There’s an interesting and not totally obvious truism about sports, coaching, and life: the minor details are, in fact, major. John Wooden knew this. Van Halen knew it. Good teachers know it. Everyone, it seems, can intuit this, and yet the seemingly minor details are often dismissed as irrelevant. In a turn of phrase from the popular self-help book in the 90’s: Sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff.
Coach Wooden is famous for not just what he did—10 NCAA basketball Championships and a winning percentage of 80% in his 29 year career—but, more so, how he did it. He mastered the ability to apply lessons learned by his players on the court to life off the court. That is, to life. One in particular is often playfully recounted by fans of Wooden: how to tie your shoes. He began every season with a lesson in shoe tying, teaching some of basketball’s legends like Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar how to take the details seriously. This clearly had practical applications resulting in fewer blisters and sprained ankles. But it reached far beyond that.
Any expert coach imparts the basics of their sport. All basketball coaches teach how to run a press and a zone defense, shooting fundamentals, etc. These are the big things. Every player even at the base level learns these. But coaches with a foundation based on taking details seriously separate themselves from those who ignore them.
The beauty in sport and in life lies in the details—not just because the details are important, but because attending to the details is important.
The Head Coach of the U.S. Women’s Water Polo Team, Adam Krikorian, has based much of his approach to coaching explicitly on Wooden’s philosophy. He discusses this in his keynote addresses on team building. He shares an instance in which he credits this details-oriented approach as playing a key role in a major success: winning a gold medal at the 2012 Olympic Games.
The United States was tied with Canada, 8-8, in a game whose winner would qualify for the 2012 Olympics. With 5 seconds remaining, Canada earned a penalty shot. A goal here sends them to the Olympics. Instead, U.S. goalkeeper Betsey Armstrong got a fingertip on the shot, causing it to ricochet off the bar. This forced the game into overtime which the U.S. eventually won, earning a spot in the Olympic games where they went on to win a gold medal.
When you listen to Krikorian retell the story, he captures Wooden’s shoe-tying philosophy succinctly, though without mentioning it explicitly. As a goalie coach myself, I often reference this approach as a primary motivator for goalies in our training. Water polo goalies rarely allow a goal that is more than inches from being blocked: goals scored most often flicker off the goalie’s finger tip, knick the tricep, or some other near miss. It is almost always the case that a goal would have been blocked if the goalie could have reacted a millisecond quicker, if her reach had extended an extra millimeter, or her legs generated just a smidgen more power. And so, every single instance a goalie attends to the details, from something as seemingly meaningless as donning her suit properly or focusing on any other minute aspect of the position, this turns a shot scored into a shot blocked. And with the margin of victory so small—many games are won by just a goal or two—this literally transforms losses into wins. Details matter.
Eighties rock band Van Halen approached details as a matter of life and death and they exemplify this as well as Wooden and Krikorian have done. As legend has it—and legend, in this case, is reality—Article 126 of Van Halen’s venue contract for live performances required a bowl of M&M’s in the backstage area, but with one caveat, a seemingly annoying detail: “There will be no brown M&M’s…upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” Many viewed this as epitomizing “rock star” bravado. But it has nothing to do with that.
Lead singer David Lee Roth explains in his autobiography that including this clause tipped the band off as to how detail-oriented those running the venue were. In a sense, they were testing whether a particular venue started things off with a proverbial tying of the shoes. Van Halen’s production involved nine 18-wheel trucks-worth of gear, girders, and flooring, all of which required exact attention to detail. If details were ignored, the performance would be certain to fail or, worse, yield dangerous consequences involving the pyrotechnics, heavy moving objects, or complex flooring. As Roth reflects, “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl…guaranteed you’re going to run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.” Details matter.
Interestingly, this approach can seem to cut both ways. Does it matter if a particular athlete does just one more set of push-ups? How about just one more push-up? That one push-up couldn’t possibly prevent him from scoring that big goal. And the answer is: it does matter. And not because of the push-up itself, but the approach to the push-up.
The recent Super Bowl featured an unlikely hero in Malcolm Butler. Working part-time at Popeyes Chicken just years prior, Butler made an interception in the game’s final minute to preserve the Patriots’ victory. In this case, an extra set of push-ups—or, even, all the push-ups in the world—didn’t help him accomplish this. In this particular case, it was the extensive film he watched, getting him to the point where he actually expected what was an exceptionally unexpected play call at the time. Butler attended to countless hours of game video of his opponent, noting their formations in various situations which allowed him to predict plays ahead of time. In attending to this particular detail, he watched hundreds of plays that weren’t run but, in doing so, was able to stop the one they did run to win the Super Bowl. As Director of Patriot’s Football Operations, Michael McCarty, said of Butler, “He gets after it…He wasn’t going to give up an inch. That’s just how he is.” Attending to details isn’t about the details, it’s about the approach.
And here’s the fun and the bit of paradox in all of this: Armstrong would have blocked that penalty shot if she did one fewer set of push-ups or occasionally showed up five minutes late to training. But she also would not have blocked that penalty shot if she guided her training by the philosophy that such minor details don’t matter. Likewise, Butler and his game-saving interception. And Wooden’s numerous championship teams. Tie your shoes. Watch the video. Do your push-ups and show up on time. Don’t just sweat the small stuff—relish in it. Details matter.
