by Pete Carroll
Also at this foundational level, my philosophy has this vision: Do things better than they have ever been done before. This level consists of a variety of philosophical beliefs for any organization I would build. These covered the elements of the game, human performance, and organizational structure that were most important to me. They included what would be the most important phrase in my next football program, “It’s All About the Ball,” and the directives known as the Three Rules:Rule 1. Always Protect the Team
Rule 2. No Whining, No Complaining, No Excuses
Rule 3. Be Early
I also added behavioral, or style, elements: We would perform with great energy, great enthusiasm, and great toughness, and play smart, all while respecting everything and everyone involved in the process.
On the next level of the Win Forever pyramid I put what I’d come to realize was the central theme of my life as a coach: competition. As I had learned through the process of self-discovery, competition is at my personal core, so it would be foolish not to put it at the core of any program I ran. And if I were ever to find myself in an organization where competition didn’t play a central role, then I should immediately recognize that I was in the wrong place. I knew that any program that didn’t embrace competition had better look for another coach. Other coaches might be successful with an entirely different theme at the center of their programs, but I knew I could only be successful if I focused on what was true to me. My programs would be built on the concept “Always Compete.” In line with this, every member of my program would have no choice but to perform in a relentless pursuit of a competitive edge. That concept would carry over to our practice field, where we would compete to find new ways to raise the level of competition in practice each day. Whether it was through entertainment, practical jokes, or straight-up competition, the program I would lead would always be in a relentless pursuit of a competitive edge.
The third level of the pyramid is about the importance of practice. After decades of coaching football at different levels, I was prepared to boldly state that “Practice Is Everything.” By placing practice on a high level of the pyramid, I was making a statement. We would never accept having a poor practice or taking a day off. There would be no choices. For us to do things better than they have ever been done before, I believed that we had to practice at the highest level, the most competitive level. I promised myself that I was going to be absolutely relentless in pursuing any competitive edge I could. With consistently competitive practices, players would ultimately reach a point where they could perform in the absence of fear, due to the confidence they had gained by practicing so well. Ideally, they would then learn to trust the process, themselves, and their teammates. When a performer has supreme confidence in himself and can trust all the people around him and the schemes they are running, he is finally free to totally focus and become immersed in his performance. This is where great performers and great teams acquire a most cherished characteristic . . . they know they are going to win. When you know you’re going to win, you don’t doubt or worry. You can actually perform with a “quieted mind,” in the absence of fear. It is my job to orchestrate this “knowing” throughout the entire process in every aspect of my next program—a responsibility I would welcome.
8
ALWAYS COMPETE
Lots of people talk about competition, especially those who seek to achieve high performance no matter what the profession. In my experience, however, the real essence of competing is often misunderstood. Competition to me is not about beating your opponent. It is about doing your best; it is about striving to reach your potential; and it is about being in relentless pursuit of a competitive edge in everything you do.
As I worked through that process of developing my vision and plan for success, I decided that competition had to be at the heart of everything we would do—absolutely everything. Our stated goal would be to “do things better than they have ever been done before.” When you think about it, that is a statement about competition in its purest form. However successful you may be, there is always some element you can improve upon, some achievement to exceed.
I can’t say this any more loudly or any more clearly: Competition is the central theme in the Win Forever philosophy. It is absolutely essential to our program. If food, water, and sleep are essential in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, competition is at the core of Win Forever’s philosophical needs. Where Nike says, “Just Do It,” we say, “If you want to Win Forever, Always Compete.” Competition would become everything to the players and coaches in my next program.
Competition is typically defined as a contest between individuals, groups, teams, or nations; it is a test of skills. In my world, however, competition is much more than that. It is a mentality, an outlook, and a way of approaching every day. The traditional definition of competition requires having an opponent. For players, the real “opposition” is not necessarily the team they are matched up against in a given week—far from it. The real opposition is the challenge to remain focused on maximizing their abilities in preparation for the game.
I have worked for plenty of teams where coaches spend the week or even the month leading up to a “big” game talking down the opposition. They fuel traditional rivalries and do whatever they can to build up the other team as the enemy. Of course, this approach wins games for many teams, but I don’t agree. The essence of my message about competing has nothing to do with the opponent. My competitive approach is that “it’s all about us.” If we’ve really done the preparation to elevate ourselves to our full potential, it shouldn’t matter whom we’re playing.
Once I understood that we were competing with ourselves, it changed my view of future opponents. Many people confuse “opponent” with “enemy,” but in my experience, that is extremely unproductive. My opponents are not my enemies. My opponents are the people who offer me the opportunity to succeed. The tougher my opponents, the more they present me with an opportunity to live up to my full potential and play my best. From an extreme perspective, that’s a reason to love them, not to hate them. At the end of the day, that opponent is the person who makes you into the best competitor you can be.
Thus, a Win Forever team or organization holds opponents in high regard because they are the ones who call on us to reach our potential. In our practices, we always end each day with our best offensive players competing against our best defensive players to create the most competitive situations. It is crucial to maximizing the development of the team.
Of course, when we say that the competition is “all about us,” that doesn’t mean that we don’t think about our opponents. Of course we do. We think about them a lot. But what we do is try to understand their makeup and nature. We want to center our focus on what we can control, which is us. We have no control over what our opponents do; we can only control what we do. We want to maximize our potential, and to do that we must focus our energy and efforts on ourselves.
These thoughts about being a competitor are not necessarily all insights that I came up with on my own. Some are simply truths about performance that I have observed by being around extraordinary achievers during my career. I have had the good fortune of working with or admiring from afar many individuals who have taught me about competing. Among all of those people, the greatest individual competitor I have come in close contact with is Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice. I worked with him in San Francisco, and I have always said that the 49ers had many great competitors in the organization, but Jerry stood above the rest.
From my very first days on the staff, it was obvious to me that Jerry felt he had to prove to himself and his teammates that he was great. And this was not just on game day; it was during walkthroughs, training camp, off-season workouts, and even charity events. The beauty of it was that his mentality became a part of the 49ers culture, and Ronnie Lott, Steve Young, and others followed suit. Still, Jerry was different from anyone else.
As I got to know Jerry, I learned that he had to prove wh
o he was every single chance he got. Apparently he had this drive at an early age, and it was an approach he carried over to his NFL career. Whatever it was, Jerry would give everything he had to beat you. He came to practice taped up, in full pads, and ready to go every day, and he’d finish in the end zone every time he caught the ball. He is easily recognized as one of the great competitors of all time. When I say Jerry competed at everything, I mean it. I saw it for myself.
During my first year in San Fransico, there was a celebrity basketball game at Santa Clara University pitting the 49ers from the 1980s against the 49ers of the 1990s. As a new coach on the staff and interested in 49ers history, I went to watch the game. The score was fairly even, and I was watching some of the guys and their personalities. Jerry played really well, scoring a bunch of points, then checking out of the game for a while. He was having fun on the bench signing autographs and talking to fans.
Then, over the loudspeaker, the announcer said that Carlton Williamson had become the leading scorer in the game. I looked around and Jerry was already on a knee checking back into the game. He went in for several minutes, scored twelve points in a wild flurry, and then took himself back out again. It was all just to make sure he was the leading scorer in the game.
He didn’t say anything to anybody, but it was so clear what he was all about. He may not even remember doing that, yet it was a magnificent illustration that to him everything was a personal competition. Basketball, of course, had nothing to do with it.
As a great competitor, Jerry understood that by staying in the mind-set of always competing he could develop the awareness to capture the “opportunities within opportunities” that other people might miss. In other words, he was constantly seeking a competitive edge. It helps to always be searching for that tiny edge in whatever you’re doing—even if it’s small, silly stuff—because that’s how you are going to catch things that someone else might not when it really matters. It’s an extremely powerful tool.
Just as important as that competitive intensity was the fact that you could see without a doubt that Jerry was really competing with himself. He never allowed his success or failure to be defined by anyone else. Jerry Rice’s ability to maintain his competitive focus made him into one of the great figures in the history of sports. I think his example is an unusually valuable one.
Adopting an all-out “always compete” approach to your passions does not necessarily come without a price. For example, it may be difficult to get a good night’s sleep if your mind is occupied by thoughts of doing things better than they have ever been done before, or being the best you can be. In extreme cases, you may be faced with a decision to uproot yourself and your family in order to pursue a professional opportunity.
One of the first, but not the last, times that brought this into focus came when I left UOP, after coaching for three years as a graduate assistant. Something needed to change, and my two choices were to coach at Moreau Catholic High School in the Bay Area, which would have been convenient, or to pack up a U-Haul and move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to coach under Monte Kiffin and Lou Holtz, who had just been named head coach at the University of Arkansas. At the time, it was just Glena and I, but nonetheless I made the difficult choice to shift our entire lives just so I could pursue that competitive opportunity.
I want to be honest about what it takes to compete at an extreme level—but I don’t for a minute want to scare anyone away from embracing competition. Having the drive to always compete doesn’t necessarily mean you have to either make the choices I’ve made or not compete at all. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You can compete to be a good student, compete to be a good friend, compete to be a good dad, or a husband or wife. My point is to make conscious choices about what you compete at, and always compete to do your best at whatever that is. The idea is that you can be a great competitor at whatever you’re doing. You can direct this competitive mentality to serve you in all aspects of your life.
9
PRACTICE IS EVERYTHING
The uncompromising core belief of Win Forever is to “do things better than they have ever been done before.” This includes football practice. It might seem obvious that, as a coach, I would say that good practice sessions are important. But my view of practice is different from most others’. To me, practice is not just something that is necessary for a team to prepare itself for game day. Rather, practice is one of the many places where we compete to be the best.
It is my belief that how we practice makes just as important a statement about who we are as how we play the games. How we practice defines who we are. It is not only something we have to do in order to compete, but our practice is a competitive activity in and of itself. Practice is something we want to be the best at for its own sake. As I began to develop my thoughts about this and to write them down, I recalled a great example to illustrate this point.
During the year following my last season with the Patriots, I had been asked by the league offices to critique a youth program the NFL was conducting. I observed two different practices in an afternoon, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx. The first practice was well organized and disciplined, and the drills had been set up properly for a youth team. I expected to see more or less the same thing at my next stop. When we got to the Bronx, however, I didn’t have to see a thing to realize that my assumption had been completely mistaken.
We had parked out of view of the field where the second practice was taking place, but from the moment I got out of the car, I could hear it: whistles, kids, and coaches, all sounding somewhat unlike the practice I’d come from. Here there was something very different—it was the energy. As I hurried around the corner and saw the levels of activity and emotion unfolding, I was able to see the energy and enthusiasm that I live for as a coach. Despite the fact that both teams clearly had the same gear, the same facilities, and players of comparable ability, this practice and the one I had just come from were two utterly different experiences. From the moment I got out of the car, I sensed this was going to be a better practice.
As I got closer, I could hear coaches speaking in Spanish and English, but the language didn’t matter. The players could interpret the passion, energy, and excitement. It was so clear to me that these coaches were the source of the difference, and it just blew me away. You could have put any group on the field with that staff and the results would have been the same. Obvious passion and competitive desire to play football dominated the scene.
I know that if I were a kid on that field, I would have loved this practice, as it reminded me of my first experiences in Pop Warner. In the first year I signed up to play football, I was ten years old and excited to get started in the local Pop Warner league. I don’t know if they still do it, but in those days when you signed up, they sent you a workout routine to get in shape for training camp. For the most part, I think it was something to give kids a sense of what football camp was going to be like; it wasn’t something that any of the kids I knew actually did. But at ten years old I took off and started running hills in my hometown to get in shape. No one told me that we were even going to be tested—I was just crazy about the idea that when the time came to be tested, I was going to be as ready as I possibly could. I never even thought twice about it. I knew that if I wanted to do really well when practice came, I had better start running. Because I understood the link between practicing and my goal of being ready to play, it quickly became something that I wanted to do for myself.
There I was, an NFL coach with many years of experience, and it was a youth program that made me realize how crucial the energy of the coaches was to create a great practice atmosphere. It was so obvious that coaches were the factor that dictated and controlled the energy of practice. It was there in the Bronx that I realized that coaches are ultimately responsible for maintaining a high level of intensity for every practice session. Once I realized it was our responsibility to establish the tone and energy of practice, I had a newfound vision about how important it
would be to motivate my next staff on a daily basis. I learned that if you want to have great practice sessions, you have to prepare your staff to have great days. That was exactly what I witnessed on the practice field that day in the Bronx. The passion and the excitement that coaches bring to the field will transfer directly to the players and will allow you to create a competitive practice environment, not to mention a fun one. I declared forevermore that in my coaching career, we would practice with more energy and more excitement than anyone else in football.
PART THREE
WIN FOREVER AT USC
10
GETTING THE JOB AT USC
By December 2000, I had gone through an enormous process of self-discovery and created a vision and philosophy. I was excited and ready to present my approach to any athletic director or owner who would listen. More important, I was as confident in myself as I had ever been.
My next team would be built around the goal of maximizing everyone’s potential. We would strive to “do things better than they have ever been done before” with competition as our central theme. With my thoughts down on paper in a new way, I felt more ready, more prepared, and more focused than I had ever been before. When my next coaching opportunity came along, I knew exactly how I intended to approach every aspect of building a new program. All that remained was to find a job where I could put it all to the test.
There were only a few job opportunities that year that truly interested me. One morning, my longtime friend and lawyer, Gary Uberstine, called. “Pete, the University of North Carolina has an opening. Do you want to go for it?”
I was fired up, so my response was an overwhelming yes, as UNC had a long-standing athletic tradition and was in a great location. After showing a strong interest in the job, we were told that their athletic department was not interested in offering an interview. Their reason was my lack of recent college coaching experience.
