Navigating day 1 in a new job: Advice from 3 experts

Season openers, first day of the play-offs, opening ceremonies, first day of preseason… sports give us plenty of Day 1s to organize our lives around, whether we’re coming at them as fans or practitioners. These are on the calendar well in advance, and if you somehow miss the memo you’re not going to miss the marketing campaign nor the “did ya see?” texts from colleagues, athletes and maybe their parents.

Any of those Day 1s can be a source of stress, anxiety and uncertainty, to go along with the excitement and anticipation. Perhaps none as much as the one that only a few people know about: yours. Whether this is your first day of your first (paid, actually on the staff) job or the first day of your fifth job in three years and tenth in 12 years spanning three states or three countries, it’s the first day that you get to do “your stuff” with a fresh group of athletes.

Fresh to you, that is. Maybe it’s been a few months, maybe it’s been a few days, but not too long ago many of those athletes were in the same gym doing some other guy’s stuff.

Before that, either here or somewhere else, they were doing someone else’s stuff.

Even if you’re working in fantasy football – our version of fantasy football, where all the athletes have developed perfect technique, positive habits, are receptive to learning and have never once been influenced by influencers on YouTube or TikTok – they still have preferences. They still have habits and routines. They still have valid reasons to hesitate, eyeroll or mumble when the next new guy shows up gunning to make his or her Day 1 a full scale realization of team-wide triphasic training, weaponized warmups, detailed technical paradigms or minimalistic task-oriented constraint-based learning.

A different set of trending topics attach to productive Day 1s: microdosing, progressions and regressions, pedagogy. Underlying those are few less trendy and, therefore, probably more valuable, concepts: preparation and basic human relations.

T-minus two weeks, if you’re lucky: Preparing for Day 1

Every few jobs, you’ll arrive with a couple of weeks to review what your predecessors did in the role, examine training plans and data, send a quick get-to-know-you email to the athletes and have some solid face time with the coaching staff about their technical model, with the sports medicine and physio staff about injury patterns, and with the cafeteria staff because it’s utterly basic that you should always be on good terms with the people who make your food.

Often, though, you’re coming in blind, hard and fast.

You might be hoping to grab a coffee with the head coach and assistant coach 36 hours before Day 1 of 10 days of preseason leading into an eight week season.

Maybe you have a week to familiarize yourself with the facility before you have your first day with the athletes. That can help you figure out the logistics and the flow of those first few sessions, and do some forensics on what you’ve walked into.

Better yet, you might have the roster.

“The first day I was in the building at the University of Texas, I was on the field during a session. I had a bit of a benefit because the staff there had been my strength staff in college, so I knew what they were about. But it was a short runway there, just like it was with my first full time position at University of Minnesota. Day one, before I even finished all the paperwork, I trained the sprinters and jumpers for track,” said Matt Van Dyke, Director of Sport Science for the Houston Texans.

“When I left Minnesota, I might have had 10 days to move down to start the job at the University of Denver. From there, I had maybe a week in the weight room prior to all the athletes returning. I was around the gym, but it was the last break before the season started.

“I had probably 160 athletes that first year at Denver, so I sat down to try to know as many names as I could in those 10 days. Because that’s a huge win when you walk in and you already know everybody’s name.”

If the roster includes an email address to go with name, age, position and height, you can learn a few things that will show up on the Day 1 program as well as take a big step towards the second half of everyone’s favorite coaching aphorism: “…until they know how much you care.”

Rett Larson, strength & conditioning coach for the German national women’s volleyball team, “touch[es] base before I ever meet them over an email that’s super quick and easy. Just introducing myself and asking a couple questions to get to know them. I don’t need a big thing – just give me the bullet points:

• What have your previous S&C coaches done that you love? What exercises do you go to war with? And what exercises do you just hate?
• What are your biggest weaknesses as a player that you think I could help you with?
• What are three of your favorite workout or pregame songs?

“Then I can send a very quick reply to each. ‘Oh OK, if your quad strength has been a problem that’s led to pain, you’re going to love the warm ups that we do. I’m going to start putting a bunch of isometrics in there that really benefitted my last team’s quad strength, and in the weight room we’ll do some customized tweaks for you so you get a little more out of it.’

“That’s a three email exchange. Now I can start to plan with an idea of how each athlete is going to respond. If I’ve done the replies well, then every athlete is hopefully excited that I’m going to help with whatever their biggest worry is. And I’ve taken a step towards relatedness because they’ll hear their favorite song in the gym along with everyone else’s (and what I want to listen to, since I’m in there longer than they are) on the playlist I put together for the team.”

Ideally you’ll come in knowing not only who your athletes are but what they’ve been doing.

Adam Petway, head strength & conditioning coach for the University of Louisville’s men’s basketball team, recalls a previous job: “I didn’t have anything from the last guy. I asked questions about what the previous person did, and knew it was all 10 reps to failure, high intensity, high volume. Beyond that, I just saw the weight room, the old school Hammer Strength lat pull downs, saw the machines, the fact there was no room on the platform. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I understand what’s going on here.’”

That gave Petway a starting point for his first few workouts, and something to keep in his back pocket for later.

“I knew they were used to doing 10+ reps on every compound movement, whereas I’d rarely go past eight. They had the basic literacy in what I wanted to teach, and their muscular endurance was off the charts, so if I ever needed it, it was there.”

After reverse engineering some recent training programmes, if necessary, coaches can start sketching out how their first few sessions are going to run. Critically inspecting what you have to work with can prevent a lot of friction in the first session by taking you out of your old context and placing you fully in your new one.

Facilities and logistics constrain you as anything you can devise to constrain your athletes.

“We all understand that the environments change, but we have to think about how that changes our planning and workouts,” Van Dyke said.

“As an intern at Minnesota working with the men’s and women’s hockey teams, we had a rack per player. Maybe two players per rack. Then I went up to St. Cloud where we had a grand total of eight racks, and I was training an entire men’s and women’s swim team at the same time. Logistically, how I have to go about planning that program is significantly different than what we were able to do at Minnesota.”

Planning and implementing “your stuff” gets even more mundane than that.

“Thinking back to my time at Denver, one of the first mistakes I made was introducing a different workout sheet, full of the terminology I was used to using. So before we could even get into the exercise selection and programming, I had to teach the group how to read that sheet.”

Proof of work leads to proof of concept

Athletes don’t want to have their time wasted any more than anyone else. If a new coach causes them to ask each other “Are we at the weight room or the DMV?” you can forget all about buy in and VBT.

But on Day 1, there may be a trade off between building buy in through a frictionless execution of the session and laying down the marker on your preferred training concepts or modalities. It’s easier to teach VBT in Week 2 than it is to regain the athletes’ trust in your professional competence.

“Early on, I would make the mistake of trying to change everything immediately, instead of picking 1-2 rocks that we can really address,” Petway acknowledges. “Ensure the athletes can do a bodyweight squat before you start programming around back squats. If you try to do too much right away, you end up not accomplishing anything.

“With the jumps crew at Westchester University, I could slow walk it a bit. My big rocks were things like six and eight step approaches, the penultimate step, pelvic position on the board. Those are ‘big rock’ technical things that we could hit in the first few sessions and that can lead to a big jump.

“Then I can look at what gaps need to be filled, what can I facilitate and what do we really need to work on.”

Those “big rocks” are the platform for everything that will come later. The early sessions establish the baseline athletic competence you need the athletes to have for “your stuff” down the road, as well as what they can expect from you in terms of coaching style, communication and pedagogy.

“On the first two days I pick my battles,” Larson says, “and then it’s rock and roll.” Or, as the case may be if you’ve seen his viral warmups, K-Pop, boy bands and Taylor.

“In the first month of training, I’m just narrating like a crazy person. The why behind everything we’re doing. For every jokey silly exercise, I’m talking about how important it is for differential learning. I could give the impression that I’m just talking way too much, but I do just enough that I can get the buy in that I need and then moving on.”

Larson describes his “weaponized warmups” as a Trojan Horse. The dancing, the modified elementary school PE games, the hula hoops and the gamification of nearly everything are ways for him to smuggle in sport-specific thermogenics, isometrics, joint stability, coordination and sociolinguistic programming. Like the original on the plains of Troy, though, it’s not enough to just build a big wooden horse – you have to convince the gatekeepers to open the doors to the city and bring the horse in. That might require as much subterfuge as the horse itself.

“When I came to China I was the new guy on seven different Chinese teams. I had to give the Western style of things, in a country where they don’t high five – too froo froo, too USA. And my style is even more out there than the baseline Western style. 

“I know the athletes are going to love it. They have their strict disciplinarian teachers, and now I’m there as the fun guy. But I can’t be the fun guy unless I’m also the guy that leaves them sweaty.

“In the beginning, I’ve got to leave them more sore than they’ve ever been. Of course, I know that’s not good coaching, but that is the sweat equity and the soreness equity that I need to prove myself. Specifically in the Chinese environment, in order to be the fun coach I also have to be the coach that makes the girls’ glutes more sore than they’ve ever been in their lives, makes their abs so sore that they can’t laugh the next day, because that’s what will get all the coaches talking.

“The coaches will say, ‘Oh, I thought our girls had strong abs. I thought our girls had strong legs. Rett did one weight training session with them and they’re so sore they can’t walk the next day.’

“That’s terrible training. I know this, but it was one of my keys to success in China. It gave me the leverage that gave me the space to do my work, because the coaches weren’t worried that I’m not going to make the players stronger. I could say, hey, listen, I can do both.”

Taking the full measure of your first day

Less dramatic shifts in culture and context than Larson’s still factor into a new coach’s first days on the job.

Where on their calendar is your Day 1?

“One of the easiest wins that you can have when you’re taking a new position, especially in the collegiate environment, is to understand the requirements of in-season vs. off-season, using that to develop an annual plan and then coming in to your first week knowing right where you are in that rhythm,” Van Dyke says.

“Our volleyball team at Denver played twice a week. But our lacrosse team almost never did, nor did the teams I worked with at the University of Texas or now with the Texans.

“University of Denver also ran their school calendar by quarters, not semesters. That was entirely new to me. We had to plan knowing that we only had 7-8 weeks with the team before they would leave, if they weren’t a fall sport. Then, when they come back after Thanksgiving, they would be walking into their version of training camp. In the spring, the national championship week was during finals. Every other team in the tournament is pretty much done with school, and we’re administering final exams in the hotel. You really have to understand the stressors the athletes are going through, and learning from the head coach how they handle practices against these other demands.”

“And don’t forget that at Denver,” he adds, “when they come back from a six week break to resume training, they’re coming back to elevation.”

Are you the short-timer, or are they?

Summers are now the transfer window for American colleges, which is increasing the level of athlete turnover. Stack that on top of the churn among coaches and performance practitioners, and stability is becoming as rare as it is in pro sports. An athlete may feel like she knows more about coaches’ Day 1s than we do because she’s been on the receiving end of so many.

“Plan for the worst, hope for the best,” is how Adam Petway summarizes his approach to transfers, turnover and the shifting rules in college sports.

“One of my colleagues once said that we have to do three years of work in one year. I think that’s the worst mistake a performance coach could make. Don’t try to change everything all at once. Get out on the court, determine each player’s strengths and weaknesses relative to sporting activity, identify their technical characteristics on the court, track, rink.

“If you come in and one of the athletes is a fifth year transfer, just get him to the line because you may only have him for eight months. On the other hand, you’ll have the freshmen in your squad for at least 24 months. With them, from the first day you can start doing your full needs analysis, set the KPIs and work through your big rocks. Then, if you’ve accomplished those things and you get a third or fourth year with them, you’ve put yourself in a place where you can now hit those tertiary and lower goals.”

Athletes who face a lot of turnover amongst their coaching and performance staff may justifiably hold that against the next incoming coach. Why should they expect you to stay if the others didn’t?

“For some, I’ll be their third strength coach in three years,” Petway said.

“Of all those things you can do from the start, if you get to know an athlete outside of the weight room or the court, you get some sustainability that you can use for buy in and motivation on the court. If you have no backstory on any of the athletes and you’re just the latest guy who does sets and reps, it’ll be very difficult to get performance out of them.”

Is this their first Day 1 with a new coach, or closer to their last?

Youth, college and Academy sports all have a pretty narrow age range of athletes. But at the pro level, it’s now common to have a 20-year spread across the squad.

Van Dyke: “Some of them are as young as 20-21. Your time for development is very limited in the professional setting, at least in the NFL. Those younger players have obviously met the physical barriers necessary to play at the collegiate level, and they might tell us something that they’ve found success with. If that matches up, at least from a physiology standpoint, with our strategy for maintaining strength throughout the season, addressing double and single leg efforts, and the like, we’re going to give that athlete a bit more freedom while also educating them on why they should come back towards something that’s closer to what we’re producing with the team as a whole.

“On the other hand, you also have some guys in their 30s. They’ve seen all of the gimmicks, they’ve seen all these things. They just want to know: are you there to help them get better?

“Having a ‘why’ behind everything that you’re doing in training becomes really valuable at either end of the age scale. If they don’t understand why something’s being done, you have to relate it to how it’s going to help them improve physically.”

Petway also has moved back and forth between college and pro sports. “In the NBA, you’re dealing with grown men, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th contacts, several guys older than I was. What are you trying to accomplish with an 18 year old freshman who’s never lifted a weight nor done anything outside of playing basketball? 

“Teaching your players their routine and the standard of how pros work is the biggest thing you can give them right from the beginning.”

Why are you there?

No, this isn’t a deep existential question about motivation, meaning and fulfillment in the workplace.

You’re starting a new job. Someone else recently had that job. Now they don’t, and you do. Why don’t they, and why do you?

The answers to those questions should influence your approach to your first day, and the trajectory you take over your first few weeks and months implementing “your system.” If the previous person was sacked due to poor results or high injury rates, you may be there to completely turn things around and to do it quickly before things get worse. This would especially be the case if your first day is midseason. On the other hand, maybe your predecessor took a better paying job in a more competitive league, and they set the absolute standard against which your every rep will be judged. If that’s the case, do you still come in strong or do you strategically turn down the ego volume on Day 1 with the plan to incrementally restore it to normal levels as you prove your abilities?

“Depending on the setting you enter, it will be really key to understand why the previous coaching staff isn’t there. Is it because they weren’t doing such a great job? Let’s say an athlete or a large group of athletes did not enjoy the previous coaching. Then it’s good to change a lot of things at once, create some buy in that way by demonstrating that it’s going to be different,” Matt Van Dyke says.

“But if the last coach took a better position at a different school, then it could be detrimental to getting buy in if you come in and start flipping everything they’ve been taught on its head. There’s give and take, and some of those nuanced pieces can really create an understanding of how much change you should make right away.”

The recruiting, interview and hiring process will hopefully set the expectations and remove any surprises. Particularly when hiring someone like Rett Larson, the higher-ups have to know what they’re getting themselves into.

“Coming into the positions in the Netherlands and Germany, in each case the head coach came to me and said, ‘Rett, I think you’re going to be great here because we have a young team. We’re not currently podium material, but we need a competitive differentiator and I’m looking to aggregate all the marginal gains that the rest of the world are overlooking.’

“What I sell back to them is, yes, I’m also all about that. They might know me because of the silly dancing in the warmup. But then I talk them through how that’s one little thing I do, the Trojan Horse, and all the things that go into my design, how I tick every box, give the athletes and the coaches what they all need, and how I can justify everything that goes into a warmup or gym work.”

Big rocks for them, big rocks for us

We’ve spent over 3,000 words talking about Day 1 as some kind of special phenomenon, but in the end, it’s another day of being a sports performance practitioner. If we take care of our “big rocks” on the first day, we’re in a good position to take care of theirs – and to reinforce the right habits and mindsets within ourselves.

“Biggest thing,” says Adam Petway, “is don’t try to change everything all at once. Create habits initially, then build from that. If you come in guns blazing, you’re going to fail.”

Matt Van Dyke boils the job down to what it really is: “This business is a people business. The X’s and O’s are great and they really matter to the program. But younger coaches – myself included – come in thinking ‘Oh yeah, I can program this place up and down.’

“The thing I’ve learned is that you get to the X’s and O’s through the human aspect. Only once you master those human relationships are you in a position to worry about triphasics or biometrics. If you can’t relate to the person in front of you, something that starts from your very first interaction with everyone you meet that first day, they’re already checking out on you as a human.”

For Rett Larson, who has had numerous Day 1s, dag degenen, Tag diejenigen and Yītiān de, knowing where you are – your context – is key.

“First and foremost, to get buy in so you can then be able to do anything you freaking want, you’ve got to understand the sport and you’ve got to be able to speak the language of the sport. Then make everything you do look more like sport practice than S&C work.

“Show the head coach that you are helping him through whatever you are doing with the athletes. Have that talk, then have the same conversation with the physio. Lay it out for them: Every time there’s something bothering them, they’ve got to give it to me. Whatever their headache with this team, just give it to me and I’m going to rack my brain thinking of ways that I can tackle it from any way necessary.

“I call it making yourself an agent of alignment, or an architect of alignment. Everyone feels heard. My physio feels heard because we’re doing all of his favorite rehab exercises. My head coach feels heard because we’re working on single leg jumping abilities that he’s been worried about. And the athletes are all getting to play fun games, doing something different and knowing that they are getting better for their sport.” 

Don’t get caught off guard by Day 2

An opening day win or topping the leaderboard after your first round of the season has limited predictive value for the next game or round, let alone where you or your team will finish the season.  Athletics is particularly silly when they announce an athlete’s world leading mark in late February or early March, before most athletes have even opened their season. Sports is a results business, and Day 1 is just one day of many leading towards a succession of goals and milestones.

Whatever happens on your first day, you’re coming back the next day. A well executed Day 1 gives you a platform and a bit of momentum for Day 2, and Day 2 is an opportunity to correct any mistakes and build on the successes.

Day 1 is just another day on the job. Another memorable, impression making, high intensity, tone setting, over-indexed day that we all experience many times. If an opening day – yours or theirs – isn’t enough to get you excited, you’re missing out on some of the joys of what we do.