The key to peace of mind as a Longhorn Coach is found in the past teachings of golf Coach Pat Weis, golf coach Harvey Penick, football Coach Royal, and soccer coach Pibulvech .
Recently, there was a penetrating and revealing article in the Alcalde magazine written by Chris O'Connell about volleyball Coach Jerritt Elliot. The article shares some of the internal struggles and disappointments he has experienced as Head Coach of the Longhorn volleyball empire. His comments in Alcalde are symptomatic of what happens to Longhorns Coaches when they win too much.
No one can deny that Coach Elliott is one of the most successful coaches in college sports history, but like other great coaches before him, there is a downside to winning most games but falling short at the end. Coach Royal, Abe Lemmons, Coach Pat Weis, Coach Harvey Penick, Coach Pibulvech, Mack Brown, and Coach Elliott represent a unique fraternity where winning too much generates unrealistic fan expectations.
In the Alcalde article, Coach Elliott says that the expectations—some largely self-imposed—had taken a bit of the joy out of winning; it was commonplace. "The more you win, the more miserable coaching becomes," he says, "because you're expected to win those games, and there's not a lot of joy from it." DKR walked in Coach Elliott's shoes. After deciding to resign, Royal said, "Winning did not excite him anymore, and he found it difficult to recover mentally from losses. He said, "Climbing is a thrill. Maintaining is a Bitch." Abe Lemmons says, "You build a monster, and the monster eats you."
The fans were unhappy after Notre Dame ended the T’s winning streak at 30 games. Royal said, "There are some people around here who think all we have to do is put on an orange uniform, crawl out there in the Wishbone, and say, 'Bang, you're dead'’"
Many fans attacked even Mack Brown. For seven years, Mack never won a Big 12 championship. Critics sniped that he was better in the living rooms of high school seniors than on the sidelines as a coach. He was tagged with the name COACH FEBRUARY. They referred to Mack Brown as a great recruiter but a poor coach.
Author Chris O'Connell for Alcalde shares a Coach Elliott story that defines unrealistic fan expectations. In the article, Elliott says he ran into Geno Auriemma, the coach for the Connecticut women's basketball team, just after his Connecticut women's basketball team was bounced out of the NCAA Tournament in the Final Four. Auriemma has won 11 national championships with UConn, including four straight earlier this decade. His team lost three games in five seasons for one stretch in the same decade.
Auriemma says, "All my fans think I'm losing it. They think I'm not a good coach anymore because I've been undefeated, but I lost in the Final Four the last two years," Auriemma told Elliott.
Former women's golf coach Pat Weis has come close to winning a couple of national championships, but from the beginning of her coaching career, she accepted that "winning simply cannot be a Coaches only goal." She said, "One team and one team wins" the national championship.
Harvey Penick, one of the most incredible golf instructors ever, said, "Giving luck a chance gave players a high probability of scoring." Another way of saying that a coach's essential responsibility to their players is to prepare the athletes for a high probability of winning.
Royal understood that preparation for a game increased the chance of "giving luck a chance. "Royal said that "luck happens when preparation meets opportunity." Bobby Lackey said we beat a more talented Bear Bryant Texas A&M team in 1957 because Royal prepared us for the game.
In the book Darrell Royal “Dance With Who Brung Ya,” Duke Carlisle says that Royal was a "genius at organization and preparation." "I never went into a game and felt like the other team was better prepared than we were." "You figure if you go out there and do your job, you will win the game, or at least unlikely to lose because of a stupid mistake or mental error."
Past Longhorn soccer Coach Pibulvech shares the most crucial point that helps a coach reconcile reality with expectations. He says you can’t allowing winning and losing to determine self-worth. He warns coaches not to gauge success by winning a once-in-a-lifetime national championship. Instead, a coach should build a program that gives the team a lifetime of chances to win the national title.
Coach Elliott has accomplished that goal.
Elliott seeks volleyball title redemption
by Cedric Golden- Austin American Statesman December 17, 2022
OMAHA, Neb. — Jerritt Elliott lives for this.
Breathes it. Sleeps it. Eats it. Yet he has to constantly prove himself. The Texas volleyball coach should invest in a timeshare at the Final Four because his teams always seem to make it here.
The 14 Big 12 titles and early bracketology success aside, multiple national championships haven’t followed the amazing consistency Texas has shown in the tournament, particularly in the second half of his 22-year tenure.
Yet Elliott keeps plugging, putting in the work required to keep this train aiming toward greatness year after year. He believes the payoff will happen if he continues to pour himself into his craft.
“How do we keep this thing going?” said Elliott, the nine-time Big 12 coach of the year. ”I don’t sleep very much, and I’m always concerned about letting this thing fall apart. And it’s relentless effort of every aspect of it all.”
He lives it. Breathes it. Eats it. Saturday’s title clash with Louisville
is the latest opportunity to make history in a sport that has not only afforded him a tremendous living but allowed him to grow and develop young adults not only as players but as people. Elliott has earned every penny of a salary that’s in the neighborhood of $600,000. He recruits the top high school talent and navigates the transfer portal like a Fortune 500 headhunter while checking every detail of his operation — budgets, logistics, his players’ mental health and well-being, etc. — with the aplomb of a seasoned CEO.
“I’m basically running an enterprise now,” he said after the Horns arrived in Omaha. “I have eight people underneath me and there’s a ton of work that needs to be done. My athletic department has allowed me to hire some phenomenal coaches.”
It’s a sport, but Elliott treats it like a business. He delegates offensive and defensive duties to assistants David Hunt and Erik Sullivan while the support staff is there to make sure everything else runs smoothly. All the while, he’s the overseer of everything Texas volleyball, carefully blending the right portions of tough love and humanity when it comes to his most valuable assets, the players. He has grown in the job and found a good balance between his professional and personal life.
Elliott’s wife, Andrea, has been a constant positive presence, providing moral support and living and dying with every point. “It’s much easier to play than to watch,” she said Thursday.
So, the enterprise is thriving, but the man in the big office needs more hardware in that trophy case. It’s a never-ending pursuit.
For Texas, getting there may be half the fun, but winning there has proven difficult. In five trips to the NCAA championship match, his Horns have produced one title, a 2012 sweep of Oregon behind the exploits of first-team All-Americans Haley Eckerman and Bailey Webster.
That epic 29-4 season represents the last time a campus program in a traditional team sport captured a national championship, that is, until rowing posted repeat NCAA titles in 2021 and 2022.
It was also the beginning of an amazing run of five consecutive Final Fours, though another title was not in the offing. Texas lost in the national semifinals in 2013 and 2014, then finished as the runner-up to fellow volleyball blue bloods Nebraska and Stanford in 2015 and 2016, respectively.
Ellliott’s 7-8 record in Final Fours includes a national semifinal appearance with USC in 2000 — he took the Texas job a year later — and speaks to just how tough it has been to break through on the sport’s biggest stage.
Saturday’s is the program’s eighth appearance in a title game — trailing only Stanford (17), Penn State (10), and Nebraska (10) all time — so it’s obvious that Elliott has taken what Mick Haley built and kept the momentum going.
Which begs the question: isn’t making it to the Final Four also breaking through? Sure it is, but breaking through in such consistent fashion can often be overlooked and quickly dismissed as underachieving. Elliott knows that ultimately, it isn’t enough to just make it here.
It’s a results-based business and while his .833 winning percentage is exemplary, the Forty Acres has become championship central of late. Tennis. Track and field. Golf. Rowing. Swimming and diving. All have tasted national title nectar in recent seasons. It’s volleyball’s turn.
No team ever won a national volleyball title without making it to a national semifinals first, so there is something to be said for what he has accomplished. The 54-year-old father of three would agree that it would suck to make it this far and leave town without that big trophy sitting on his lap on the flight home, but for every Elliott who has coached in 11 Final Fours, there are scores of others who have yet to reach his level of consistency.
“He has built a dynasty,” Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly said. “Every year they’re expected to be in the Final Four and I know when they’re not in the Final Four, people are asking, ‘What’s wrong with Texas this year?’ So it’s a pretty hard spot to be in and it’s a lot of pressure year in and year out. They handle it really well.”
A win would break a three-game losing skid in national championship matches dating back to the 2015 loss to the Cornhuskers, and also would make the Horns the eighth school to win at least three NCAA titles. That doesn’t include the program’s first championship at the 1981 AIAW tournament.
Common sense says that if he keeps stacking national semifinals appearances, championships will have to follow. Even though Logan Eggleston, Texas’ face of the program, is wrapping up her illustrious college career Saturday — she was named the AVCA’s national player of the year on Friday — Elliott’s cupboard is stocked for the future.
Sophomore outside hitter Madisen Skinner has future player of the year written all over her and will have plenty of support next season from veteran stars Asjia O’Neal and Molly Phillips.
So another chance to take it all will present itself with a packed house expected at CHI Health Center and a couple of million more expected to tune in. Expect fireworks from two national juggernauts who will walk onto the court with a combined record of 117-6 the past two seasons.
Elliott’s loaded team of six All-Americans should be favored to notch his second national title, but it won’t be easy. Championships rarely are.
That’s the beauty of it all. When the final ball is struck and the final whistle blown, the Horns will either dogpile on their side of the court for the fifth time in program history or make that painful walk up to the net to shake hands with the victorious Cardinals.
Whatever the result, Elliott will get back to work. After all, this is his life’s passion, his company, his vocation and his reason for coaching.
He will continue to live it, breathe it and eat it.
A good CEO never rests.
