Building Positive Student-Athlete Experiences with Will Kloefkorn

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molitor Group, Ed Molitor. Now, we have had some amazing conversations with previous guests wrapped around centered on related to the athletics at business brand and what it represents. And what it represents is this. It is a leadership mindset that the traits and behaviors of high performing teams, elite athletes slash performers and high impact coaches are key to your success in business. And that is exactly why I'm so fired up. To be joined by today's special guest, Will Klepporn, Vice President of Sales at Xcel Institute. Because he and his team there live and breathe this brand every single day as they develop coaching leaders throughout the business and now sports world. You might be saying to yourself, excel Institute.

We've talked about them on the Athletics of Business podcast before and you're correct. On episode 119, were joined, very fortunate to be joined by the founder and CEO Bill Ekstrom, who also authored the book the Coaching Effect. And I could not encourage you enough to go out and pick up a copy of the book and don't just read it. This is one of those books you want to study. It would behoove you to study this book because it'll help take you as a leader and your team to a whole other level. Now, after Bill and I recorded episode 119, we stayed online and we talked for a bit. And at the end of that conversation said, ed, I need to introduce you to my vice president of sales, Will.

You two are so aligned, you'll connect, you'll have a great conversation and who knows where that will go. Well, where, when is this. Here we are in episode. What is it? 146, 147. And I'm now interviewing Will and I'm sharing with you the incredible work they're now doing on the sports side. And here's what they're doing. They team up with athletic directors and coaches to build a more positive student athlete experience. And how do they do that? Just like their business side. Through the research of more than. Get this. Over 150,000 interactions between coaches and student athletes, they've uncovered six coaching themes that are instrumental to improving the student athlete experience. Based on their definition. This is where it gets really cool because they don't just share the data with you. It's not an academic thing.

They share the how to, and they're so passionate and purposeful about it. But based on their definition, these themes help measure the athletic programs that they're working with for further development. In other words, their assessment is used as a tool for growth, not a weapon. Okay, and what do I mean by that? Oftentimes, especially in college, these assessment surveys given to the athletes are used against the coach to show what he or she is not doing well, what they're not doing. Right. These are tools to help you grow and take your team and their experience to the next level. But this is really cool. Before we get into the conversation, I want to share this with you. Here are the six themes. Connection, psychological safety, structure, skill development, communication, and challenge. There's this and there's so much more inside this conversation.

You're going to love, Will. I mean, just an incredible human being doing amazing work. Enjoy the conversation. Will, thank you so much for joining us today on the Athletics of Business podcast. I am fired up to have you join us. It's going to be a great conversation.

Hey, man, we've had enough conversations to. This is just the next logical step was to be on the podcast.

Seriously, how many times have we been on a zoom call and we said we should have just hit record and done the podcast today?

Too many times, but here we are.

Yeah. Seth, forgive the voice. This is my basketball coaching voice. And I apologize. A little rough this morning. I had a good one last night. Packed house. I might have raised my voice a few times, but hopefully I can articulate the questions properly for you. So I filled the listener in on your journey a little bit on the introduction. I don't feel like I did it justice at all. Can you just walk us through where you've been, what you've done, what has impacted you? Right, so what were some of the crucibles? What were some of the moments in your life that helped shape you, that got you to where you are with Excel Institute in Excel Sports now?

Well, how much time you got, Ed?

We got lots of time. Hey, like you said, I'm driving this bus. I call the shots here. We got all the time that you want.

It's a loaded question because it's layered, right? I mean, you can go right to the start of starting with Excel Institute in 2008 and how that got to Excel Sports. But if I step all the way back in terms of what allowed me to accept that job back in the mid-2000s, you know, growing up, I Was undersized. Kid loved athletics, was pretty good at a lot of things, but not great really at anything except for field and baseball. Played and watched sports my entire life. Just it's the one thing that allows me to be in flow. And that's still true today. And so when I was approached by our CEO who you've had on the podcast, Bill Ekstrom in 2008, said, Hey, I have this idea.

I'm looking to start a business that focuses on the impact of the coach or of the leader and the impact that they have on performance. Said, well, tell me more. He said, well, in sales world, which I was in at the time, all the resources go to the salespeople, but the performance of those teams are a reflection of how they're coached by the leaders, by the managers, and there's nothing for those folks. And that really resonated with me because I've been a part of teams that on paper had no business being as good as they were, and vice versa, right? And you see that all the time in the athletics world. And so I said, hell yeah, you know, I'll get involved with that because that speaks to me. And I'd had some my own personal experience that really lended itself to that.

And so, you know, we began the Excel Institute with a singular idea of let's get enough people who believe what we believe, which is the performance of a team is a reflection of a coach, and let's provide them resources and measurement and opportunities for growth. And we did that ad successfully for many years, and just along that journey met a lot of wonderful coaches, Olympic psychologists, thought leaders in the space of coaching. And they said, listen, you need to bring this idea to athletics. So we did, and we started to focus group that out worked really well here in the state of Nebraska. Or, long story short, Covid hit put it on hold. And in July, went full forward with it.

We're now In, I think, 11 different states, 27 different schools, and it's growing like wildfire because, as you know, the leadership role focuses almost exclusively on X's and O's and on the players. But who's helping the coaches in those intangibles, right? When you think about victory, the things that soft, skills that are actually really hard, skills that drive performance. So we got a business line, we got an athletics line, we got an education line, but they're all the same. It's how do you measure and improve the impact that the coach or the teacher or the leader is having on those that roll into them?

Well, and not just that. How do you measure the progress? Right. How do you measure the success in the areas of growth as you're doing the work? It's funny. And I'll take the listener back. In case you didn't listen to Bill Ekstrom's podcast, we'll post it in the show notes. It was an incredible conversation and the way I was fortunate to get connected with Bill and then with you was I read the book, I was writing some content and I was looking for a stat on something and all of a sudden the coaching effect book popped up and. Or an article that included something from the coaching effect. So I pulled up the book, I read the overview, I read Bill's background, I read Sarah's background and I'm like, oh my God.

I ordered the book right away and I don't do this very often, but I read the book in a day and then I read the book in another day and I outlined it and I put my sticky notes in it and I wrote in it and I typed notes up from it. And there's so much alignment. And to go way back, if you haven't been listening to the podcast for a long time, the athletics of business, where the whole brand came from, was that the traits and behaviors of performing teams, elite athletes and high impact coaches are key to your success in business. So what you folks do is so spot on. And it's not, you know, you're not doing it to be cute, right? It's not doing it all because it sounds neat. No, it's the reality of the situation.

And you and I both agree and it's in the book. Coaches are the key to performance and growth. And notice, we didn't say managers, we didn't say division. I mean coaches, coaching leaders are the key to performance and growth. And how does that show up? Like, how are you able to take that from the education in the business to. And throw that into excel sports?

Well, it's interesting because when we started in 08, the word coaching and business basically didn't exist. That was an evolution. And part of that evolution that's happened is, you know, it used to be back in like Bobby Knight era, right? Authoritative leadership was way more accepted. And now, you know, these kids, your kids, my kids, they grow up and coaching is an expectation, but not only that, they have infinite amount of choices, right? So coach to teach the game, the X's and O's, the skills. It's not that's not important, it's still critical. But connection, psychological safety, the environment, That a coach creates has everything to do with how much those kids allow the coach in now versus in the past. Right. And so that's a fundamental shift that has occurred.

And so the business world is now just catching up to this to realize if we want to keep and retain and hire good people, we've always said the manager or the leader that they report into is critical. But now what our advantage is, and probably what you experienced when you read the book and reread it, what we hear is, it's profound in its simplicity. But our job is to bring data and research and take bias and opinion out of it. To be able to say, listen, in a coaching world, for example, wins and losses, yes, you want to care about that, but. But you also want to care about what's the coach doing to create an environment that allows peak performance teams. So you can take a question that seems extremely soft.

Like, my coach makes practice fun, but if you're falling behind there, you can only crack the whip on people so long before it takes a toll. So when you look at it and you correlate it over time to high performing teams, it's like, hey, you might want to be intentional about injecting some fun into practice, which there's a million ways to do it. But. But it's not a soft skill. It's actually something that team builds well.

And here's the thing you and I talk about all the time. Psychological safety doesn't mean soft and fun and hard work. They do not have to be mutually exclusive. We're not saying goofy. We're not saying, like for basketball, we're not saying play knockout, but make practice enjoyable, make working hard and achieving something and feeling progress and recognizing the progress and the process itself, make it fun.

We live in a binary world where everybody likes to make things black and white, right? So that's why that happens. But when you, if you can put it into context, which people, everybody can relate to, they can change the paradigm with which they see it. So you can take something like challenge. Hey, my ability to challenge, well, that's not soft. But then you start to look and correlate different behaviors like connection, well, that can be perceived as a soft skill. But if you tell a simple story, like, you know, hey, an acquaintance walks up to you on the street, Ed, and says, hey, I'm moving this weekend. You want to help me out. You're a busy guy. You got probably a million different excuses in your pocket that you can pull out to not help that guy, right?

But a good Buddy of yours, a friend of yours comes up and says, listen, in a pinch, I need some help moving this weekend. Let's get a six pack and go do it. You're there in a heartbeat. And what, why? What's the difference? It's simply the relationship that you have with that person. You probably are just as busy, but you're going to make time because you have a connection.

Right.

And that's why, you know, it's hard, because it's a difficult thing to measure, but we hear, I'll run through a wall for that coach. That's why. It's because it's connection. It's not because they taught me how to pivot and dribble and all those other things that come along with the skill development. That's also important, too. Right.

Well. And I think that's what makes it all so powerful, what you're doing with Excel Sports. Because we've talked for years like some of the most influential, impactful people in my life. In your life and many lives are there coaches even all the way back to their youth sports?

A hundred percent.

Because they saw more in us than we saw in ourselves. And they found a way to make us confident. Like they put us in situations where we had to earn that confidence. It wasn't something that was given to us. People will say sometimes, well, that coach gave me confidence. No, you earned the confidence. He gave you the situation in practice or any game, or he created an opportunity, helped create an opportunity for you to earn that confidence. And I think now that we see that in business, it's huge. And it comes down to this. And this is a word I love. And I want to make sure that we touch on it early in the conversation. Cause I've often talked a lot with leaders about understanding the power of discretionary thinking of their people. Right.

Their ability to choose what they're going to think in certain times. But what this does is it drives a discretionary effort in the right direction. Can you talk about how you do that in Excel Sports?

Yeah. I mean, maybe Bill touched on this. I can't remember going back that far. But if you have a team, whether or not that team has a coach, they're going to show up and they're going to play.

Right.

So the value of that coach in business, it's simple. The economic value of that coach is how much more does this team perform because I'm their coach. And what goes into that? There's disciplines, there's structure, there's processes and game plans and all that other stuff, but there's other intangibles too. So you want to be able to measure, well, how good am I at driving connection, how good I am I at creating site safety or structure or communication?

Right.

The coach, everything the coach does or perhaps doesn't do plays a role in the environment that they're creating that allows success or lack thereof. And you know what's interesting is that for the longest time on the business side, CEOs would you ask them a simple question like, you know, do you believe the performance of your team is a reflection of how well your managers are coaching? And they would all violently agree. And you say, okay, well, what are you doing about it? And then you just hear crickets. Well, the whole thing changed when you were able to go back and put data down and say, listen, for example, you have a management team of 20 and they're all responsible for driving sales. But look at the work we've been doing over the last two years.

Your managers that are doing, say, one to one meetings every two weeks at an 85% clip, and their coaching scores are in the 90th percentile. When measured on all these other areas, they're 120% to goal. But when you fall behind below 70% and you have a coaching score of less than 80, you're at 90% of goal. So do you have a sales issue or do you have a coaching issue?

Right.

And it's the same concept that when you pull it into sports, because there are measurable behaviors and activities that coach is doing or not doing, where when you assess it through the eye, and that's a superpower, you have a captive team. So if you know what you're measuring, you can go to them and get their perception. And that's all that matters anyways, because it's their emotion that's driving behavior. Coaching has for way too long been this ambiguous, ethereal thing that we know matters because we pay them through the moon to get results, but nobody's distilled it down into what are some actionable incremental things you can do as a coach that are specific to you, that are going to yield better results.

Well, it's the how to. We tell people all the time. And then you get this with the keynotes and things, and you get the sunburn, the seminar sunburn. We tell you all the time what you need to do, but where's the opportunity to do something? And then how do you go about doing that? That leads me to a quote I have written on my whiteboard. From you. Okay. And I look at it every night and I love this. You said it just in the middle of a conversation. I wrote it down. It says, we do what we know and we can't do what we don't know. So until we know better, we can't do better. Take me through that.

Well, I think that if you said, what's the one important skill set that leaders need or that I need. And it's self awareness. And I don't think that's a skill that gets talked about or taught, you know. And so that's a big deal. And so I don't know if you want to get into the world of. I'm kind of a science nerd by default, which is, I love learning about quantum physics and the power of the mind and all that kind of good stuff. And you start to read enough about this and what you realize is that, you know, 95% of our program is subconscious. And so if I'm not aware of those subconscious behaviors or limiting thoughts or limiting beliefs that I'm instilling in people, then how do I know where to change? Right? And you see this all the time.

It's like on the excel sports side, I mean, we work with lots of different high performing coaches in lower level colleges and high school athletics. And sometimes you'll go through rapport with somebody who is a great coach and they score a 71% on connection. And their response like, how does my kids not know I care deeply? How do they not know? But then the self awareness and the self identification becomes. Well, they don't. But unless I saw that, it's not real to me. And then at that point that begins your sink or swim journey. Because you either want to let ego and pride and behavior just stop and just, hey, screw them. I'm going to keep doing it the way I'm doing.

Or if you are self aware and you want to do better, there's incremental things that you can do to make that score of 71 to an 85. And that's what I mean by that quote. It's all of us fall into the bucket of having habits that don't serve us. And lots of times those are hidden. But if they, if you can bring them to the surface and become aware of them, then you can do something about it.

Well, and that's what makes what you do and your tools so powerful, right? Because all of a sudden you increase that. I firmly believe that self awareness isn't a. I Believe it's the competitive advantage and everything you do. And I believe you need to get reps and you gotta keep getting reps and increase your self awareness to get to that 95% of performance. Being driven by the subconscious. It's funny. And as you're talking, I was sitting here thinking, you know, I've had four conversations with clients and potential clients to be clients. And it's funny how when we go through challenging times and people start getting worried about budgets and money, one of the first things that they will cut though is the leadership development piece.

Even though they'll say, yeah, I know it's valuable, okay, I understand that it's going to help us, but it's one of the first things. So what are some of the pushbacks that you've seen? Forget the monetarily, okay, but like what are some of the pushbacks people have seen? Like, okay, I get it makes sense, but it's not.

For me the simplest one is just, it's change, right? Especially change in established teams where it doesn't matter if it's leadership development or you know, a different type of coffee that's going to be delivered on Friday. It's like we're going to be hell bent against doing things differently. And that's just inherent human behavior that's natural across the board. You know, specific to leadership development. A lot of it, what it comes back to is not having the right data or the right metrics, right? And so CEOs for example, and CFOs and people in the C suite, right, Wrong or indifferent, they're looking at spreadsheets all day long and they're making decisions that are based on a ledger. And that's not wrong. It's good business practice.

But if you don't have the right data and the right metrics that help you understand well then you might make a decision like cutting leadership development, which is going to make those numbers on the ledger eventually, if not in the short term, but certainly the long term worse. Right. And that's where it becomes super short sighted is when you look at it like that. And it's one of my favorite stories that we tell, went into it was C suite client that we had worked with for a couple of years, stories actually outlined in the book and the data that we had basically showed two thirds of your managers over a two year period increase their coaching frequency and quality by, I can't remember the exact number, 17% and 12% quality and year over year they outperformed by 17% versus their goal salespeople. Right.

The good thing about sales is very much comparable to athletics because it's therefore you want metrics, everything, outcomes. But then you have 30 year managers who barely increase their frequency and their quality didn't go up at all. Which means one or two things. Either they didn't have the skill or they didn't have the desire to be a coach. And that's not all bad. That doesn't make them a bad person. It just means you can't be responsible for the livelihood or performance of seven or 10 other individuals that report into you. Go be a salesperson yourself. But what happened is year over year, their performance went back 9%, they decreased. And we had fun banter about this leading up to the event to say, do you tell the executive team that you're paying a third of your managers to take performance backwards?

Which ultimately we did and they ended up loving. But that's a hard pill to swallow, right? You have to have some humility and some desire to do things differently to even allow yourself to hear that message. Yeah, sometimes what I believe this is just years of experience. Sometimes I think what happens when they drop leadership development or that type of programming is, listen, I know it's the devil, but it's the devil we know. And so we're just going to roll.

With it, you know, and that's what I love about Excel sports is because the beautiful thing about sports is this is what we crave. This is we want to grow, we want to be developed, we want to continue to get better and we want to have the coaches in the right place that are going to be the ones that help the student athletes do that. And when you bring this to, let's say it's an athletic director, okay, and you bring this program and you show the fact that, hey, here's the data, here's the numbers, here's the statistics, here's how we can help you because, and you and I have talked a lot about this. Too often assessments that we give student athletes is to show what the coach is doing wrong.

You and I identify gaps to see areas of growth and it double down on areas of strength. But too often it's a negative vantage point where these assessments and surveys are given. Can you talk about, if you're able to, with your client confidentiality, share a couple stories about the excitement on the sports end and when you bring that to them and they see the results, and they see the potential results and they see what it does. Can you talk into that a little bit?

Well, so one of the things that we hear and see all the time is almost all survey work is evaluative in nature. And to your point, it's kind of like gotcha, right? And to some degree you get that because there's, you hear a lot of the stories that get coverage are bad stuff that's happening. You want to be able to sniff that out. But our whole design is this isn't evaluation, this is developmental. This is just opportunities for your growth. And it's really interesting because here's the difference between business and I'll include, when I say business, I'll include D1. Even though we haven't gone down this road.

But like big athletics versus high school athletics, there's an environment and a purity that exists that allows ads to have a much better long term macro lens than is afforded to like an SVP of sales, for example. And so you can say all the right words in business reality is average tenure of a senior sales leader, for example, is 19 months. So it makes sense why they try to whip the number out of people and they leave a path of destruction in the wake, just trying to get to wins and losses. But you take that into high school athletics. And a lot of these athletic directors, for example, they were coaches, they were teachers. They, through serendipity or by design, they ended up in this athletic role.

And now they have that challenge of I'm one step removed and I got 25 to 45 coaches underneath me. I know my impact on the student athlete experience is to work through those 20 or 45 coaches or however many I have.

Right.

And so the data, to answer your question specifically, it gives them a compass, a clear line of sight into how they can help the collective program, but also the individual coaches, because someone who's, you know, a JV girls basketball coach who's been doing it for two months versus the varsity girls coach who's been doing it for 25 years, their development and their opportunities for growth are going to be very different.

Right.

So you have to be able to delineate that and provide a growth picture for that ad.

Right.

Because then what it becomes is to use maybe a poor analogy or maybe a good one, I don't know if you want to grow or go anywhere. Like if you hop in your car right now and you drive down to Texas, what's the first thing you're doing?

For me, I'm getting barbecue.

Well, you get a barbecue down there when you eat how are you going to get there? How are you going to get there?

Right, right. Well, you got to map it out. Yeah. You have to figure out where you're going to go.

You're going to go to your Apple Roads or Maps or whatever it is, you plug it in, you say, hey, this is. I'm going to go there. And it's going to take you on a path that gets you to your destination. Well, if you can't define where you're at today and where you're going, how do you set your GPS on your professional development plan? Right. That's the value.

And how do you make adjustments?

Exactly. And how do you know, your road to doubling down on strengths and how you want to improve in those areas versus your road to improving on weaknesses? Probably going to be a different vehicle and a different level of intentionality because it's just different.

Something just popped in my head and tell me if I'm off on this, but this tool that you have, the resources, the program that you have, it gives athletic directors, okay? And we're talking specifically excel sports, but it does the same thing for sales leaders, upper management. It gives the athletic directors the opportunity to be the strength coach of their coaches. In other words, I hired you because.

I believe in you.

I hired you because I believed you were the right woman or man for this position. And it's my job to put you in the best position to be successful. And it's my commitment to you that I'm going to provide the resources to do that. And this, it's not a, hey, man, you're awful at this. Come on. No, that's not it. It's like, hey, look at this. This is really cool. You go back to the coach, you talked about the connection. He didn't understand his players, didn't get how much he cared. It's not on them, it's on him. And there's. He might be the most sincere, passionate, caring, empathetic, prepared, knowledgeable coach there is, but there's something they're missing.

And once he figures that out through your program, it's going to tap into his strengths and it's going to drive a connection that's just completely unshakable and drive the trust. I mean, that's what I love about this. It's like, there's something there. As the athletic director, there's something there. I believe in you. Here. Go have fun with it. Whereas a strength coach says, listen, you know, and it's great. I mean, you're really strong in this Area. Let's work in this and let's get you complete. Let's get your body imbalance. Right.

Well, a hundred percent. I don't know if you ever follow or listen to any like Jocko Willinks stuff were talking about.

Absolutely.

Before we started here, that idea of extreme ownership through self awareness is incredibly important. You know, and the folks we work on the business side are great because they walk the talk. It doesn't matter if it's sales or otherwise. It's, hey, we believe we have a developmental bias. And my role as a senior leader is to develop my managers. Right. On the sports side, so many of these ads are teachers. They're developers by nature, and so much of their job historically has been transactional. Right. It's, hey, we've got to get all the logistics, got to get the officials, got to get the buses, got to make sure all of this stuff is done. But, man, what I'm really passionate about is working with my coaches and having an impact and helping them help their students to create this wonderful student athlete experience.

And what's so refreshing to me, having done this now for a while is you'll talk to these ads and you can see it in their eyes that they're competitive, like they want to win. It doesn't matter the program, they want to win. That's sports, right? It's front and center. But then they'll step back and they'll say, you know what? I won two state titles as a football coach in my previous life. That pales in comparison to when a student walks back in and says, hey, coach, you taught me this when I was ready to give up. Guess what? I'm now a coach myself. I got a family of three, and I instill those same lessons. The downstream impact of what an ad has the opportunity to do through coaches is immense.

And it's the stuff that, you know, you watch the SBS or whatever and you'll hear these great stories. And the reason the hair stands on your arm is because, you know, that's resonance. That's what life's all about. And they see it from that macro lens. So when I talk about, like, a lot of these ads are jazzed up, they're excited about this work is because while they care about how their varsity programs do on the score sheet, they're hoping that they're helping their kids win at life. And that sounds cliche, but it's not. It's true.

It's not. And that's what makes it all so powerful. And you can do that in the business world as well. I mean, you do that in the business world as well. Right. You know, it's funny is I've been around, you know, I was fortunate growing up a coach's son because I. That's one of the things that resonated with me, right. Was the players. I would come back to my dad and share stories with him and his staff like that. So I kind of had that. But as a younger coach, I still didn't get it. I was so caught up in the wins and losses and signing the right players and making sure they're at weights, they're at class, they were doing what they're supposed to be doing. And I never understood until.

I shouldn't say never understood, but I didn't realize that at that moment, even though I was only a few years, four years, five years separated as a young coach, I was still having an impact on them. What you folks do allows the newer coaches to really jump into the fact that, hey, I can do this. They're giving me a tool that many people before me did not have and I can start accelerating the impact I have on these student athletes at an earlier age.

Yeah, a hundred percent. So you want to ever get emotional, you should read the open box comments on some of these questions about the impact that these coaches are having. You know, not always great. Sometimes it's the other way. But that's information in and of itself too. Right, Right. That can change an entire trajectory.

Right.

But you know, to your point, I think that coaching or otherwise, I think lots of times we underestimate as human beings the impact that we have on other people. Right. We're social animals. I always admired young coaches or young people who somehow seem to be able to have wisdom without having to go through the trial and error to be able to obtain wisdom. Right, right. And so it's like, you know, I don't know how you old you are, but I'm about to turn 40 here in April. And I know that in some ways that's still really young.

It's very.

I can look back. It is, it is. But the difference between what you know at 40 and what you know at 30 and what you knew at 20.

Right.

And one of the things I always find challenging in society today is we like to feather nest for people or we like to take challenge away or try to protect people. It's like so many of your greatest moments are inextricably linked to when went bad or obstacles you had to overcome. You think in the moment, you don't want that. But in the long run, you absolutely do. Because there's no other way to obtain.

Wisdom without discomfort, you're not going to grow. Without adversity, you're not going to grow without. And that's the beautiful thing about sports is every single day as a coach, you can create that. You know, you talk about the four growth rings that you folks focus on and the chaos, the complexity, the order of stagnation. You can do that every single day at practice.

You've got to be intentional about it and then have a pulse on where you're at individually and where others are at and where the collective is. Right. And that's why that question. Right. My coach makes practice fun. Well, I think it was two or three weeks ago. My son plays competitive soccer. He's younger, he's 10. And they did. Parents versus kids cleared out the indoor stadium and that was practice that night, which was a gas.

Yeah.

But then talking to his coach, who's a great coach afterwards, it's just like, listen, the grind gets long, it's mentally hard. And even for 10 year olds who believe that this is fun, right. They're hanging out with their friends, it gets tough. So you need to inject that every now and then to be able to have a practice like they had last Thursday, which is he was riding them hard. Right. And both of those practices are necessary.

Well, they're going to know that players versus parents is coming somewhere down the road again when they have those practices that are a grind. Right. When they have those practices where he's on them. And that's what's really cool about it. You know, we keep talking about your stuff and your process. Can you walk us through exactly what you do with Excel Sports, how you go about administering the assessment, what the assessment entails? I want to make sure that we get to that. Because if I'm a listener, I'm sitting there like, okay, this all sounds great, but what is it exactly they do and how do they get to the results?

If I step back from that question and say, what's central to the mission of Excel Sports? And that is to ensure that every student athlete has the best experience possible for them when they're at their respective high schools and playing their respective sports. So that is the focus, right. As we talk about gps, where we're going with everything that we do, how we go about ensuring that happens is where we separate ourselves from anybody else out there in the marketplace, is that we're focusing on the coaches and the ads to provide them support and development and growth opportunities. Because what we know through years of measuring this on the business side and now a few years of measuring on the sports side is that when the coaches improve, cultures get better, trust improves, experience goes with it. And so it's logical.

So then an ad comes to us and says, hey, I came across excel sports, this looks good, tell me more. And once you figure out that they have alignment, you say, listen, it's really a simple three step process. The first step in anything, as you and I were talking about earlier, you have to become self aware as an organization, as an AD and as coaches. So we have this tool called the Coaching Effects Survey. That's step one. And the approach is through our research based questions, which we have the best research team around and cut and slice this data any which way. We go directly to the student athletes and anonymously and confidentially through a series of about 40 questions, we measure that coaching relationship through their eyes and the impact that the coach is having in six key themes.

Can you give us just a couple of examples of what questions would be?

Well, we talked about one which is my coach makes practice fun. Right. As an example, my coach asked questions outside of the sport about my life.

Right.

So you're measuring skill development, how they are as a coach, their student athlete experience and then their life impact.

Right.

That's the three core areas. So and then the six themes, Connection, psychological safety, which are relational structure, skill development, which are order based questions. And then communication and challenge which is pushing people outside of their comfort zone. And so what happens is doesn't matter the sport, track, cross country, basketball, bowling, you know, your major sports. Every single coach gets an individual roll up report that identifies and breaks down the questions how they scored their own self versus their coaches internally at the school and then versus the Excel Institute community at large. Best coaches. The data is very clear and breaks down, hey, here's what you're doing. Well, here's your opportunities for growth. And then it defines next steps for them in terms of where they want to focus on their professional development. So for a coach it becomes clear self awareness.

For an AAD it becomes clear by individual coach and collectively in terms of where they want to go over the next year. And you're never going to tackle it all, but you can make incremental strides where if you have 20 coaches doing that.

Yeah. When you start thinking in terms of athletic director, like why is our cross country program so successful every year when they don't get the resources that football gets or basketball gets or you know what I'm saying? Well, it has everything to do with the coach. Okay, and what does that coach doing that this coach isn't doing? And how can we help this coach do that?

So the first step you have to be able to measure, that's step one. Little side story on that is years and years ago Google did a deal called Project Oxygen and they're trying to figure out why are some teams of coders performing better than others when they all have access to the same resources. Well, Google spent all sorts of millions of dollars trying to figure this out. They came back, said, hey, your manager's your issue. Well, what were they doing? One, they weren't measuring why they figured that out, but two, they're promoting coders into leadership roles and never giving them opportunities to understand how do you drive human performance. So the thought process behind the coaching effects survey is it's whether you major it or not, those feelings exist.

So do you want to have the physical where you see your results or do you just want to go ahead and have the heart attack potentially six months down the road? Then you go into step two, which is analyze and support is what I call it, helping the ads make sense of the data, teaching them how to do that and then from a support mechanism. We're a community, right? I mean we work with so many different ads, businesses, we work in education as well. So if you're an ad and you're on an island, you got a thousand responsibilities, there's no reason for you to have to recreate the wheel. When it comes to professional development or questions, we become that conduit or that sounding board, right? And then the third step is what we call the Excel Sports learning portal.

And that is a self directed online tool that houses two different types of resources, how to actionable resources in those six themes, but then also a community aspect where coaches can interact and share best practices. We pull outside resources and we pull your podcasts in there, house them for people so that they can access it. And so it's a three step process that you can be as prescriptive and hands on or you can say, hey, here it is, go get it. And that's just to each their own. It just depends on the style, well.

And willing and abel. Their level of success is pretty much dependent on them. Are they going to opt in and commit to doing what they can do? The way you simplify it is just mind blowing because you and I both make the complex simple and that's where there's so much power in that and the fact that you can apply. And I love the community feel because you and I both know, I mean, growing up in the athletic world, that the best coaches share their ideas, they share their best practices, they pick each other's brains, they go to coaches clinics, they pick up the phone.

One of the things during the pandemic that I thought was so awesome and Porter talked about it in the podcast, these high major coaches, mid major coaches, D2, D3, didn't matter what level, whatever your network was, whatever your circle was, they would have Zoom calls with 10, 11, 12 coaches in each week or each call there'd be two or three coaches in charge of a different topic and they'd come with their questions, they'd be prepared, and they would pick the brains. And your community really allows that to happen.

Well, that's another one of those glaring differences between business and athletics. I mean, ads and coaches are so fraternal, right. In nature versus business. And it's just different. And I love it because again, how do you tap into that power of the collective and the wisdom that others have gained? That's funny. Funny side story. I've told you this before, but it's probably good for your listeners. You ever want to know how good of a guy Ed Molitor is? You know, I was sitting down in Vegas on Sunday and me and my buddy Nick Baugh, who played at Creighton for whatever reason, we took a late night Sunday out of Vegas and we're sitting there at Park MGM and run into Porter and some other coaches that were there for a clinic. And again, sharing. They're, they're learning from other people.

But like, Nick hadn't ran into these guys for years and you might as well have just. It might as well have time collapsed and went back because that's the type of environment that exists with people in coaching roles. That's, that's how it is. And I said, you know, hey, you guys know Ed Molitor. And right away they were all like, oh yeah, we love. Ed's our guy. Yeah, well, that just justifies what I've experienced in the short time that we knew each other at the time. But tying a bow on that, it's. It's really cool and it's really unique, I believe how fraternal that coaching community is versus other pockets that try to do associations and networks and collaborate. And that's not to say that there's not good ones out there. It's just different in terms of how it feels.

Well, and you think about this, if you really think about it. And I do love that story. When you sent that picture to me, it's so funny because I'm sitting in my chair, it's late Sunday night, and I was watching Yellowstone or something like that. Everybody was in bed sleep. And I looked at. I'm like, okay, the world's small. The only thing wrong with this picture is that I'm not sitting there. Okay. Now that would have been a trip. Cause we had literally, we had just connected for the first time.

Yeah. We just met at that point.

Yeah. But here's what's really cool about what you're doing, and tell me you've started a movement. Because not only are you providing an opportunity, a platform, the tools and resources for these athletic directors to help their coaches grow and succeed, you're also providing through the community, an opportunity to grow their network. And all of a sudden, wait a minute, they're doing work with Excel Sports. They get it. I am going to interview that person or I, you know, I am going to respond to that introduction or, you know, it becomes a conversation piece. And inside of that conversation piece, you're going to peel back the onion and you're going to connect with people you never would have connected with before.

Well, I hope that the movement that we're creating is twofold. First and foremost, what I hope that we're creating is ending a vicious cycle of poor coaching or average coaching. Right. It's, hey, a lot of almost everybody. This is the common narrative. I was good at what I did. I became a coach. I sank or swam, I learned and I had success or I didn't. But I was never really giving guidance, tools, resources on how to do this effectively, let alone assessment. That helped me, you know, better as it pertains to me. So the more part of the challenge with great coaching is so many people haven't experienced it. And if you haven't felt what that means, then you don't have place a premium on it. Right.

And so that's one of the things I hope that we're creating a movement, first and foremost, secondarily and selfishly, through the growth of our business and the community at large. Yeah, there's a FOMO to it. You know, it's like, hey, this district here in Cincinnati is working with Excel Sports to improve their student athlete experience. What is that all about? Because we don't want to not be that. That school, but to the sheer fraternal nature of it's like, hey, went to a coaching clinic, like, hey, we're working with Excel Sports. You should check this out. Well, that makes my job a lot easier, because in our job, I should say a lot easier, because if somebody comes to me and says, hey, I was talking to Ed, heard the podcast, was interested, so I called him up.

Man, it sounds like what you're doing is really cool. You what, you have a moment? Well, you know, you're working with those people probably four or five times.

Well. And at the end of the day, we're all doing the things for the right reason. Right. And that's to impact kids. And you talked about, okay, the Cincinnati school district's doing it. We really need to look at that. Think about the power of this at the college level, the high school level, where kids do make a decision where they're going to go, parents help make that decision. Think about the club level for different sports, the recruitment and the retainment of student athletes that this would provide, knowing that their coach is vested in developing the skill sets to help enrichen their experience, to make their experience more fun and to put them in a position to be more successful and not just. Not just on the field, not just on the court, but later in life as well.

To me, that's what's so powerful about what you're doing.

Yeah, I don't know how far and wide the opportunities go. For now, I'm personally staying in my lane just because I can let my. My head go a lot of different places.

Well, you know what?

Honestly, this is. I haven't had conversations with this like this with anybody internally. There's opportunity across the board. If I'm being 1000% honest, I don't know how excited I would be to work in terms of, like, D1 athletics, for example. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, for sure. I also think there's a ton of bureaucracy and the same stuff that you run into on the business side that takes away the impurity of what it is that we're looking to accomplish. Now, that shouldn't deter us, because if it's the right thing. But just looking at it from an outside observer, my intuition says you're. You're absolutely in the right spot at that lower level, college and high school level. Build that up, blow it up, make the biggest impact you can there, and then let those other levels come to you.

That's just my opinion. I don't get paid the big money to make those decisions, so I'll go whatever Direction Bill wants.

Well, you and I both know the ego that gets involved at the highest level, and it becomes about them as opposed to about the kids, you know, And I think the NIL is great. There's a lot of things they need to work on to straighten it out. But the end of the day, our responsibility and our commitment is to provide the student athletes with the tools that are going to make them successful long after they're gone from our program. So the sooner people figure that out, the better. And I think there's a ton of great ones out there. And student athletes at the highest level want the same thing that student athletes at D3 schools want. Okay? They want to know their value. Right. They want to know they have a significant role in a team, and they do want to be coached.

And psychological safety, that's a whole other podcast that we could talk about. You know, as a matter of fact, that was my solo cast. That's a whole other podcast. But that's so significant, and that's something that you guys are helping to provide. So I. You know, and being the parent of young, little. Young athletes, I mean, really young athletes, and we. We share stories all the time. We need this. The good coaches are getting out. You know, the older good coaches are getting out. We need. We can't let coaching go in the wrong direction.

I'm kind of utopic at times, I think, when it comes to this topic, but because I'll say something that. That sounds extremely soft, but, like, we're all human beings first right before we're athletes. And one thing that, like, was. Was a really hard concept for me to grasp. And I didn't learn until I got older and was fortunate to be friends and acquaintances with people who have played in the NFL and Major League Baseball and, you know, have had really successful careers at the D1 level. One thing that I never even considered as a thing is that not everybody loves their sport. There's a lot of people out there that are playing at really high levels where it's like, it's okay. It's what I'm really good at. It's what I know.

It certainly brings in a lot of money, but I'm not passionate about this. And if that's true, if those types of environments exist, then part of the role of a coach is not just to win games and maximize their effort at performance. It's like, how do I get to know that about you and support you in everything you want to do in life? Not everybody wants that. You asked that question earlier. About what deters it.

Right.

Not everybody wants to go there on an individual or collective level as a coach to understand how does my connection impact our wins and losses. Different skill set than teaching the game or coming up with an offense. And you talk about that accountability or realizing that you are the issue. I've gotten pretty good. I feel like listening to press conferences or listening to people talk and say, well, I point the thumb. No, you don't. You're saying the right words, but you don't. Right. And that becomes pretty transparent when you've lived in this world for a while. Yeah.

And the consistency in the message and the timing of the message and the situation and all. Now your programs. So you come in, you do the assessment, you give the results, you provide it, you get into the queue, you start doing all the work. How long does the program go? Is there an end date? Is it a one year contract? A two year, three year, like, well, how is this year over year?

The unsatisfying answer to that question is it depends on the school and the district and the size. On the business side, for example, we got clients who've been working with us for 12 years. The double edged sword is that finding people who really care about the development of their coaches is tough. But when you do, they always are recognizing, hey, this is an outlet, this is a resource we can get incrementally better. Most people that we work with, you're doing three year contracts with and the reason why is extremely pragmatic. You're not going to flip a switch and become self aware and become great in three months. This is something that has to get woven into the fabric culturally of who you are and to have a common framework or a common vernacular system, it's going to take time for that to mold.

And not everybody's going to come along that journey, but most people will over three years. And then you have a story to tell. Also you get a break in price. When you do a three year contract. Then you can do one year. You can say, hey, we're going to start spring season with eight coaches and just try all this out just to get a feel to see do we want to go forth with 45? So everybody buys a little bit differently. You have to meet them where they're at based on needs and then you make recommendations, of course, but we're pretty flexible that way. What I will say though is that when you come across people who do it the right way and say, listen, this is a two year, this is a Three year contract. What's really cool?

One of the things we don't actively promote even though we're doing it. We work with school districts and education, working with instructional coaches and admin and teachers. And you take a school of a thousand kids, right. And year over year their teachers improve. A simple question like their coaching score goes up by 14% on a question like my teacher makes me feel more confident in my abilities. That's 140 extra kids walking around the halls feeling better about themselves and more inspired about the work that they're capable of.

Right.

They've broken through this ceiling of self limiting belief. Well, what's this impact to society or those kids at large for that work? You don't learn that in a quarter.

No. And then that's contagious amongst the other students. So. Okay, you almost stole my thunder there for my last question. Because before we get to the last question, I want you to go ahead and tell us where folks that are interested in Excel Sports can find out more. And you put some great stuff on LinkedIn. You're really engaged. You're very consistent in what you do. I love it. Just go ahead and share your social media stuff, website, all that.

So easiest place probably to find me is on LinkedIn. Will Clefcorn w I L L K L O E F K O R N Excel Sports spelled a little bit uniquely E C S e l l sports.com that's the best place to go. There's resources there's contact us information, all the everything you need that is there.

Well, listen, as we wrap this up, and I don't want to wrap this up, I want to keep talking and we're going to have you back on the share stories. Let's say three months, six months to show how it's growing and share some more of the stories. But that's what I want to end with. So we've talked often about like this is about, at the end of the day, this is about the student athletes, right. This is about impacting them and putting them in position to succeed. And we've shared a story about some of the aha moments athletic directors have had, coaches have had. But let's talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten from the student athletes themselves, even if it was the coaches that provided it to you. Right. Like this is what I heard back from my players.

What are some of those, some of.

My favorite stories to tell. They're woven into this type of theme, which is a coach, you talk about psychological Safety. One of the questions that we asked is my coach never overreacts or when things are stressful, my coach is at their best. And those are questions that lots of coaches for all the right reasons don't score great at. But it has a huge impact because not every coach or not every player, I would argue I don't have data on this, but a lot of players don't respond well to when the coach loses their mind. In fact, it's the opposite. It's, that's where fear comes in, your brain slows down, they don't maximize performance and everything shuts down. So lots of those comments are the year over year.

Comments like, hey, coach changes behavior, coach became more patient, coach asked more questions and the impact that had on our ability to ask questions. Their example that through their behavioral change liberated us to make that type of change. The other thing that you read through comments or you read through the tea leaves is coaches start to coach more to the individual because they recognize that how you coach your power forward is not the same of how you coach your point guard. How you coach your four year starter is not the same as how you coach your walk on. And that's not just skill development, that's mentally as well.

And if I could inject probably one message outside of self awareness to the world of coaching or otherwise, it's that there's this hidden truth that we don't really talk about out loud and that's at the end of the day, we care about ourselves most. And if you can tap in and understand what an individual cares about on the field and off, it's going to allow all that skill, knowledge and coaching knowledge of the game to be able to be heard and resonated. And to your point earlier, create the environment that allows the student to achieve it on their own. They'll give the coach the credit and the good coaches will give the kids the credit. But those two things are just cyclical and they work off of each other when done well.

Right. I absolutely love that. And you know, going back to what you're talking about, you know, our coach responds well under pressure, okay. Or performs at his best or her best under pressure. Firmly believe, right, that a team is a direct reflection of their coach. And if we find a way to be the face and the voice that the team needs to see and hear, before you know it, you're going to have coaches on the field, you're going to have coaches on the floor. Those, I mean you'll, you will have accomplished exactly what you're trying to accomplish. And that's equipping them to make the decisions. Right. And to make the commitment and to put the work in.

The cool thing about that too, Ed, is that so pulling in some adjacent data that's not ours, that plays into this type of stuff.

It's.

We work with a company called the Institute for Health and Human Potential out of Canada. They do a lot of work in emotional intelligence and they've coached Doc Rivers and other high performing coaches. But I'll probably butcher this, but it's basically the sentiment and the depth of their research proves that when it comes to your reputation, 87% of your reputation comes from your 13% moments. Or it could be 83% of your reputation from your 17%. But you get the point. It's when things get tough and when things get difficult, that's where you earn your credibility and your reputation. And that's not just coaching, that's everywhere. And you pair that with some just really scientific data, Nobel prize winning work that says you want to build relationships with trust. You have to have seven positive interactions for every one negative.

I mean think about that historically from a coaching perspective. Now what constitutes as positive versus what constitutes as negative? That's an important question to answer if it carries that much weight.

I'll tell you what. Seven positives to one negative takes that whole sandwich coaching method and throws it out the window, doesn't it? For sure. Negative, positive. The positive ones are very simple positive reinforcement. You know, recognize recognizing the extra pass, recognizing getting back in defense, recognizing making an effort play doing something that's intangible.

Well, and people's minds go to, when you say positive, kind of like foo sauce stuff, it's like no, you can be positive and clear. You can hold people accountable in a positive way. Right. It doesn't have to being positive doesn't have to have a negative connotation which sounds funny to say out loud. But that's where refinement of coaching effectiveness makes all the difference. Because communication is a big one. How you say something and when you say it can be positive, but if not done well, it can be perceived as negative. And that's where communication, one of my favorite quotes of all time is like the biggest challenge with communication is the illusion that it actually took place better over communicate. You better make sure you're a clear communicator if the livelihood of your role is to communicate clear.

Well, how many times do we communicate and not make sure that they understand what were saying almost every single day.

Yeah, yeah.

That is huge. I absolutely love this conversation. Well, I can't thank you enough for joining us and I do look forward to the next time we have you on the Athletics of Business podcast to hear some more stories, hear how much Excel Sports is going to grow. And the thing I love, and I've said this to you, and I'm not trying to blow smoke, the thing I love is your commitment to what you're doing and the fact that you're doing it for the right reasons. Right. And how you go about doing it. It's so authentic, it's so genuine, and I truly believe it's so powerful.

I appreciate that probably more than you know, because there's probably shortcuts and other things that you could do to get to places faster, but it's not going to serve you well in the long run and likewise throwing that back at you. It's been a pleasure to be on podcast, been a fan of your work from the beginning. Merging sports and business is right up my alley and I know so many other people's alleys. So look forward to many more conversations and opportunities.

All right, well, thank you and please let us know how we can help you anyway, any way possible. And again, this will be in the Show Notes. Go to Bill Ekstrom's previous podcast on the Athletics of Business. I'll put the link to that in the show notes so you have a shortcut to that. But there's so much here and I feel like we barely cover the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, you can talk for days and I'm sure we will.

All right, well, take care and thanks again for joining us.

Thank you for listening to the Athletics of Business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit the athleticsofbusiness.com now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.