Ep 163 How You Finish Is the Part They Actually Remember

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This episode is for the fall coaches. Soccer, volleyball, cross country, football, tennis. You are two or three weeks from the end, some chasing a conference title, some chasing a winning record, and some, honestly, just chasing the finish line. Coach Collins argues that this stretch is the part of the year most of us coach the worst.

The reason is simple. By mid October coaches are tired. The energy from August is gone, and the mind has already drifted to next year, to who is graduating, to the meeting with the athletic director, to the other sport that starts in three weeks. Players feel every bit of that, and a coach who has mentally moved on teaches his team that the season stopped mattering.

The core idea is that how you finish is what they remember. Nobody remembers the middle of September. Players remember the last two weeks and the last conversation, and that is what they carry out the door and repeat to the younger kids all winter.

Coach Collins offers four ways to finish on purpose. Give the team something to chase that is not the record, because a team with nothing to chase quits quietly in the third quarter rather than loudly. Get to the seniors before the last day instead of waiting for the banquet, and tell each one not what his stats were but what is different about the program because he walked through it. Finish the standards rather than letting the late kid, the loafing rep, and the sloppy drill slide, because a standard dropped in the last two weeks is one you will spend all next August rebuilding, and kids never forget which rules had an expiration date. And protect the ending, because if the last game goes badly, that locker room is a leadership moment, not a venting moment. Correct on Monday. Care on Friday.

The episode closes with three things to do this week: name something worth chasing for the last two weeks, talk to every senior individually before it ends, and pick the one standard you refuse to let slide on the way out. Every season ends, and a coach gets no say in that. What he does get a say in is whether it ends well, because a team that finishes well becomes a program that starts well.
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