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Why the Idea of Balance Falls Short The phrase work-life balance is widely used, but rarely examined. It sounds appealing on the surface, yet it creates an expectation that is almost impossible to meet. Balance implies a scale, something evenly distributed and consistently maintained. It suggests that time and energy can be split equally between work and life, as if both operate in predictable and stable conditions. Leadership does not work that way. Life does not work that w

Every coach reaches a point where the skills that brought you success are no longer enough to move you forward. At first, coaching is all about mastering your craft. You earn your reputation through technical skill: breaking down film, designing smart plays, running smooth practices, and helping players grow. The results are easy to see. When practice goes well, performance gets better. When performance improves, you win. And when you win, you move up. This approach works bec

Culture Isn’t a Slogan. It’s Behavior. In athletics, culture is often discussed but rarely defined. Real team culture is not about slogans or locker-room posters. It is the cultivated behaviors that leaders reinforce every day that, when aligned with purpose and standards, create a powerful competitive edge. Every coach is searching for a competitive edge. Coaches study new schemes. They invest in technology. They analyze performance data and look for any advantage that might

Soon, many tributes to Lou Holtz will appear. While most will provide more detail than this, they will cover his coaching career, the championships, memorable moments on the sidelines, and his decades-long influence in college football. This is not a complete account of Lou Holtz’s life. Instead, this is my personal reflection on someone I have admired and tried to follow. For much of my adult life, I have learned from his leadership ideas, his views on life and work, and the

Leadership accountability requires clarity, composure, and respect. The Jerome Tang situation offers a powerful lesson in holding standards without damaging culture.

The scoreboard doesn't lie. Neither does the film. Yet too many coaches fall into the trap of measuring success by the volume of drills run, hours logged, or plays installed rather than the quality of execution and actual game-day performance. Championship cultures aren't built on busyness—they're built on precision, purpose, and relentless focus on fundamentals that matter. Competitive greatness, as Coach John Wooden defined it, is "performing at your best when your best is

A full military career is full of different assignments, different locations, and different experiences. Even when you spend an entire career inside a single specialty (armor, infantry, aviation, logistics, intelligence) the range of units, leaders, missions, and cultures you encounter is wide. The uniforms look the same. The doctrine is the same. The standards are supposed to be the same. But the reality is not.

Summer of 2020 Most leaders are built in peacetime but judged in wartime. Peacetime is where you build identity, culture, discipline, and systems. Wartime is where you’re forced to act under stress, make decisions with imperfect information, and defend the mission when the world is watching. Crisis doesn’t change who you are; it exposes who you already were. I learned that lesson viscerally in July of 2020 when I assumed command of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Div

Sports, man. What a game. And yes — coaching matters. Leadership matters. Previously, I wrote that “if you want to win championships, you need to build a championship culture — on purpose.” The 2025–26 Indiana Hoosiers just demonstrated that lesson with a clarity that should force every athletic director, business leader, and sports fan to recalibrate their thinking about what winning really takes. They didn’t just get better players. They didn’t just get richer boosters. The

I’m taking a break from football, culture, and coaching talk on the blog this week to celebrate one of my heroes. Command Sergeant Major Timothy A. Bolyard would have turned 50 this week. That number feels heavy to me. The older I get, the more I notice how strange time is. It moves quickly when it’s passing, feels slow when you look back, and seems unfair when it’s cut short.

Why do we assume coaches must choose between winning games and developing people? This reflection challenges that false tradeoff and shows how trust, purpose, and discipline create teams built to last.

Most leadership failures in sports don’t come from a lack of effort or discipline—they come from leaders who were promoted for performance without developing the skills or identity required to lead others. That pattern reveals a broader truth about leadership, particularly in athletics: most people are promoted for performance, not for leadership readiness, and the two are not the same thing.

Coaching is demanding in ways most people never face. Leadership is always tough, but coaching stands out because your wins and losses are public and judged right away. It puts a lot on your shoulders, exposes your weaknesses, and makes everything feel bigger. For those in charge, it can feel like living in a pressure cooker.

The sporting world watched with interest over the past six weeks as Lane Kiffin, former head football coach at Ole Miss, went through a very public game of “The (football) Bachelor”.

In December 2021, Vanderbilt football entered the offseason with one of the toughest starting points in college athletics. A 2–10 record. An 0–9 campaign the year before. A roster thin on SEC-level depth. The program had spent decades and was labeled a conference doormat. Competitive confidence wasn’t something Vanderbilt had misplaced — it was something the program had never truly possessed. So when Clark Lea took over, he wasn’t reviving an old contender. He was building a

If you spend time with young leaders like assistant coaches, new managers, or rising captains, you’ll often hear the same answer when you ask, “What kind of leader are you?”

Spend any time on a practice field and in a motor pool, and you’ll notice similarities in language. We rally around the mission, refuse to let our teammates down, preach next man up, and dig deep when it’s the fourth quarter. We leave it all on the field and trust the process. The vocabulary overlaps so naturally that it almost goes unnoticed. But the real connection isn’t linguistic—it’s foundational. The language is the echo. The roots run much deeper.

I recently joined my friend Chris Kolenda in leading a client offsite at Antietam and Gettysburg. Standing on ground where decisions carried life-and-death consequences was a powerful reminder about the essential elements of leadership. It reminded me that success, whether in combat or competition, comes down to people, trust, and the culture a leader builds. Thinking about those experiences, one topic we discussed resonated with me, since I personally struggled with it so o

Let’s be real—the word "culture" gets tossed around so much these days it’s almost lost its meaning. But here’s the thing: most people talk about culture without agreeing on what it actually is, let alone how to build a good one. So, before we go any further, let’s check what the dictionary says (yeah, I know; cliché, but hear me out). “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” Nah. “The customs, arts, social institutions, and

A case study on Brian Kelly, Jimbo Fisher, and what their stories say about program leadership. When Brian Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU and Jimbo Fisher jumped from Florida State to Texas A&M, both hires looked like slam dunks. Proven winners. National-championship pedigrees. Command presence. Every athletic director’s dream: “Let’s get a sure thing.” Still, both tenures ended the same way. They fell short of expectations and lost the excitement that accompanied their arriva