbing kids to make sure they’re in the weight room, I’m reminded of something that Alabama head coach Nick Saban said to hundreds of onlookers in the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville during this year’s AFCA convention. To paraphrase Coach Saban, “It’s the human condition to be average, to just survive. It’s normal for people to be mediocre by nature. They don’t want to do the extra things to make themselves better, so we can’t expect that they will. It’s our job as coaches to bring it out in them.” It’s been a long-time goal of mine to find innovative ways to motivate players. I remember reading in AFM about Kent State’s point system that tracks the progress of their student-athletes in