Read Time: 2.5 min

Here’s what this week’s newsletter includes:

• 🪞 Reflecting on 2024: Our successes, challenges, and how we got better.

• 🎩 Top Newsletters of the Year: The most shared, engaged-with, and widely-read editions.

• 🧮 Practical Takeaways for 2024: How to build ideas into the culture of your team or program.

Like most, we are reviewing this past year. What were our successes? Our failures? Where did we improve? What still needs work?

We learned a lot.

BETTER today looks vastly different than it did on January 1. It’s been exciting. And we are getting to interact with you all more than we ever have before.

Our newsletter readership nearly quadrupled.

As we close out this year, for this week, we’ve simply listed the editions of the newsletters below that had the highest levels of engagement.

At the bottom, we listed some practical tips on taking some of the ideas you liked the best and how to make sure that you build them into the culture of your team, your department, your unit, or whatever group you are leading.

✨ The Idea: Our Most Engaging Ideas

1. Our Most Shared Newsletter: 1 out of 5 readers sent this to someone else.
   
   Minimizing Interference (Link): How to identify and work on the things that undermine you most in your performance as a coach, leader, or athlete.
   

2. Our Most Engaged With Newsletter: This had the highest combination of reads and clicks.
   
   The Biggest Lie in NCAA Athletics (Link): Debunking the myth that your value as a leader or worker is directly tied to your output.
   

3. Our Top Read Newsletter: This newsletter made its way around college golf programs nationwide a few weeks ago.
   
   The Truth About Confidence (Link): A deep dive into how we define, quantify, and develop confidence in the athletes we work with.

🎯 Practical Takeaways

We talk a lot about Systems. If you’ve heard us say anything, you’ve heard us say that coaches don’t need another book, idea, or message to be incorporated into their current work. They need help with implementation.

So, for our end-of-year newsletter, here’s how we think about building ideas into the life of your team or program.

1. You can’t do everything.

   • If you chase five rabbits, you catch none. You can’t emphasize everything. Your players should know the 2-3 things you are about and be able to say them to you nearly verbatim how you feel about them.

2. Connect Ideas with Action

   • Ideas are good, but they mean little if they live on the wall of your gym or locker room. Connect your ideas, values, and culture with the actions you, your staff, and your athletes are practicing.

3. Think About the Calendar

   • When we build a system we offer to coaches, we ask the following question:
     How can we practice this each day?
     How can we practice this each week?
     How can we practice this each month?

4. Treat Your Culture Like Your Offensive/Defensive Scheme

   • How do you reinforce when your players execute something they’re supposed to in your scheme? What are you bringing up in film? What gets measured gets managed.

5. Celebrate and Reward Those who Exemplify Your Culture

   • In the long run, rewarding people who are about the same things you are about builds a stronger culture than talent.

✨ Closing Thought

As you reflect on this past year, take a moment to celebrate your progress and identify where you still want to grow. The ideas you’ve resonated with most can become part of the foundation for your team, program, or department moving forward. With intentional systems and consistent reinforcement, 2025 can be your best year yet—for what you achieve and how you lead.

BETTER’s Solution to Coach Development

As a part of our work, we lead cohorts of leaders. It’s just one meeting a month with a topic, some homework, and sharing about how it’s going. But it’s powerful. Many of the coaches and leaders in our cohort express the following sentiment:

“I wish every coach got to experience this on some level.”

So, we thought, why can’t they?

As a part of what’s next for BETTER.

We are launching a community around the Culture Playbook.

Until now, the Culture Playbook has been something you buy and then get. We wanted it to be so good and affordable that every coach in the country could access it.

From now on, leaders will get the Culture Playbook as part of a guided community that Kevin and Seth will lead.

If you’ve enjoyed our newsletter, imagine a community where we will take you and others through a deeper level of how to install the systems for yourself, athletes, or other coaches. You can ask us questions directly. We can guide and share discussions, share ideas, and get feedback.

We will host monthly calls., and everycoach will have direct access to us. We will lead guided discussions and encourage coaches and ADs to share best practices. We want it to become the absolute best resource for all things Culture Development, both at the program and department llevels. Over time, we will continue to add content, resources, and offerings—you’ll get discounts on future products that the public won’t get. And no, the price is not changing.

We’re targeting a public launch in early January, but we offer early access and a 25% discount to newsletter readers. Fill out the form using the link below, and we’ll send you a link to get started.