⏳ Read Time: 5 min

New here? Read about the BETTER Team and Mission here.

📌 What’s inside:

• 🏀 What BYU’s roster approach reveals about the era we’re in

• 📈 Why retention matters more than acquisition

• 💡 Five ways leaders create a culture players want to stay in

📖 Anecdote: The Quote That Says Everything About This Era

Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Borzello wrote a feature on this year’s BYU Men’s Basketball Team.

The article is a fascinating look at roster building and how a program thinks philosophically about roster construction.

But one quote from HC Kevin Young in particular caught our eye.

It’s a line that resonated with us at BETTER. We have gotten an inside look at dozens of programs over the last three seasons.

It seems evident to us that retention-focused programs have a clear advantage. And innovative programs are figuring out that a healthy culture is a great way to boost retention. Sure, $$$ helps. For top-ranked talent, culture will rarely (if ever) be a driving motivation for a player and their family. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help.

Think about it.
Roster volatility is higher than ever.
NIL has reshaped incentives.
The portal has turned “talent” and “roster management” into a 365-day trading floor.
And coaches (or entire athletic departments) are thinking more like portfolio managers as much as people developers.

But here’s the reality:

Even in the most cynical, transactional view of college sports (or even pro sports).
Retention is the advantage.

In fact, retention is the only real separator left.

You can acquire talent in the portal.
You can acquire experience.
You can acquire athleticism.
You can acquire positional need.

But the one thing you cannot acquire? Continuity.

You have to earn that.

And the programs that earn continuity are the ones winning in the modern era.

📊 A Thought Experiment

Let’s consider two ends of a spectrum. This is an over-generalization. But can help our thinking.

On one end of the spectrum, you have the purpose-filled view of college athletics:
Coaches are “in it for the right reasons.”
They want a good, healthy, life-giving, high-support, high-challenge culture for their athletes because they understand the impact it can have on them.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the most transactional lens possible:
Players are assets.
NIL is the bidding mechanism.
Coaches are essentially investors.

The truth is that there are coaches, athletic directors, and entire departments that land closer to one side or the other, or one side in between. Every coach has to decide where they want to fall to inform how they operate.

If that is the game (and for many, it is), then ask yourself: Is there a strategy that works for both ends of the spectrum? A philosophy? A truth of leadership? Something practical for both sets of coaches?

We’d ask another question.

Would you invest in a company with:

• massive turnover

• inconsistent leadership

• no compounding advantages

• constant restructuring

• unclear identity

• perpetual re-acquisition costs

Of course not.

But that’s exactly how many programs operate today.

Retention is compound interest.

Retention is value that grows without additional cost.
Retention is development that scales.
Retention is clarity that strengthens.
Retention is culture that carries forward instead of resetting to zero.

And the one thing that earns retention? You guessed it. Culture.

Not messaging.
Not slogans.
Not hype videos.
Not facilities.
Not NIL alone.

Culture.

Players don’t stay because they were convinced.
Players stay because they were connected.
Because they grew.
Because they trusted.
Because the environment made them better as players and people.

You might not retain players because of culture. But it can be the reason a top program is able to command a higher price over time.

🛠️ Putting It All Together:

This is a list of “things we’ve noticed” in programs that do this well. And while the examples above are really about revenue-earning sports in NCAA Athletics, we think the lesson is valuable at all levels of sport.

💡 5 Ways Leaders Build Culture That Earns Retention

1️⃣ Create development players can feel, not just hear.

If players can’t point to how they’re improving, they won’t stay — even if they like you.
Development must be visible.

2️⃣ Build relational glue, not just roster construction.

Players leave teams they don’t feel connected to.
They stay in environments where they feel seen, supported, and understood.

3️⃣ Clarify your identity so players know what they’re returning to.

This is true of all levels of your program. How you play, your tactics, your culture.
Unclear programs don’t have an identity enough for a player to attach to.
Clear programs attract and retain it.

4️⃣ Reduce friction.

Healthy communication is the foundation of a healthy culture. Conversations, easy and hard, happen when they need to, not delayed.
The programs with the fewest unnecessary frustrations (communication gaps, organizational disorder, inconsistency) lose the fewest players.

5️⃣ Give players ownership in the process.

When players help build the program, they stay to defend the program.

Ownership creates loyalty.
Loyalty creates retention.
Retention creates winning.

🏁 Closing Thought

Because in an era dominated by volatility, the programs that thrive are the ones that create something rare:

A culture people don’t want to leave.

And that is the real separator.

📣 Keeping Up With BETTER

🎙️ The CALS Podcast!
We joined the CALS Podcast — one of the top executive development groups in NCAA Athletics — to discuss leadership identity and culture. (Our section starts at 52:03)

🏐 BETTER at AVCA
Seth and MAYBE Kevin will be at the AVCA Convention during Volleyball Final Four week. If you’re attending, reply and let us know — we’d love to connect.

📘 PowerBook 3 Drops Monday!!
Our next PowerBook release is Monday. If you’ve pre-ordered our upcoming book, it’ll hit your inbox automatically.

Once PowerBook 3 is available digitally, we hope to have hard copies ready immediately for anyone who would like one!

Download our FREE Digital PowerBook: You Are The Culture!

You Are The Culture is the first chapter of our self-leadership system for coaches called Lead Yourself First. We’ve released two chapters so far. The first is below. The second PowerBook: Know Your Voice, Coach From Identity, you’ll get with an implementation guide as soon as you pre-order our book for $10!

Pre-Order The Full Book: Lead Yourself First!

When you pre-order, you’ll get:
✅ Immediate access to the next two PowerBooks as soon as they’re released
🗒️ A downloadable implementation guide for PowerBooks 1 & 2
🎥 Access to our monthly leadership webinars inside the BETTER Community
📗 A physical copy of Lead Yourself First when the full section is complete

🛠️ Want to Build Elite Culture?

Get BETTER’s Culture Playbook. A system designed to install a thriving, healthy, high-performance culture. Join over 1,000 coaches who use our Culture Playbook from youth club teams to national championship NCAA programs and everything in between.