Valorie Kondos Field

speaker

140 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Valorie Kondos Field’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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And I knew nothing about how to develop a team culture.

The best I could do was mimic other coaches who had won.

And so I became tough-talking, tough-minded, relentless, unsympathetic, bullish, unempathetic and oftentimes downright mean.

I acted like a head coach whose only thought was to figure out how to win.

My first few seasons as a head coach were abysmal.

And after putting up with my brash coaching style for a few years, our team asked me for a team meeting.

Well, I love team meetings, so I said, yay, let's have a team meeting.

And for two solid hours, they gave me examples of how my arrogance was hurtful and demeaning.

Yeah, not yay.

Yay.

They explained to me that they wanted to be supported, not belittled.

They wanted to be coached up, not torn down.

They wanted to be motivated, not pressured or bullied.

That was my time out, and I chose to change.

Being a dogmatic dictator may produce compliant, good little soldiers, but it doesn't develop champions in life.

It is so much easier in any walk of life to dictate and give orders than to actually figure out how to motivate someone to want to be better.

And the reason is, we all know this, motivation takes a really long time to take root.

But when it does, it is character-building and life-altering.

I realized that I needed to fortify our student athletes as whole human beings, not just athletes who won.

So success for me shifted from only focusing on winning to developing my coaching philosophy, which is developing champions in life through sport.

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