The Locker Room Playbook

9The Six Pillars

For Everyone

Core Lessons

• A team's culture must be built of concepts that the whole team buys into.
• The specific concepts are less important than the team's agreement to abide by those concepts.
• To get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to stick to the team's stated culture.

Chapter Summary

Coach Smitty takes some time to go over the Six Pillars of his athletic team's culture. He has worked hard to instill these concepts as the pillars of the program, and now those Six Pillars are going to help him work through the racism problem that his team is facing. In previous chapters, Coach Smitty and Coach Washington discussed where they were and where they want to be. In this chapter, Coach Smitty lays out the concepts that are going to help them get there.

Deep Dive Teaching

The Six Pillars of the Northwest Tigers are good concepts to incorporate into just about any athletic program or team culture. But the pillars themselves are less important than what they represent. Let's look at what makes the pillars work so well.

Zero-Talent Skills Each of the pillars represents a zero-talent skill. That's something that anyone can do regardless of their physical abilities. Everyone can give relentless effort even if they can't throw accurately farther than a yard. Everyone can cultivate toughness through hard work and grit, even if they flinch when a ball is kicked in their direction. Everyone can strive to be excellent in the little things, even ...