Impactful Coaching Project
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The Impactful Coaching Project (ICP) seeks to develop coaches that coach the whole person.
ICP is the thought leader in coaching the 21st century athlete and produces training, information, and research to help coaches develop.
From this week's episode of "Beyond Coaching" with Darin Keizer.
Are you honest about why your team is winning or losing?
If you keep losing close games, maybe you need to train end-of-game situations. If you finish 8th every year and can’t compete with the top four, maybe the issue is recruiting.
Good coaching starts with accurately diagnosing the problem.
09/21/2026
New episode: Mission, Evaluation, and Developing Coaches with Darin Keizer
How do we evaluate coaches in a way that actually helps them grow?
Darin Keizer and I talk about mission alignment, building trust, developing coaches, and shifting evaluation from simply identifying problems to cultivating growth.
A good conversation for coaches and athletic directors.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-coaching-an-impactful-coaching-project-podcast/id1711128150
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4XZrfisl0lv82qFPtfipVz
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
Substack: https://impactfulcoachingproject.substack.com
“I love you, so I’m going to have you do this.”
Sometimes what we call love in coaching is really control, frustration, or a coach trying to satisfy their own needs.
The question isn't just what we're asking athletes to do. It's why.
Transactional Leadership Comes Before Transformational Leadership
Transformational leadership doesn't happen overnight.
Before coaches can lead meaningful transformation, they have to earn trust through the small, consistent, transactional actions that show people they care.
09/16/2026
Most coach development happens in July and is gone by week three of the season.
ICP Daily is built for the other version. One idea a day, sized for the ten minutes you actually have, drawn from the same research everything else here comes from. Under two dollars a month.
Most coaching advice assumes the problem is effort. Work harder. Want it more. Outlast everybody.
Angela Duckworth built a career on grit and then wrote a book complicating it. In Situated she argues that effort alone does not explain much, because nobody is operating in a vacuum. The situation does real work.
Coaches hate this idea. It sounds like an excuse. We are trained to believe the right person wins anywhere.
But I have watched good coaches grind themselves down inside a situation they never once tried to change. They never asked whether the schedule was wrong, whether the staff meeting was useless, whether the parent problem was actually a communication problem. They just worked more hours.
Effort inside a broken structure is not grit. It is stubbornness with better branding.
09/14/2026
I recently finished Angela Duckworth’s Situated, and it got me thinking about coaching.
Grit and effort matter—but so does the situation we create around ourselves.
In my latest Substack, I break down Duckworth’s idea of situational agency and three ways coaches can create, alter, or reframe the situations they’re in.
Read it here:
https://impactfulcoachingproject.substack.com
Not all motivation is clean.
Sometimes we're motivated by doubt.
Criticism.
Frustration.
The desire to prove someone wrong.
Call it dirty motivation.
It isn't necessarily bad—but it's worth asking:
What's really fueling you?
**The sport is the vehicle. It’s not the destination.**
If coaching is only about winning games, developing skills and producing results, we're missing the biggest opportunity we have.
Sport can be one of the most powerful environments for real-life transformation.
But coaches have to earn the right to do that deeper work by getting the fundamentals right first.
Get more practical coaching and leadership ideas in the free Impactful Coaching Project newsletter:
https://impactfulcoachingproject.substack.com
09/09/2026
Released an episode with Dustin this week. He said something about his first head coaching job that I have not stopped turning over.
He understood the opportunity but not the responsibility.
Then he went further. Early on, when his guys did not believe what he believed, he felt like he was failing them. Now he says his job is to model it well and let that be enough.
That is a fifteen year distinction compressed into one sentence, and I do not know a way to hand it to a first year head coach so that it means anything. I have tried. It usually gets heard as permission to care less.
I keep looking for the version of it that a 28 year old can actually use.
Full conversation on Beyond Coaching:
Beyond Coaching: An Impactful Coaching Project Podcast Beyond Coaching, a podcast from the Impactful Coaching Project, explores coaching and leading the 21st century athlete. The importance of the coach being a positive impact on their student-athletes hasn’t changed but the strategies for connecting with them has changed. This podcast interviews coac...
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