Sticky ideas from 2025
Tournament observations, transfer portal realities, and the wisdom that stuck around
To finish off 2025, I wanted to share some ideas or takeaways that swirled around my brain for days, weeks, or even months afterward.
“Don’t be a complainer that doesn’t offer solutions.”
Anna Camden’s reel, spoken from the perspective of a former Penn State and Richmond basketball player, quickly hits on a lot of things coaches tell players, but they tend not to believe until it’s too late.
So hearing this from an athlete carries a lot of weight.
The section on playing time mirrors a lot of what most coaches experience: complaining and blaming, but not taking enough ownership.
Remember, when you point a finger at someone, there are three pointing back at yourself! “Don’t be a complainer that doesn’t offer solutions” is great life advice in general.
“Coaches are there to see exceptional. Not average”
Andre Luciano comes from the soccer world, but almost everything he talks about can be related to field hockey, too.
A hill I will die on is that the gap between club and college hockey is significantly bigger than most recruits and families imagine it to be.
Most families prepare their daughters to be solid. But solid doesn't get recruited at showcases where coaches are hunting for standouts.
It may not be a surprise, then, that three of my highest-engagement newsletters of 2025 were all tournament observations: what I saw at specific events that families missed.
Families go to these tournaments. They watch the same games coaches watch. But they don’t know what coaches are actually seeing.
That gap - between attending and understanding - is where recruiting advantage lives.
The families who succeed aren’t just showing up. They’re decoding what matters. What gets written in coaches’ notebooks. What separates “attended” from “recruited.”
Here are the articles in case you missed them: the first one is free, the other two are only for paid subscribers.
“You joined us. We didn’t join you.”
The All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, have been the subject of more books and articles on leadership and team culture than just about any team on earth.
Hardly surprising, given their enduring success; they’ve won 80% of the games they’ve ever played over 120 years, and counting.
James Kerr’s Legacy is the book most associated with the ABs, and it introduced the world to the team’s “No D**kheads” policy, which essentially meant that if you were a jerk, you wouldn’t last long in the environment, no matter how talented you were.
But Gilbert Enoka’s book, Become Unstoppable, provided crucial extra context when it was released this year.
Enoka was the team’s beloved mental performance coach, and mastermind behind turning around a team in disarray in 2004, helping them top the world rankings for the next 15 years.
“The players were taught to put their personal ambitions aside for the sake of the team,” Enoka writes.
“Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t fall in line were left out of the squad. Our mantra: you joined us. We didn’t join you.”
I thought this was worth bringing up in the context of recruiting, which is essentially an individual pursuit within a team sport.
How many players choose a school for the ‘team culture’ and then proceed to be the first ones to erode and undermine it when it doesn’t suit their own self-interest?
This is a topic I’ll discuss in more detail in 2026, but it’s always worth remembering before critiquing your team’s culture that you are that culture too.
The best book I read in 2025
I have a few books related to coaching that I try to re-read once a year, for various prompts, reminders or reasons. Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings, Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code, Pep Lijnders’ Intensity and all three of Cody Royle’s books usually make it in there.
The best new book (well, new to me anyway) I read in 2025 was Belonging by Owen Eastwood.
The book is a guide to fostering a sense of shared identity, purpose, and ownership within teams, drawing from Maori wisdom (yes, more New Zealand influence here) and evolutionary insights.
For me, the biggest gift is the constant reminder when things get tough in team sports to go back to basics.
One of the case studies in the book is the South African cricket team; Eastwood observed that “in their despondency, the team had unconsciously drifted from their [culture]; the language had shifted away from purpose and identity and back to the physical, technical and tactical. Rituals had slipped.”
When the s**t hits the fan, you don’t need a new game plan, you need to remember why you’re doing it all in the first place.
Where is the transfer portal era taking us?
This interview with UCLA women’s basketball coach Cori Close struck a chord with me, as it highlighted a situation that’s a microcosm of where college sports are at in the transfer portal era.
Within 90 minutes of the plane touching down after the program’s first run to the Final Four, 6 of her 15 players were in the transfer portal.
The impacts of no-limits transfers and revenue-sharing have sent revenue-generating sports into a tailspin. Where previously, players went into the transfer portal to solve a problem, many are now doing so for opportunistic reasons.
Where does this leave field hockey? I’ll be going deeper into this topic in a future newsletter, but in general, what happens in football and basketball often trickles down to everyone else.
The one field hockey account you should follow
Nobody makes the sport look cooler than @whatnowtim. The angles he uses, his framing, and how he plays around with slow motion make you want to watch his reels over and over.
I could have linked pretty much anything he posts to demonstrate this, but here’s two of the more unusual ones:
Last but not least…
January will mark a year since I started writing about recruiting for field hockey players. It’s been a slow burn, but there’s now almost a thousand of you reading the weekly newsletter, and allowing it to take up space in your inbox.
I am incredibly grateful for that, and I hope it has added value, whether you’re currently on the recruiting journey or not. More fun stuff coming in 2026!
Alan - I love reading your stuff. So insightful and so helpful as I begin this recruitment journey with my daughter. Thanks for all that you do!
Love this, “It’s always worth remembering before critiquing your team’s culture that you are that culture too.”