Get Your Preseason Organized the Quick and Easy Way

Happy Sunday Coach!

Even though it is the beginning of June, I know a lot of you have already started to prepare for preseason. 

When I first got to Youngstown, my first meeting with the staff was to get preseason organized.  I brought with me what I am going to share with you today and even though it was an all-new staff, we were able to figure out what needed to get done and who was doing what in 1 hour.   

It sounds like a lot of you are trying to remember what and how you did it last year. 

Trying to remember how you did things a year ago is not a great strategy.  

Here’s the thing. . . . 

If you plan on staying in this profession for a long time, you will organize your preseason every year.   

You need a repeatable system that is easy to follow that has multiple benefits for you and your program. 

Here are a few things that will happen when you do what I suggest organizing your preseason this year:  

1. The quality of your work will improve.  
2. You will complete tasks faster.  
3. You will be able to delegate more effectively. 
4. You won’t have to remember everything.   
5. You will be proactive with your schedule and get things done in advance so you can avoid a lot of running around frantically trying to finish a lot of last-minute things. There is no more “oh crap, I forgot we have to do this” for me…for the most part J. 
6. This will decrease time it takes to train a new hire. 
7. You will eliminate variables affecting execution-person, time of day, mood. 
8. It won’t matter who is on your staff, the work will be able to be done the same way as always with little training time.  
9. Things will be more stable. 
10. Great execution every time adds up to something very good over the long term. 
11. When things are proactively worked on and completed well in advance, your time is freed up to focus on your team.  

This all sounds amazing right?  

I want to suggest this year that instead of trying to remember what needs to be done to have a well-planned out and an organized preseason that runs smoothly, I want you to create a master to-do list.  

I know, I know, you have heard me talk about it before.  BUT have you actually done one or are you still just winging it? 

You can’t build a powerhouse program on randomness.  

And the best way that I have found to eliminate running around like a chicken-with-your-head-cut-off and always feeling busy is to work off of this list. 

A daily to-do list for coaches tends to be a reactive list – it’s based on what has just recently come up and is in your immediate area of concern for that time.  

As you are working through your reactive list, by the end of the day you have worked hard, done lots, but achieved very little. 

Sound familiar? 

It makes for a “busy” coach – but not necessarily an effective coach. It’s like you’re always chasing your tail! 

Getting organized so you can be less “busy” means creating a proactive system that works best for you and saves you time and effort. 

I believe being proactive begins by making a master list of everything you can think of that has to be done over the course of your preseason over the course of the year as a coach.   

You are welcome to take the master to-do list that I had created for my program.  It is soccer specific so just make it applicable to your sport and program. Download now

This master to-do list holds all of the tasks that need to get done over the course of the year–and gets them out of your brain until you’re ready to act.   This list then becomes the central control list for your coaching life.   

You could organize your master to-do list by the month that you should work on it.   That way you already have a list that covers everything that you can be proactive on in the coming weeks so I can avoid rushing to do it last minute.    

At the beginning of the month, I pick a few things from my master to-do list and put them into my daily planning pages in my Busy Coach daily planner that I created.   

Being proactive on my to-do list has made it easier to meet goals, it has reduced a lot of busyness, and I have been able to work more efficiently. 

I also just made this YouTube video talking about more in depth about how you can use this list. 

Take a look and if there is anything else I can do to help, please lmk.    

To your success,  

Mandy Green