Summer reading with Santa Clara, by Asst. Jesse Pruitt

Every week our coaching staff, like most, discusses ways to give our team a competitive edge both physically and mentally when facing adverse situations. Our players are faced with some form of adversity on a daily basis.  It may be in the classroom preparing for a midterm, or on the court trying to get three stops in a row.  How you handle adversity individually and collectively can directly affect a team’s success.

Coming off an up and down season in 2012, along with the NCAA rule changes that encouraged players to stay on campus during the summer, Coach Keating and our staff decided it would be a great idea for our players to immerse themselves in a Summer Reading assignment.  We needed something that was going to help keep our team energized, communicating efficiently and thinking positive during the peaks and valleys of a college basketball season.

After a few discussions our staff decided the team was going to read Jon Gordon’s “The Energy Bus”.  We had heard accounts of other successful teams and organizations reading this book so we thought we’d give it a shot to hopefully help improve our mental approach to training and competition. As a staff we realized that if this positive thinking model was going to work we had to have total buy-in from everyone involved.  Therefore, we ordered 32 copies and checked out a book to everyone in our program, from our senior sport administrator to the freshman manager.  Everyone that was going to be on our bus that season had to read the book.   In the months leading up to the first game we met once a week to discuss lessons in the book.  The weekly symposium turned out to be a great exercise to get our players to communicate with one another, a challenge that most teams face early in the year.  Coach Keating would pose a question, but the players would lead the discussion.  We learned very quickly that Jon Gordon’s book had many useful tools to help overcome adversity and reinforce positive thinking:

1. Be a catalyst to turn something negative into a positive and a new opportunity
2. Optimism & staying positive is a Competitive Advantage
3. Emotions are contagious both positive and negative
4. Talk to yourself instead of listening to yourself
5. Get rid of the Energy VAMPIRES!
   – None in the locker room, nothing on the floor, nothing outside the arena
   – Win in the locker room first, on the floor second.

One of the great lessons we took from the Energy Bus was the One Word concept.  One word that would help inspire you to approach each and every day with a little bit more passion and purpose. Our players chose words such as FOCUS, LEGACY, LOVE and CONSISTENCY. Our team was able to keep the vision alive throughout the season by having their “One Word” flash across the video board in our arena throughout practice.

Building off last year’s momentum we had this year’s incoming class read the Energy Bus also. The week before we started preseason conditioning, Coach Keating assigned three people to each one of the 10 Energy Bus rules, and that group had to teach their rule to the entire team using any means they wanted.

We had everything from a rapping 7-footer accompanied by a beat boxing strength coach encouraging us to Love Your Passengers (Rule #8); to a junior shooting guard dressed up as a vampire being told by our sports information director that there are NO ENERGY VAMPIRES ALLOWED (Rule #6).

In addition to keeping the positive energy bus alive, everyone in the program this summer was issued a copy of Jay Bilas’ book “Toughness”.  Each one of our 22 practices Coach Keating has read a Toughness rule to the team, and we use that as our Thought of the Day to go along with our words that flash on the screen throughout practice.  Everyday each member of our program has the ability and freedom to be a catalyst to turn something negative into a positive and a new opportunity.

Best of luck to all the teams around the country beginning their journey this month!

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