The Competitive Cauldron: The Goal is Improvement by Tom Black

Tom Black – Women’s Head Coach, UCSD Tritons (now Head Coach, Loyola Marymount University)

Explaining the Cauldron

There is no improvement without intensity. This is what draws us to the cauldron. If we want our players to improve, they have to play hard. If we want them to play hard, we have to get them to compete. If we want to create a competitive culture, then we need to measure things, record them, praise successes, and hold ourselves accountable for results. The cauldron, as created by University of North Carolina’s soccer coach, Anson Dorrance, gives us a foundation.

The cauldron records statistics for skills and competitive play, weighs each score, and assigns a subsequent ranking to each player. Would it be effective? I believed it would be. My assistant coach, Tom Haight, and myself would spend the next four years experimenting.

Early Failures, One Success

I had implemented the cauldron for about two years before becoming the Head Women’s Coach at UCSD. Before then, as an assistant at USC, I had instituted the cauldron into our men’s program. I was intrigued by it for two related reasons. First, was my exposure to it in a Gold Medal Squared Clinic, and Carl McGown’s claim that the competitiveness created in practice, via the cauldron, was largely responsible for their two national championship runs. The second was the statement made by the cauldron’s inventor, UNC Women’s Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance, who claimed that a naturally competitive player would be instinctively motivated to find ways to ensure they rise to the top of the list. This made sense to me on a fundamental level, I pitched it to our head coach, and we instituted it.

I consider the two years we had it at SC to be a lackluster success to moderate failure. The success was in the accountability it created. The guys were well aware stats were being kept, and they eagerly checked the door every 11 days to see the rankings. I considered this to be a tangible improvement. There was something pushing them to work hard in practice, to realize every day mattered.

But, there were several aspects that left me disappointed. The first was, the coaching staff wasn’t using it to make any decisions, nor as a teaching tool. We were never acknowledging when people excelled or surged ahead, and we were never calling people in when their numbers dropped. I was aware Dorrance said he never talked about the cauldron or addressed it specifically, but this didn’t sit well with me. We were taking very specific statistics that directly impacted the outcome of our matches. To not acknowledge improvement, or to seek to fix dips, seemed a ridiculous waste of information to me.

There was one instance that stuck with me. We had an Opposite complain about his lack of playing time to one of our assistant coaches. The coach asked if he had seen the cauldron lately, his hitting efficiency was well towards the bottom. The player replied he didn’t see how this was possible since his errors were relatively low. The coach, in turn, pointed out how he had nearly double the amount of neutral swings as any other outside hitter.

His kills skyrocketed. There was no other coaching involved. He was just more focused every time he attacked, and intent on scoring. There was accountability, and he was responding positively to it. This lonely example stayed with me. Here, the cauldron had been successful. The player was unhappy with his situation. He addressed the coach. The coach provided an objective, non-personal statement, along with information the player could see and understand. The player responded.

But there were negatives. The guys were obsessed on personal statistics, to the point of making sure their block was recorded, while their team was losing in the drill. The losing carried greater weight, and the whining and complaining escalated as a result. The best player on our team would have been the best, and played just as hard without it. The cauldron was doing nothing for him. The worst players also received little from the cauldron aside from the validation they were, in fact, the worst on the team. I didn’t consider any of these things positive, and I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear off-hand the players were relieved when a new assistant coach came in, and the cauldron was gone. I left SC, still feeling I needed a cauldron with me for the women’s program at UCSD, but that it would not work unless the coaching staff actively made it a part of the training environment, and closely monitored its behavioral effects on the team.

Re-Tooling the Cauldron

Ron Larsen, the current men’s national team assistant, pointed me in the direction of a book he had read by Aubrey Daniels entitled “Bringing out the Best in People.” He said it had deeply challenged many of the notions he previously held true regarding the cauldron. This made me excited to read it, as I was wondering a few things myself. The book was all about measuring performance, determining what rewards truly work to motivate people, what type of performance charts are actually effective towards improving productivity, and above all, how that is tied in to actually bringing the best effort out in those around you. I coupled this book with “Moneyball” the famed book about the success of the Oakland Athletics and their innovative, if not savagely Darwinist, method of statistic evaluation to achieve wins.

The central point of “Moneyball” resonated. Dr.McGown hits on it all the time. The naked eye simply cannot be trusted as an impartial observer. Numbers have to be used to see the truth of things. There are patterns we need to be made aware of, and we simply cannot tell the difference between a .250 and .275 hitter, though we know there is a significant difference between the two, especially over time. How many times have we put in a less efficient, but more physical, player in the line-up, only to realize after a few matches the player with the less-impressive package was helping us more, (sometimes just by hurting us less)? If we were able to measure this in practice, we might be able to play the right person sooner, and thereby help the team faster.

The points of Mr. Daniels’ book were more profound. He took exception to the statement “what gets measured, gets improved.” Not so, he comments. “What gets measured, recorded, and rewarded, gets improved.” This made sense. Obviously, a high cauldron ranking should reflect in playing time, if the cauldron is truly measuring things the way we want them to be measured. However, there is a more important point here. Daniels, as well as a number of leadership authors, goes on to explain that the negative compels people to do just enough to avoid punishment. The positive, however, propels people to look ahead and achieve more. This is what the cauldron was for, and was by far the most important “reward” it provided. If we were measuring performance, and did not go absolutely crazy every time a player improved in a key category, we weren’t using it correctly. We weren’t making sure the improvement stuck. We had this great tool in front of us that could really make an impact on a player. Instead of telling Sarah “Hey, Sarah, you’ve done a nice job making that change in your hitting, keep it up.” We can tell her, “Hey Sarah, you made that change we were discussing, and look, you’re hitting efficiency has improved 20 points! That’s a great job, keep it up!” We have measured what was important to us, we have recorded it, and most importantly, we have rewarded it in a meaningful way that will stay with the athlete. This was a profound change for me as a coach.

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