One Player at a Time - Kelly O'Connor
“Opening the door"
Kelly O’Connor is, in her own words, passionate and I couldn’t agree more. Her dedication to her craft and to the student-athletes in her care shines through every time I talk with her. She is the Associate Head Coach at Omaha.
What is “One Player at a Time”? - read here
It seems ironic that Kelly told me she doesn’t feel like she was very good at her job at first. Yet, she was part of a NAIA national championship-winning team and a NCAA Division I national championship-winning team in back-to-back years in her first two full-time coaching jobs. She explains that, in her early years, she used her competitiveness as a measure of her success as a coach. She has always considered herself to be “wildly competitive” and she thought that being a good coach meant tapping into that competitiveness as much as possible. She has come to learn that her competitiveness is only a narrow expression of something she values much more, passion. Kelly attributes much of her success as a coach now to how she brings her passion for people, for coaching, and for learning into her work.
She was still figuring out who she wanted to be as a coach when she came to Omaha, where the staff she joined was taking over for an Omaha coaching legend who had been the head coach of the program for the previous 29 years. It’s one thing to take over a program after the previous staff is let go, it’s something completely different to take over a program when the previous coach is loved and respected. In the first situation, change is expected and generally welcomed. In the second situation, both existing and incoming players may not be as welcoming of a change. Incoming coaches inevitably change the culture of the program, if nothing else simply by being different people than the previous staff. Kelly and her fellow coaches faced the challenge of integrating themselves into a program that varied widely in their interest in that integration.
While the team had similar results in Kelly’s first season compared to the previous year, even playing in their conference tournament final, the new staff and the players weren’t on the same page. The athletes were either not all convinced or willing to be part of this new team. In an effort to acknowledge this and signal a willingness to work together, the coaches brought in a sport psychologist during the following spring season. In their discussions with the psychologist, the players expressed many concerns about how they were (or were not) interacting with Kelly and her fellow coaches.
It would be easy for coaches in a situation like this to double down on their approach, encouraging players that disagree to either get in line or transfer. Instead, Kelly chose to learn what she called the biggest lesson of her first two years at Omaha. Kelly decided that she too could change, just as she was asking the players to change. But there was no guarantee of the players changing, even if she did.
Kelly’s decision is often framed as “meeting them where they are” and I think it’s important to dig into that cliché a bit. Some coaches believe that the phrase means they must do all the changing while the players can remain exactly as they are. Some coaches reject the premise, relying on the traditional coach-player relationship, in which the players must do all the changing because the coach holds special knowledge that the players do not yet understand. I believe that the cliché is somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum. I believe that what coaches like Kelly do is acknowledge the reality of the situation, that the relationships are in need of change. They choose to encourage change in the players as well as model growth as well by changing their own behavior. This middle path better embraces the dynamic nature of relationships. I recently heard a cognitive scientist refer to it this way1.
If you want to transform another person’s life, you have to really transform your relationship with them…We only exist in relation to other people…And so if you want to transform an individual person, in some sense, you have to transform yourself as well.
- Nafees Hamid
One change that Kelly made was to ask the players for opportunities to get to know each other better. She was finding it difficult to care as deeply about the players as she wanted to because she didn’t yet know them well enough. She offered to meet players individually, outside the gym or the office, in an effort to build relationships that weren’t as influenced by the work they did in those places. Dani (not her real name) was first to accept Kelly’s invitation.
Dani was still a first-year student, having arrived on campus in the Fall, just after Kelly had arrived. Dani played in about half of the team’s matches that year and showed promise but, to Kelly, perhaps the best aspect of Dani was her role as a change agent within the team. While many of the players were cautious of the coaching staff, Dani accepted Kelly’s invitation as well as being one of the first players to stop by Kelly’s office to check in or to socialize. Dani told her teammates about the time she spent with Kelly and encouraged them to accept her offer of getting to know one another better. Dani served as a great connector of people on the team and on the staff.
But there was more to Dani than just her willingness to have coffee with a coach. She had been recruited by the previous staff as a middle blocker but she was pressed into service as an opposite in the opening weekend of her collegiate career. This was just the beginning of a 5-year career that saw multiple position and role changes. Kelly said that, throughout all the uncertainty and discomfort, Dani “always went for it”. Kelly believes that Dani struggled at times with her role on the team but she also believes that those struggles never stopped Dani from committing herself to doing whatever the team needed her to do. Dani’s commitment to her teammates came from a place of confidence that transcended volleyball. Kelly observed that Dani “had a better sense of who she was” than her teammates and Dani built that confidence by developing who she was outside of volleyball even more than she developed herself as an athlete.
Kelly’s observation of Dani’s identity is rooted in what psychology refers to as the Identity Status Model of development. Many people of Dani’s age have yet to experience identity achievement, which is one way of describing Dani’s perception of herself and her place in the world. Rather than accepting what others may expect of her, to be just a volleyball player whose success or failure depends on excelling at her sport, Dani felt secure and confident because she defined herself as far more than just a volleyball player. This security and confidence allowed Dani to take risks like playing different positions and opening herself up to Kelly and to her teammates.
Dani’s continued willingness to be vulnerable, both as a player and as a person, gave others around her permission to be more vulnerable as well. Kelly counts herself as one of the “others” that opened themselves up more as a result of Dani’s influence. She says that Dani “opened the door”, allowing them to connect and better understand one another. Through her relationship with Dani, Kelly began to see more opportunities to show how much she cared about the people on the team. One thing that she changed was how she viewed the role of passion in her coaching. She didn’t want to impose her passion, particularly her competitiveness, on others. Instead, she wanted to spark passion in the people she coached.
Kelly described the shift as going from “coaching at you” to a more collaborative and guiding style. For many coaches, including my younger self, there is a struggle to deal with players that are perceived as not competing as hard as they should. Kelly has come to say that “I’m not coaching at you because you’re out there and I’m not.” Instead of coaching at, by telling the players what to do, think, and feel, she strives to instead “open the door” to honest dialog between them. Rather than try to read their minds, she asks questions.
Dani thrived in this collaborative relationship with Kelly. Even though Kelly describes Dani as a perfectionist, Dani didn’t get bogged down in success or failure because she was engaging with Kelly around questions like “what did you see?” and “what did you notice?” Mistakes were just information that could be noticed and filed away for future reference instead of defining moments that could close doors. Because Dani was secure and confident in herself, it was easier for her to have honest dialog with Kelly. Dani demonstrated to her teammates how to be okay with herself, no matter how volleyball went. Kelly’s collaborative efforts showed others on the team that it was ultimately beneficial to be vulnerable and open to change as Dani had been.
Kelly says that one of her most important goals is “to help women be better women.” First, Kelly strives to meet the women in her care where they are by seeking to understand who they currently are and what they are striving to be. Through her collaboration and questioning, she works to help them understand themselves so they can take the chances and make the decisions that will help them move towards their goals. For Kelly, building relationships means embracing who these women are, both in and out of volleyball. Building relationships means maintaining honest dialog. Building relationships means constantly opening doors and doing her part to keep them open. That’s how Kelly has come to show her passion as a coach and as a person.
Have questions for Kelly? You can ask me here or you can email Kelly directly.
Hidden Brain podcast episode “Out of the Rabbit Hole”, 7/8/2024. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/out-of-the-rabbit-hole/