Sideline Sessions

In the Season 2 finale, I speak with Aaron Makelky.

Aaron has served as a head high school football coach for 12 seasons in Wyoming, assistant for 4 seasons, and has also coached wrestling, basketball, and track. He is currently consulting with sports teams and elite individuals who want to learn mindset and mental conditioning skills.

Our conversation covers:
  • How to determine the culture you want to set and how that’s evolved for Aaron during his career
  • Who helps to build the culture?
  • How to develop leaders within the team
  • The challenges that make culture-building “easier said than done”
  • Developing mental toughness, leadership and other skills
Connect with Aaron:
About the host
Ross Romano is co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and also hosts The Authority Podcast. He began his career in the pro sports industry before becoming a leading communications, marketing, and management expert working with education companies. He is founder and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. 

Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn. Listen to The Authority: https://authoritypodcast.net. 

Creators & Guests

Host
Ross Romano
CEO, September Strategies. Co-founder, @BePodcastNet. #EquityAwards Program Chair. Advisor, comms & storytelling strategist for #k12, #nonprofit, #edtech orgs.
Guest
Aaron Makelky
Husband, Father, Leader, Teacher. I help college students use AI to raise their grades & lower their stress WITHOUT cheating!

What is Sideline Sessions?

Designed for coaches, parents and other stakeholders in the world of youth, scholastic, and amateur sports, this show brings you interviews with leaders at the highest levels of their respective sports.

Hear from coaches and performance experts with experience in the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Olympics, and NCAA Division-I, plus those who run elite youth programs, successful high school teams, and more. Hear about their motivations, philosophies, and strategies for success, and take away actionable insights to support the athletes in your life.

Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody, to another episode of Sideline Sessions here on the BE Podcast Network. It is a pleasure, as always, to have you with us. Thanks for being here for another conversation about [00:01:00] coaching. My guest today has coached a variety of different sports.

Both team and individual, and we're going to get into that. He is Aaron Makelky. Aaron has served as a head high school football coach for 12 seasons in the state of Wyoming. He also was an assistant football coach for four seasons and has also coached wrestling, basketball, and track. He's currently consulting with sports teams and elite individuals who want to learn mindset and mental conditioning skills.

In addition to his other coaching, Aaron, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Aaron Makelky: Thanks for having me, Ross.

Ross Romano: I decided because you've been involved with such a variety of sports and I do want to kind of draw out a lot of that experience here for our listeners that will sort of structure, talk a little bit. stuff first and then some things that are particular to that and then sort of organically transition into some of the individual things and you know, to give a little thought to our coaches, our parents, our other people who are listening.

So from a team perspective, culture building is important. In your [00:02:00] case, when you're thinking about it, like How do you determine, first of all, the culture you want to set, and you've been doing it for quite a while now has that evolved, how has that evolved as you've gotten more experience, been with more teams variety of compositions of those teams, right?

Aaron Makelky: That's a great question, Ross. So I would say it's evolved in the sense that over time I've narrowed my focus and tried to do less better. And I don't know if that follows necessarily my experience or the size of program, but in terms of being a head football coach, I started in a school of 150 to 200.

The team was maybe 40 kids, 45 in a good year. In the last five years, I was at Kelly Walsh, which is 2100 kids and 100 plus on the roster and my focus for culture went down to just, let's do these two things really well and let's start there. And until we can nail those, we're wasting our time on other things.

So, not sure if that's based on the overtime I [00:03:00] narrowed or the larger the program, but either way, that was what we did. And I read a great book. I'm a history teacher by trade, and there's a book called Steal My Soldier's Hearts. And this guy talks about taking over a combat infantry unit in Vietnam.

And it was, Until you can do these two things, well, the rest don't matter, and I thought that was a great philosophy that sports coaches and football teams could apply. So, that's we started with the outcome and then said what behaviors lead to that and what value is that based on, and we made what we call the culture blueprint.

And it was just a three by two grid, and that was the basis of everything that we did.

Ross Romano: How do you decide what those two things are?

Aaron Makelky: That's the million dollar question. In fact, I had a great exchange with a national big name. If I come in and speak, it's like 20 grand to get me their guy. And I wanted to bring him in, couldn't afford it. And I just said my big question with culture, do I bring that or do you get feedback from the people there and build it around community, kids and coaches?

And he said, do [00:04:00] you trust them to know what it takes to win and build a good culture? And I said, I think that's why they hired me is they trust me. Think I have the answer to that and he said well Then why would you entrust that to somebody else if you don't trust that they know what it looks like and that really changed my mind not that it's a dictatorship, but If those values aren't something that you, the head coach, and the leader of the team or organization eat, sleep, and breathe, you can't just change those to appease people.

So they evolved slightly over time, but 95 percent they stayed the same and just said this is what it takes to win. Service over self and a brotherhood. Raising standards like those things are universal and they might look different in different sports or in school versus on the football field But those are the foundation of everything we did so I thought that was a great advice and I followed what he said

Ross Romano: How do you go about Building that then. So once you've determined what you want it to look like who's involved in that, is it, do you know, get the other coaching, the rest of the [00:05:00] coaching staff on board, are there leaders within the team you know, the implementation and sustaining of that culture.

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Aaron Makelky: starts with the administration I think and Something I learned from a really good principal that I worked with was The things that got you the job will not keep you the job. Your resume and experience got you in there, but it's not gonna keep it. And his advice to me was, you need to go straight to your administration day one on the job and say, What are the non negotiables to stay here?

They'll have theirs. And then you share with them, this is the culture we're trying to build, and I have to know you support that, or maybe give me some guidance. And start there because you're not going to be able to enact that and execute on that if you're not supported by your administration. From there, definitely the coaching staff, and then the leadership, whatever leadership organ you have within your team, captains, a leadership council. four guys per grade on a football team, whatever that is. And then from [00:06:00] there, it's the parents because they have to know what their kids are going to get out of your program. So parent meeting is obvious, but through the in app communication, the website, putting it in the header of any newsletters you send out or schedules you send home and just copy and paste that everywhere.

so that everybody knows what it is. But I think administration down is a good way to approach that.

Ross Romano: So, yeah, I mean, that, that brings up an interesting thought because we haven't, I haven't really haven't discussed this with anyone at the high school level, but we had our Previous episode where we talked about this fit with coach Mike Jarvis, who coached basketball for more than 20 years at division one college level at a variety of programs.

And that was part of the lessons learned is when you determine kind of what you want your program to be, what. You want players to be learning and developing how you want to build [00:07:00] that program that culture, that approach to the character of the players you want to recruit, how you want to build it, and so on.

How are you identifying before you take a job, hopefully. But then once you do, if you have an administration who's on board with that, who sees eye to eye, who is in agreement with what you want, and particularly when you're talking about division one college level, yes, hopefully there are and should be things beyond wins and losses that matter, but Eventually, they're going to want to see some evidence of that, but it's okay.

I'm building my program and once we have the program in place by year four, we're going to have a sustainably strong program where we can consistently have success. on the field, on the [00:08:00] court academically and otherwise, right? Or I need to see year one that there's improvement in those things, and that's going to be different case by case.

At the high school level, again, it's not that there's no, no concern for the results and the standings but there's other things that matter. But how do you go about Having those conversations with administration to really discuss what are the goals of the program and what we're working toward and what those timelines look like and what evidence of success looks like beyond the black and white on paper stuff.

Aaron Makelky: Absolutely. And the more new you are to the community or school, the more important that is, because if you've been there, been an assistant the AD or the principal. You have a feel for that, or you know, what led to the change that you're coming in behind. [00:09:00] One example I'll just share, I think there's what administrators say, and the journalist gets out of them, or the parent meeting.

But then, there's often times a different angle behind closed doors. When I approached that with my head, football job, the first one that I had, I got it. I was probably the only one who wanted it. It was not a good job. And I was young and naive, but I went to the principal and I just, I took a notepad out and I just say if I'm going to talk to you, we're going to take notes.

And I told him, what are the things I need to do to show success? What's that look like to you and keep my job? And he gave me a list and I wrote them down and I tried to tactfully revisit those as often as I could, especially in an evaluation meeting. Like, hey, you said you were big on being a great communicator within the school.

Here's three ways that I work to do that. If I need to improve, let me know. But I'm referencing what you told me in July when you hired me. One of the things that my first [00:10:00] Boss told me was, I don't want you to get frustrated and quit. And I said, well, why would you expect that? And he goes, I don't think you guys will win a game for a couple of years.

And I just want you to be realistic and not think you're going to have success right away. Well, he never would have said that in a parent meeting or to the newspaper, but that was the first thing he told me when I took the job is I have really low expectations on the field. And I don't want you and your staff to get frustrated and leave if you don't win right away, which reinforces why that's an important conversation to have. behind closed doors because I wouldn't, I didn't think any principal in America would think that, but that was his perspective and in some ways he was right to think that.

Ross Romano: Right. And then there's, it's going to be a difference in the way you go about it. There's not always a ton of options, but there certainly could be some quicker fix approaches. Maybe you feel like you're cutting a corner here or there or compromising on some of the values you want to instill in the [00:11:00] program to have a little bit more success in the traditional metrics.

Early, but that might not build the the strong foundation for what you really want long term versus saying, okay we're at least in alignment here that there's not an expectation that we're going to win a lot right away. And if we can exceed those expectations, great, but if we don't, we at least understand, okay, we have.

the time to build what we want to build and we can determine for ourselves what we think it looks like when we're making progress versus when we don't. But when you're coming into a place that historically hasn't had a lot of on field success. It's going to take some time to establish that it's going to be [00:12:00] different, right?

For for young athletes to want to be a part of that team or that program to say, look, if I join and I put in the hard work, we have a chance at doing something here. I, it's not going to be four years of never winning or whatever the case may be, or it's worth it to put in that effort because I'm going to feel like I'm a part of a program that has a positive trajectory versus one that's just consistently spinning its wheels, lack of direction, etc.

And those things I don't know that every High schooler can necessarily. express that or, but they can feel it. They can tell the difference between something that's being built with intentionality and a plan and a vision and and something that's just kind of neglected.

Aaron Makelky: And I would add, I had a coach ask me this, [00:13:00] have you ever been a part of a staff that didn't do anything intentional with culture and they just ran drills and did plays? And because he had been on my staff, I think for three or four years, when he asked me this question, I said, yeah, I have. And he said, did you ever think maybe we'd win more games if we didn't spend any time on culture and leadership? And I just said, well, what would be the point of all the plays and the strategy and the lifting if that's all we ever did? Especially if you don't win, how would you get kids and parents to support your program? And he was just like, oh, well, I've only ever coached in places where that was a very intentional we had a leadership, Kind of course element built in and captains and to a young coach he thought, you know maybe that's all a waste of time and we could have lifted extra weights or ran extra laps during this time and it would have Got us a better on the field outcome And so there are people that see it that way But my responses and then what good was that program or experience for the kid the day they leave?

You know, if you didn't win a state championship or an all state award, then what did you [00:14:00] get out of it? And was it worth all the time and effort you put in?

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that fear of the opportunity cost, if we think there is one, or the fear of doing something differently, and if it doesn't maintain or improve the results, even in a place where you're not necessarily getting the results to begin with, right? But the thought of, well, this is how it's traditionally done and then it seems to get results, but.

You know, you don't necessarily know that you're going to get the same thing, but as you said there's other goals here, and if we focus only on drills and skills, and we still don't win, then we haven't really achieved anything. And is that worth it? Would it be worth it? What would make it worth it? I mean, [00:15:00] if we win two games instead of zero, would it be worth it?

If we win eight, would it be what makes it worthwhile to not focus on the things that we think do matter from a well rounded perspective, character building, the things that 99 percent of our student athletes are going to use as life skills beyond the time when they're playing a sport anymore But that's come up as a theme in the past here, particularly with regard to one of the challenges of doing things differently as a coach, apart from some of the approaches that have been more traditional, particularly things that we would now more likely define as You know, more toxic practices, right, than more abusive ways where most coaches nowadays might [00:16:00] say that's not the way to do it, but they may also have been coached that way when they played, they may have had team success, and then still have that thought in the back of their mind of, I want to do it differently, but what if I do it differently?

Differently, what if I coach what if I don't coach that hard or I don't. Ride the players hard and we don't do as well then what,

Aaron Makelky: That's a talk that go under your administration beforehand. Even things as little as how you warm up. Are you okay with a new approach to this or a new model or something the fans haven't seen? The obvious ones are your schemes, your offense. In a small town, I can tell you changing the decal on the helmet can cause a civil war if you don't have support of your administration.

And somebody goes, we've always had this logo or this [00:17:00] color or the mascot versus the school letter on there. And I learned some of those lessons the hard way, but because I think especially when administration makes a change in coaching, they might say, we're here to bring a new, fresh take and new ideas and, but behind closed doors they go, but don't rock the boat too much.

Well, they wouldn't say that publicly, but that's why you have to go have that talk with them before you. Run your first practice or install anything with your team.

Ross Romano: what from the players perspective, what are the needs and the challenges there is part of developing your culture and then having a culture that's sustains itself or that is sustainable is there developing leaders within the team? Are there challenges to. implementing a culture with high school student athletes and what they expect or want out of the program.

Through

Aaron Makelky: I don't know any businesses that turn over 25 percent of their [00:18:00] employees Every year on a certain day like sports coaches do, college and high school Especially and so your best leaders are usually the ones that you turn over every spring when they graduate. To me, that's why it's got to be a systematic approach.

It can't be haphazard, slap together, in the moment, what are we going to do? It has to be planned out and strategic, just like your offense, defense, or your conditioning protocols would be. And a challenge that I think some coaches have is they think, well, we always do the same thing every year. I have to change it up.

And then you remind yourself, you're going to have a different core of leaders every year. And in high school, at least, you're not usually going to have underclassmen that are true leaders on the varsity level. So on your varsity teams, especially at a big school, you almost completely turn over your roster every two years.

And you can feel like, oh, isn't that what we always do? But that kid was on the JV team or the freshman team and being consistent is very powerful because if you're not [00:19:00] consistent and you have that turnover or even changes in your coaching staff, it's hard to carry out anything if you don't stick to it for at least a couple of years.

And then you got to look at what time horizon am I judging the results by? Because your admin might say you need to win year one and you might say we need to be competing by year four. Like, I'm not looking at on the scoreboard wins right away, and then being clear with kids, the follow up to my principal who told me, don't get frustrated, you may not win for a couple of years, as I sat down with my offensive coordinator and said, so what are we going to do?

Like, if we're this bad and we're not going to win on the field, how do we show success? And we just made a list of things we could do to show improvement besides winning football games, and some of them were silly, but the hotel room, it's gonna be clean, the bus drivers are gonna be thanked, the teachers are gonna appreciate the attitude and timeliness of our kids, I don't care how talented you are, and we just made a list and said, well, let's do these things, and then we have to make sure kids [00:20:00] understand.

These are the prerequisites to winning. If you can't keep the hotel room from getting trashed, don't expect to compete for championships on the field. And then they knew like, that's why those things matter. And we focus on those. It's not taking away from on the field success. It's preemptive to those.

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Ross Romano: that experience, I mean, what did you learn about how you may have approached stepping into that job had the administration not given you the expectations first, right? I mean, other than historical performance, How would a coach going into a new situation figure out what they think their expectations are for that first year, those first couple of years until they've really had a chance to work with the team, which is [00:21:00] likely going to be it's going to be a little while after you, you've taken the job, right?

But you want to early on kind of have those expectations. But I guess. You want to manage it. You don't want to, you don't want to be intentionally sandbagging expectations, but at the same time most of the time right here, you can look at, okay, this is a program that has or has not historically had success.

So if I do a good job, I can, at least that's my baseline. But other than that how do you know? And when do you know?

Aaron Makelky: Well, I think you have to define what success is for yourself as a coach, because no matter what the community or the last four years records indicate. You're the ultimate judge of success or failure. And I think it has to be calibrated based on a lot of things. But one that I learned is there's a transition period. we started referring to the first year a staff takes over at a place as year zero and [00:22:00] said, it's all about the standards expectations. Here's how we line up to stretch. I mean, everything is different potentially. And until you get through that, You haven't really signaled who is going to be a part of your program versus who isn't, and it takes a year to establish those.

And then kids go, I want to be a part of that team. I see what they do. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself that values teamwork and leadership and culture and character. But then there's some who don't, and I've had that. The hardest in the world, I think, is when you take over and inherit a senior class because they go, well, for three years we did X and you want us to do Y.

That's not how we do things here. You know, who do you think you are? Why would you change that? And that's a huge challenge and there's no way you can have long term realistic assessment of success until you go through that process, which I think takes at least a year. So, we, our staff just called that year zero.

Ross Romano: Yeah. And I would, I mean, I would imagine in that case that's an area where you can even have more of a [00:23:00] challenge if you're new, say like coming in from the outside of a program and they're probably not all too common in case this happened, but if you're coming in to a program that has been successful and you're wanting to build it, The way that you want to build it as a coach, right?

And you have the players who have been there and have said, look, this is the way we do it and we've succeeded versus. If you're coming in with a senior class that hasn't been winning hasn't won, they're going to say, look, yeah, if you can give us a chance to have some success here before we graduate, great.

I mean, there still is that natural resistance, I think, to change but there also may be a perspective of, okay, well, what we've been doing clearly hasn't worked, and if we can get some results here Great. So that's it's challenging, of course, in all the obvious ways to turn around a program that, that hasn't been succeeding and make it successful but not necessarily [00:24:00] easy to step into one where they've gotten good enough results to feel that they justify resisting change.

Aaron Makelky: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the most underrated aspect of being intentional with your culture is it signals who should not or won't want to be a part of your program. And a good example of that, I had a senior, my first year new head coach coming in from the outside, and there was a weekly tradition that they had done and he wanted to do it.

And I said, no, and I didn't agree with that. I didn't value what it was about. It wasn't wrong or bad. It just wasn't something that I valued. And he just could not accept that. And he quit. And it was a battle at first, but then I realized, well, by defining, this is what we stand for. You're also signaling to people, if this is all you care about, don't join our program because we don't value that too.

Versus trying to be the circus who. Gets everybody to want to come and be happy and [00:25:00] belong and You do want people to if they meet your expectations, but you also want to send a signal to people that are, say, just about winning, and you're about leadership and winning, and they don't want to have a leadership lesson every two a day practice like we did in August.

Well, then this isn't the program for you, and you know that coming in because it's been made clear. And with parents, that can actually be a godsend, you know? Well, we didn't really want you a part of our program anyways, or your kid wouldn't have fit, so don't be upset. when that's not something that works out.

Ross Romano: So there sort of is an in between here when we talk about team sports and individual. There's sports that I guess I would categorize as quote unquote individual team sports, wrestling, track sports that at the high school level are, they're technically team competitions, but there's individuals competing in their events within that who are earning their own record, their own wins.[00:26:00]

How does that. change things particularly when we're talking about culture and these program building aspects. When there's more to it than just one team wins, one team loses certainly the level of collaboration required in a sport like football where it's nearly impossible unless you are there.

Just so much better than everybody else to have success without also having your teammates be successful, right? In any kind of meaningful way. I guess in, in those types of sports, how does that change the calculus?

Aaron Makelky: Most of my experience is in the team sport world, football specifically, but my next most experienced area would be wrestling. And I think wrestling is a good example of what you talked about. There's a team score and a team state title, but everybody who wrestled a match was out there by themselves. to me, the biggest difference is ask those kids, why are you in the program?

And [00:27:00] it's not that different than the team sport kids. Almost all of them say the camaraderie, the brotherhood, or the sisterhood, being a part of something bigger than myself. The duel where I got to go out under the spotlight and pin a guy from my rival school, and the whole gym cheered and we won. So, I think kids attitude towards the sport isn't really that different, but building leadership and culture is, because at the end of the day, it's there's not a play call.

You can't blame somebody for missing a block. You're the only one out there. The coach didn't miss a timeout because there aren't any in your sport. And so, I think viewing your teammates as, in wrestling, practice partners are just the person that's going to make you better every day. So you can go out and wrestle somebody that has a different color singlet on besides your buddy.

in your own wrestling room every day. And the leadership part is a lot more difficult in an [00:28:00] individual sport. But the foundation is the same. You have standards. This is what it takes to be successful here. Instead of 11 of us doing something in concert at the end of the day, you're having to go out on your own as a sprinter and track and run your best race.

But I don't think you were at practice by yourself ever. You know, same with a wrestler. You didn't ever go in the wrestling room by yourself and just drill on a dummy for a whole season. So you still are impacting other people's success because that's your teammate, your practice partner. They're determining the culture of your program.

Maybe say a wrestling team has 40 wrestlers. They're 1 40th of the culture

Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting because you, in some ways, you could see how for at least certain individuals it might make them less interested in the team if they are succeeding in their individual competitions and feel like, I don't really care [00:29:00] so much about the team result. I'm focused on my record, but for others it might make them even more invested in helping their teammates improve because they can't do anything about it once the competition starts, right?

If you're a basketball team, for example, you can more or less control who gets the shots. Or if you're a football team, you can kind of game plan putting it in certain players hands and things like that, to a certain extent, at least. But in a sport like wrestling, once that other guy's out there, you have to hope that he's ready to succeed, even in a sport that's, has some similar concepts like baseball, right?

When somebody else is batting, you can't, Do you have to hope that they're going to be successful and then that's going to help you win? And so that's all those things. Okay. How can we make each other better in practice? How can we work with each other to say, okay, because no matter how well I do individually we [00:30:00] can't possibly win unless.

other guys are also succeeding. And so it really once and hopefully if you have, I guess, a culture where there is the top concern for everyone is the success of the team. Then there's even there's gotta be even more emphasis put into it. So it's you know, presents its own interesting challenges, I'm sure.

Aaron Makelky: Yeah, and team sports are more of my bread and butter So I'm not an expert on the individual thing, but I do if you took a poll of track athletes wrestlers golfers and said what was your favorite thing about the experience of your sport there would be team and You know, teammate experience would be a huge part of that.

It's not just about your performance by yourself out there on the field.

Ross Romano: Yeah. And now you know, pure for purely individual things, that's [00:31:00] when you're training an athlete or working with them on their goals. I mean, it doesn't really matter what their sport is. Maybe their sport is a team sport, but you work with them individually. What are some of the areas you're focusing on there within or outside of the team?

fundamentals and skills associated with their sport.

Aaron Makelky: Yeah, absolutely. I was lucky in high school to be a part of a really good wrestling program, and we had an assistant coach who was obsessive about goals. And at least back in the 90s, early 2000s, I don't think too many wrestling teams had classroom meetings regularly, and we thought that was so dumb.

Like, why can't we go lift weights or wrestle? And he made us write down and revisit our goals every week and share them with groups. And I learned from an early age how important those are. And that's something that I have my athletes do, and I have the fortune of teaching a leadership class right now.

And that's what we start every Monday with is, we just call it a goal setting review, and they have little groups. [00:32:00] And we gave our athletes this year something called a success manual. And just said, if you want to be elite, Here are all the areas of your life that you have to excel in, and there are standards for academics, there's standards for nutrition, there's standards for sleep.

No high school kid is elite in all of those, but some of them say they want to be. We gave them those written out and in the format of gold, silver, and bronze level. So I want to be amazing at this, I want to be really good, or I want to be pretty good. And it's okay to say I just want to be pretty good at grades because I have straight D's.

So shoot for bronze and mixing those in with performance goals in football, that's often weight room maxes 40 times, something you can measure the first week when they come in and revisit throughout the season. And I think letting kids have some autonomy in how they set those and say, here's performance goals for the week.

Here is non performance goals. So whether that's [00:33:00] academic, attendance, nutrition, sleep, studying my playbook I'm going to do an hour every weeknight in my playbook and then putting those somewhere they see them and revisiting them with their group or their position area or their teammates is huge.

And we made, I have a little template of goal printouts that we use, one for football, one for class, and do it on different time horizons. So short term, intermediate, long term, high school, career, and just say keep those in front of you at all times.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Is there, what about something like mental toughness or mental other mental skills, mental conditioning, but are, can that be taught? You know, I think we typically think of it as, it's a natural trait or it's something that is, individual athlete just goes out and they develop it, right?

Or they're just motivated. But what if you're trying to teach it to somebody who isn't particularly [00:34:00] predisposed or isn't even asking to learn, and I guess, but they're asking to be successful and you think, well, this is something that would help you succeed,

Aaron Makelky: Yeah, absolutely. Most people think it can't be taught until they meet someone who does it well, like your guest Robert Castillo a couple weeks ago on your podcast talked about. Not all things are performances, but all things can be a performance.

Ross Romano: right?

Aaron Makelky: And I was fortunate to make the acquaintance of somebody who does that on an elite professional D1 level.

And he, out of the kindness of his heart, helped my team and my staff learn some of those skills. And that's where I realized it can be taught. You just have to have a framework and be intentional about it. And it's like creativity. You might look at a kid and say you're creative versus this kid's not, or we might feel like I have this but I'm not.

Well, have you practiced it? And they all go, well, how do you practice that? I thought you were just born that way. Well, yeah, it can be trained. I mean, focus is the best example. [00:35:00] I love to ask kids the first day in my class, how would you rate your attention span, A through F, and it's like D minus and down.

Ross Romano: Yeah.

Aaron Makelky: like, but that's just how it is. And I go, well, do you practice that? Well, you can't practice that. What do you mean? I just don't have a good attention span. I don't have a good memory. I'm not confident. Well, have you put any time towards improving that skill? No. Then don't expect to get better.

And it those can be taught. I've had a little experience I got to work with. a sport that I know nothing about and I'm terrible at, an alpine ski team where they just race down a mountain really fast. And that to me, that's got to be 90 plus percent mental on race day. And they go, okay, well, I have to perform for these two minutes, and it might be windy, the conditions might be this way, I might feel nervous, and what we did is just said, here's three fundamental skills that we can give you, and practice those in a classroom setting, and then at practice on the hill, and then game day, which [00:36:00] for them was the state meet in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They go, wow, I didn't know you could practice that. I didn't know that was a thing. I thought you can only do physical stuff like lift more weights or work on my ski technique. So it is for sure. And it makes a big difference once you put the time into making that a priority.

Ross Romano: Yeah. I mean, how are, how much can you introduce adversity and or challenging circumstances, all the. the things that you would need to utilize your mental skills your mental toughness to work through. When you only have so much time and opportunity to work with, right? I mean, often especially in the professional ranks for example, it's often taken as A given that athletes and teams have to have gone through failures maybe a number of [00:37:00] times before they learn how to win at the highest level but You don't have that much time, right?

You may not have you know, you have a certain number of games, but realistically what you have more of is practice time. And to the point you mentioned from Robert, I mean, everything can be the performance. You can, if done right, you can practice, like, It's a game. Put yourself in the conditions of fatigue and other things that would represent, okay, well, when you're in a real, when you're in the fourth quarter, you're going to be tired.

This is going to be happening. That's going to be happening. But yeah, how do you work through that in a way, in an environment that's in some ways artificial, right? But make it authentic to the point where those skills are durable and they kick in when I'm in a real stressful [00:38:00] situation.

Aaron Makelky: Yeah. Well, and I always think about the military. They don't go out with live rounds and shoot each other and say, now we're ready for battle because that wouldn't make any sense. But you do training exercises and make it as realistic as possible. However, at the end of the day, There's no substitute for the real thing.

A great example, defensive coordinator and good friend of mine who lives down the street, coach Aaron Papich, one day at practice, he was asking kids, he goes, how come you don't put eye black on for practice? And this is at football practice. And they go, well, it's not game day. And he goes, well, shouldn't you practice like it's game day?

And you could see they're just like, man, I got no answer for that. And he goes, so if you're going to wear eye black or wear certain gloves or your whatever accessory. That's cool. Wear whatever you want, but it should be on you Monday through Friday, not just on Fridays. And then I never thought of that.

You know, you don't have to be a sports psychologist to go, Oh, well, that kind of creates the atmosphere that you want kids to have when they're trying to perform their best. Why wouldn't you do that? That was an easy little thing, a little more extreme one that I've done, [00:39:00] especially with, I think kickers in football have the most mental job there is.

And My philosophy has always been the higher level of competition you go into, the more the mental separates you from your competition. There's no bad NFL. There might be some bad kickers in high school. One thing we did at a preseason scrimmage, you're not going to have the stands full. It's not going to feel the same as the first Friday night, but you can use elements of stress and introduce those intentionally.

And we had a school resource officer in his police vehicle come out onto the practice facility and park his car and flash his lights and his sirens while the kid was trying to kick field goals and extra points. And we didn't tell him we're going to do that. And you could tell, like, instant panic.

What? There's a cop in here? Like, no, just kick. Come on. And it sounds kind of cruel, but there's always little elements of that where you just add stress. It may not be the full stand on a Friday night. but in some ways you can add more [00:40:00] unexpected stress, loud music you can have kids do some kind of a conditioning to raise their heart rate before they have to make a decision or do a drill to simulate that in a game.

Most coaches don't do that intentionally until you work with somebody who shows you how to do that.

Ross Romano: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a, and that's a perfect job that represents when they, when you say you can't think you have to just do the more you think about it, the more it's not going to work out. You have to be able to focus on the task at hand and repeat with consistency your mechanics and what you need to do.

And there's nothing that is exactly like when you really know, okay, this is make or break. This this is the difference between a win and a loss, but anything that, that introduces you to performing under stress is a necessity. Aaron, it's been a great conversation. What what [00:41:00] else are you working on?

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Aaron Makelky: Yeah, so my website is AaronMcKelkey. com, A A R O N M A K E L K Y. I teach a leadership class. at our public high school and met a guy named Jethro, who probably a lot better than me, who said, why do you only teach it to the kids in your physical classroom? To which all normal teachers go, what do you mean?

That's the only way to teach. And he said, why don't you start a podcast and kind of broadcast that to the world? And that's been a project of ours. So we started the McKelkey Leadership Academy and just share some things we have guests on. We've had about 40 different guest speakers in that class. From army rangers, business leaders, school leaders. DEA Agent, Motivational Speakers, and so now we record those and then I kinda go on a solo style every once in a while. [00:42:00] And on social media, I didn't have social media until a couple months ago, and my wife insisted that I get TikTok, and I was like, TikTok is dumb, it's kids doing dances, no way.

And my students have been teaching me how to do TikTok. And for part of the business stuff that I'm doing, I know it's important. And the seventh video that I'd ever made, I had no idea what I was doing. It's like somewhere between nine and 10 million views. and a couple others in the tens of thousands.

And so if of the social medias that have content and followers and have gotten traction on TikTok, it's just at Aaron Mikielke, A A R O N M A K E L K Y. But also on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. I'm not very good at Instagram and Facebook, but I'm going to learn those this summer. And I'm an identical twin.

So a cool thing that I've done on TikTok live. My identical twin who's a principal and I'm a teacher kind of in neighboring towns. We have a live show called Twin Talk and go [00:43:00] on there and trying to get him to loosen up a little bit because he's a crusty old principal. That's very uptight, you know?

Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, we will link to that below, a link to Aaron's website, we'll link to the social media, the TikTok, the All the channels. LinkedIn. For those of you who want to check that out, check out some of those conversations, those resources if it's of use to you, you will know where to find it.

Also if you have not already, if you're new to the show, or if you've been here with us. before, and you haven't yet subscribed, please do subscribe to Sideline Sessions. We really appreciate ratings and reviews. If you find the show valuable, that really helps more coaches, parents, others involved in sports to find out about it as well.

So, if you have a moment, we really would appreciate those ratings. But stay tuned for the rest of our episodes coming up, or visit bpodcast. network to learn about all of our other podcasts. 40 shows in the network. If you're a school leader, a teacher, a parent you know, if you have any role related to [00:44:00] education, there's more content there for you as well.

Aaron, thanks so much for being on the show.

Aaron Makelky: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Ross. I appreciate it.