Books building Iowa's culture
You won’t find this class in any course catalog at the University of Iowa.
Course credit won’t be given or grade assigned.
For any Hawkeye football player it might be the most important class that they take during their time at the University of Iowa each and every year.
The course doesn’t have a specific name. It’s simply reading a book provided by the Iowa coaching staff and then discussing the lessons learned with teammates and applying it to playing the game of football.
This unconventional path to helping build, maintain, and enhance the culture that is so important to the success of the Iowa program under Kirk Ferentz began back on January 15, 2015.
To say the Hawkeyes were smarting when they returned to campus after winter break would be an understatement.
Iowa had just been trounced in the Tax Slayer Bowl by Tennessee, or as offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz referred to it, the Hawk Slayer Bowl. The final score of the game 45-28, but that’s really not indicative of how lopsided the game was in Jacksonville.
“At that point we were pretty humbled and disgraced by the way we ended that season,” said strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle. “Those guys were pretty hungry and motivated to change. All we really had to do was offer encouragement and tell them that we thought this book would be good for them.”
Doyle, who has been the strength coach since Kirk Ferentz arrived at Iowa as the head coach in 1999, is one of the most respected coaches in his line of work and the backbone of the success that the Hawkeyes have enjoyed since Ferentz returned to Iowa City.
If there’s an innovation in strength training, he’s on the cutting edge of it. He’s always looking for new ways to find an edge and he and Ferentz are also avid readers. Doyle is particularly interested in the areas of leadership, team development, and culture, so once the Iowa team returned to campus the leadership council was given a reading assignment.
The book was “The Slight Edge” by Jeff Olsen. It’s much more than your usual self-help book. It’s a book that shows you by making simple daily life choices, you can find success in happiness. It also shows how you can create powerful results based on your daily activities in your life.
The concept was simple. The leadership group would read the book. The challenging part was that then that group would teach the concepts of the book to the rest of the Iowa football team and show how it applies to what they do on a daily basis.
“They delivered the message because they actually taught the concepts, so they had ownership and accountability. I think that’s what really drove it home because it was organic and came from within as far as development and delivery,” Doyle said.
This group was hungry to change the way they were feeling after the embarrassing loss. It was the right concept at the right time and they ate it up.
The result was evident on the field. Iowa rebounded from a very low point in the Tax Slayer Bowl to go 12-0 in the 2015 regular season and eventually played in the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1991.
While it would be easy to point to “The Slight Edge” as the reason for the Hawkeye turnaround in 2015, it was more than that, according to Doyle.
“It’s not about a book. It’s about a group of guys with a common commitment, common sacrifices, and common goals holding each other accountable. It’s the readers of the book, not the book itself.”
Last year, Doyle once again had a book of the year selection for the team. This time it was a book called, “Legacy” that chronicles the long time success of New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team.
The concept came from Doyle and the Iowa coaches, but it’s really been the players who have led the process of development as readers, leaders, and teachers of the books that have been selected.
“Reading has been a great vehicle. In a team atmosphere when you have common sacrifice, if you have everyone reading together, discussing together, and learning together, we can apply those things from outside our program to help improve our program and accelerate the learning process for our players when it comes to self-development, team development, and organizational behavior.”
The idea of the players teaching the book has also allowed the coaches to provide reminders of the messages to the team to keep them accountable during the season.
“As coaches, when we listen to this kid’s present concepts and messages from these books, we get to listen to what motivates them and what makes them tick. Then we can utilize that as coaches and feed back to them during the summer, in fall camp, and during the season, and say, you guys said this was important. This isn’t coming from us. This is coming from you.”
In the Iowa weight room there are 20 signs hanging high above on the walls. That’s messages were developed from the lessons learned and serve as daily reminders to the team and the coaching staff of the team that they want to be each year.
What this comes down in its simplest form is building a culture within the Iowa program. Culture is one of those buzz words you hear a lot in sports today. Every winning team touts it as part of the reason for their success on the field. Make no mistake, culture has always been important for Kirk Ferentz, but how can you maintain it and improve it from year to year?
“We spend and incredible amount of time planning. From eating, recruiting, game plans, and strength and conditioning,” Doyle said. “Are you going to ignore culture? If we are spending countless hours planning and organizing, shouldn’t we take an hour a week and talk about the culture of our program and how we are developing our thought process and our mindset?”
For Iowa and Doyle, it’s about creating a culture where the players are thinking the right way. If he can do that, then the culture will be there for success on the field.
“If our guys are thinking right, it doesn’t matter what we are running. If we are thinking right, we are going to move the football. Defensively, if we are thinking right, it will get executed right if our guys are hungry, defeat blocks, and run to the football.”
The Iowa coaches took this book concept to the next level once they returned to campus this winter. It would no longer simply be the leadership group teaching one book, but each leader would now have their own book and lead a small group of between 8-10 players reading their own book. Also included in that discussion groups would be one coach and he would be specifically assigned to try and avoid having the players position coach also be in their group.
The leadership group would draft players to their “team” and then after that was completed, they would select their book in reverse order. So, if you had the first pick in the player draft, you had the last pick of the book draft.
Doyle’s book selections this spring included three books by renowned author Jon Gordon and included: "The Energy Bus", "You Win in the Locker Room First", and "Training Camp: What the best do better than everyone else". He also had “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni, Andy Andrews book “Travelers Gift”, and “Leader without a Title” by Robin Sharma. The team and coaches has also been reading “Extreme Ownership” by former Navy Seals Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.
The positive development from the smaller group setting has been in forces each and every player to participate. If your leadership group is teaching just one book to the entire team, often the discussion group would likely be among a smaller group of players interacting. The small group provides a setting where veteran players along with young players can feel comfortable engaging in the discussions.
“You can’t sit in the room and not participate,” Doyle said. “Smaller groups forces more participation and conversation. If you sit in a room with 120 guys, eight or ten guys are going to probably dominate the conversation. If you have eight teams with 8-10 kids on each team reading the book, everyone is going to participate.”
The other benefit from this new version of the Iowa reading club is it leads to the breaking down on sometimes inherent barriers on a football team. There’s a tendency for players from a certain position or side of the football to spend most of their time together. Players from a certain class also spend time together.
With the draft of players to each small group setting, players from different classes and positions are teaming up and breaking down barriers.
“It creates interaction among guys on offense and defense. It creates interaction between younger guys and older guys. With the draft, every team is going to have young guys on it that kind of need to get with the system and they have to mentor those guys,” Doyle explained.
As this reading concept has developed over the past three years, it has also had a passing of the torch feel to it. Early on, younger players are in more of a student role. They listen and learn from the veteran leaders. As they grow through the years, they move from the student role to teacher, leading the discussions and teaching the lessons learned.
“You see guys grow from it,” Doyle said. “You don’t think (Nathan) Bazata wasn’t taking notes when Drew Ott was leading? He was taking notes and now it’s his turn to lead and teach about a winning organizations. I think that’s a natural part of the growth process.”
Back when this started in early 2015, it was hard to predict if this idea of reading a book as a team would take hold. It was an outside the box idea that is now headed into its third year and continues to evolve, grow, and prosper.
Course credit for a class on team building and leadership taught by their peers will not be on the transcript of any Iowa player when they graduate. What began as a concept to bring a team closer and enhance the culture of a team, has become the best course that any Hawkeye football player will take during their time at the University of Iowa with life lessons that will serve them well beyond their time as a student in Iowa City.