RaiseTheFloor

You often hear it when someone takes over a new program: “Once I get my system in place…”

That phrase is usually presented as confidence, but sometimes I hear ego. It assumes the coach already has the answer and that the athletes’ job is simply to fit themselves inside it.

But what if the system does not fit the athletes?

To be clear, this does not mean culture and standards should change based on the athletes. Expectations surrounding effort, accountability, attendance, academics, sportsmanship, and how teammates treat one another must be established and protected. Those are the foundation of a program.

When I talk about adapting a system, I am talking about athletic performance; the schemes, strategies, techniques, and styles we ask athletes to execute. Standards describe how we expect athletes to operate. A system determines how we put them in a position to compete.

Coaches should not lower their standards to fit their athletes, but they must be willing to adapt their competitive system to fit the abilities of the athletes they have.

A system is important. Athletes need structure, shared language, clear responsibilities, and foundational skills they can return to under pressure. A program cannot reinvent itself every day based on how everyone feels. But there is a difference between having a foundation and forcing athletes into a rigid system built for someone else.

I have seen this happen in football. A coach brings in an entire defense taken from a previous coordinator, head coach, or program and installs it without considering the personnel available to run it. The playbook may be sound. The scheme may have worked somewhere else. That does not mean it fits the athletes standing in front of him.

A defense built around a two-gapping nose tackle does not work if you do not have a nose tackle who can effectively control two gaps. You can teach the technique. You can develop the athlete. You can build toward that vision. But on Friday night, enthusiasm for the system will not give an undersized defensive lineman the size, strength, or skill he has not developed yet.

There is a difference between what an athlete could eventually do and what an athlete can reliably do right now.

Good coaches work to expand what athletes can do. They develop weaknesses, add skills, and refuse to place artificial limits on young people. But competition is not the place to build a strategy around abilities that do not yet exist.

Development should be based on potential. The system used in competition must be based on demonstrated ability.

A head football coach from our area recently asked what I would run on defense, I responded “I’d have to see the personnel. What can we do? I’ve ran an odd front and even front and even put a 6 man front on the field one week because it’s what I thought we had the ability to do and win the game.”

Prior to Kentlake when I coached football I was a defensive coordinator. Like any coach, I had schemes I loved, but it didn’t always fit, so I adapted and build a scheme around our student-athletes. I learned early from of my mentors that what works for a few doesn’t not work for everyone, and to be flexible.

Wrestling is no different.

Every wrestler needs a system. They need a reliable stance, effective motion, dependable attacks, finishes, escapes, breakdowns, and turns. When a match becomes difficult and fatigue sets in, they need positions they recognize and techniques they trust.

However, the coach’s job is to tailor, no pun intended, that foundation to what each wrestler can actually do.

I don’t to sound like I’m preaching, like I’m on a high horse, but wrestling coaches are the worse about saying “this is how we’ve always done it” and “this is how I did it.” 

I listen to and read as much as I can if Ben Askren talking about coaching and developing wrestlers. He was an incredible wrestler, but in my opinion he’s an even better coach. He talks very often about the sport changing and evolving, but we still have coaches stuck to “THEIR SYSTEM.” 

Athletes are not all the same, they shouldn’t all wrestle the same. Again, their system needs to be tailed to what they CAN do not what they could do. 

Athletes are not all the same, so they should not all be expected to wrestle the same way. Their system needs to be tailored to what they can reliably execute, not built around what they could theoretically do. For example, building an entire style around wrestling from space does not make sense for an athlete who lacks quick-twitch ability or struggles to close distance. That wrestler may be better suited to working from contact, controlling ties, moving opponents, and creating attacks through pressure.

Another wrestler may struggle when trapped in ties but excel when given space to use speed, timing, and level changes.

Neither style is automatically better. The better style is the one the athlete can execute against good competition.

The same principle applies in every position. A long wrestler and a compact wrestler may need different rides. A powerful athlete may finish differently than an athlete who relies on speed and angles. Some wrestlers can build their offense around a high attack rate. Others need to control position, create predictable reactions, and make fewer attacks count.

If I teach every wrestler to compete exactly the way I competed, exactly the way my best wrestler competed, I am not coaching the athletes I have. I am asking them to become copies of someone else.

That does not mean every athlete receives a completely different program. A team still needs common foundations. We need shared terminology, core positions, and techniques everyone understands. Those foundations make practices efficient and allow teammates to help one another improve.

The foundation can be consistent without the final product being identical.

A system should operate more like a toolbox than an assembly line. Coaches teach athletes the essential tools, help them identify which ones fit their strengths, and then build reliable connections between those tools. Over time, each wrestler develops a system they understand and trust.

That process requires observation.

What positions does the athlete naturally find? Where do they consistently succeed? Where do they repeatedly get stuck? What technique continues to break down after months of instruction? What movement looks natural, and what movement always appears forced?

Those questions matter more than whether the athlete’s style matches the system inside the coach’s head.

Sometimes coaches become emotionally attached to schemes and techniques because those things become part of our identity. We know them. We can teach them confidently. They may have helped us succeed in the past.

When athletes struggle to execute them, it is easy to blame their effort, discipline, or intelligence rather than question whether we are asking them to do something that fits.

That is where a system can become an expression of ego. A great teacher adapts to their students and a great coach adapts to their athletes.

The goal is not to prove that my system works. The goal is to help my athletes build their system.

There also needs to be a balance. We cannot allow athletes to avoid every difficult position by saying, “That isn’t my style.” A coach still has to develop weaknesses and prepare athletes for situations they would rather avoid.

A wrestler who prefers space must still learn to hand fight in ties. A pressure wrestler must still learn to defend in space and maintain position.

A football team cannot just copy what they see in college or the NFL and expect it to work in high school.

Tailoring a system does not mean eliminating discomfort. It means deciding which skills form the athlete’s competitive identity and how to build off of their competitive identity.

The system should stretch athletes without asking them to pretend to be someone they are not.

Great coaching lives between two questions:

What could this athlete eventually become?

And:

What can this athlete execute effectively today?

The first question guides development. The second guides what they can do now. Coaches fail athletes when they ignore either one.

Build a foundation. Establish principles. Teach the details and continue to build on that foundation. 

Do not build athletes to validate your system.

Build a foundation that allows your athletes to succeed, and that allows for a system to be built around what they CAN do. 

That is how we raise the floor so our athletes can reach their ceiling.