Coaches Coaching Coaches Pt. 4

Building a Culture That Actually Sticks

There is a difference between a program that has values posted on a wall and a program that lives those values every single day. I have been in both kinds of programs. One of them produces intrinsically motivated athletes. The other produces athletes who know how to look motivated when the coach is watching.

The goal of this post is to talk about how we actually try to build real culture at Deer Creek, specifically through the lens of two motivational categories from my research: Integrated Regulation and Identified Regulation. These are the two categories that sit closest to pure intrinsic motivation, and they are the areas where coaches have the most direct influence.

Integrated Regulation: When the Team's Values Become Their Values

Integrated regulation is what happens when an athlete does not just follow the rules of a program, but genuinely adopts its values as their own. It is the difference between an athlete who works hard because the coach demands it and an athlete who works hard because that is just who they are.

At Deer Creek Football, we have three core values: Relentless Effort, Competitive Excellence, and Power of the Team. We have said these words a thousand times. But saying them is not the same as building them.

This offseason, we started a leadership council made up of 21 student-athletes, three from each grade level from freshmen through juniors. Their first job was to take our three core values and give them a tagline. Something they came up with, in their own words, that represented what each value meant to them.

We split them into groups, had each group pitch their taglines, and then the athletes voted. That process alone created something that I could not have manufactured as a coach. Buy-in. The kind that does not come from a speech or a poster. It comes from ownership.

Then we asked the athletes to come up with a fourth core value. That fourth core value is entirely theirs. We did not guide them toward it. They identified something that mattered to them as a group and made it part of what our program stands for. That is integrated regulation in its purest form. The program's values and the athletes' personal values became the same thing, not because we told them to align, but because we gave them space to find the alignment themselves.

Identified Regulation: Teaching the Why Behind Everything

Identified regulation is slightly different from integrated regulation. It does not require an athlete to love every aspect of their sport. It just requires them to understand why it matters.

The best example I have is the weight room. Nobody loves every workout. Walking lunges as a finisher on a Thursday afternoon in the Oklahoma heat are not enjoyable. But our athletes do them. They do them because they understand why.

That understanding does not happen automatically. It is a result of coaches being intentional about teaching the why behind everything we ask our athletes to do.

I learned this lesson the hard way early in my career. We were installing a passing concept, and one of my Tight Ends just was not clicking on it. I explained their route, their assignment, their job. Nothing clicked. After some time and some relationship had developed, that athlete told me: "I know what I am supposed to do, but not what everyone else around me is doing. I need to know that to help me run my route correctly."

I thought I was making their job easier by simplifying it. What I was actually doing was taking away the why. Once they understood how their route affected the entire play, how their assignment created space for someone else, they ran it completely differently. With purpose. With buy-in. Because now it meant something.

We have a saying in our program: we over me. It is our tagline for the Power of the Team value. And we reinforce it in ways that go beyond football. Our players volunteer through the Creek Football Community Alliance, working at homeless shelters, doing Meals on Wheels runs, picking up trash in our community. We do this because we want our athletes to understand that there are things bigger than Friday nights. When they see the direct impact their actions have on real people in their community, their sense of identified value grows. They are not just football players. They are members of a community that needs them.

That is identified regulation at its best.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here is the practical takeaway for coaches. You cannot manufacture buy-in. You cannot demand it or incentivize it into existence. But you can create the conditions for it.

Give your athletes ownership over something real in your program. Not token choices, but actual voice and actual responsibility. Let them feel the weight of shaping what your program stands for.

And then teach the why behind everything. Every drill, every lift, every film session. If your athletes cannot tell you why they are doing what they are doing, you have a motivation problem waiting to surface.

The leadership council and the community service work are not just nice extras in our program. They are core to how we build intrinsic motivation. They are the things that take values off the wall and put them into the hearts of our athletes.

Next week, I am going to talk about something that does not get discussed enough in coaching circles: the pressure your athletes are already putting on themselves, and what it means for how you should approach your role as a coach.

This post is part of an ongoing series based on my graduate research project at the University of Oklahoma, examining student-athlete motivation through Self-Determination Theory in a high school athletic program.