Editor’s note: The following is a transcript from the latest episode of “Therefore, what?” It has been edited for clarity.
Boyd Matheson: Coping with change, dealing with difficulties and creating a culture of excellence are critical leadership skills. BYU head basketball coach Mark Pope applies these principles for his players, the team’s fans and for the community. Today he shares important lessons that transcend sports and apply to the challenges of a coronavirus world.
Coach Pope, thank you for joining us today on “Therefore, What?” How are you?
Mark Pope: I’m great Boyd. Happy to be here my friend.
BM: Well, it seems like it’s been light years since we last spoke, which was on your first day on the job. You had a a wild ride and an incredible season and I want to start right where we left off. You were there, first day on the job, in the interview, you break the chair and you say we’re going to break things around here in order to get better.
MP: Oh man, I forgot about that. You’re right. That’s fantastic.
BM: So what did you break and what did you build during this season?
MP: That’s a big question. I’ll give you the simplest answer I have, which is that I just got to witness some really special things. I got to witness a staff come together with a common cause. I got to witness players, most importantly, rally around each other and genuinely — and this is so rare — genuinely sacrifice for each other for the well-being of the team, and for something bigger than themselves. I got to witness, on the fun side, this extraordinary BYU fan base, and appreciate even deeper than I did before I got here how much this program means to people in a multitude of different areas of their lives.
BM: So let’s break that down just a little bit. We’re doing this kind of like game film today. I think one of the most challenging things to do in today’s world, whether it’s in a business, an organization, especially on a team, coming in as a new leader and creating that culture in an organization. And by the end of the season, it was very clear that you had a locker room that was unique. As you mentioned, they were sacrificing for each other. It’s rare anytime, but it’s really rare to do that with a group of players that are really experiencing you for the first time.
MP: Yeah, we’ll continue to do an autopsy on this season for the next several months, but looking back, I think it was a combination, a lot of things.
Most importantly, we inherited a group that was pretty humble. And when I say that, what I mean is they had tried to do things their way. They had tried to do things fighting for their own agenda and their own identity and their own good fortune, and I think they’d reaped the fruits of that. And while they had a lot of success, they just didn’t get to the ultimate goal of where they were chasing.
I think they recognized that the little part of them that was fighting for themselves was leaving them surprisingly empty. And so we inherited a humble group that was determined to take one last big swing at things and give it a shot. And then of course, the summer was full of all kinds of things.
So we inherited that great group that had some humility. We had to deal with a bunch of tough issues and make a bunch of hard decisions during the course of the summer. All of that laid the foundation. And they put in a lot of work in small groups during the summer. And that gave us a tabula rasa in a really good, healthy way.
BM: I think it’s so important, and it really was evident, that there was great trust between you and the players. But I think there was also trust because you trusted them, you did let them build this thing.
MP: For my little mom and pop shop here at BYU, for this basketball team, when the messaging comes from within, that’s when it’s really powerful. When it comes top down, it has some power, but it doesn’t have a lot of staying power and it doesn’t come with the authority that it does when it comes from players.
I would guess a lot of organizations search for this. When you can lay down some principles and you can find ways where players take ownership of it from the center of the organization, you know, something magical happens. And I think every parent and every teacher and every leader can recognize the moments when this happens — when a member of an organization starts owning, like it’s part of them now, the messaging.
When it’s done at its very finest, it feels like that member of the organization like it was created from within them. And man, we saw that a lot. And one of the fun ways you see it happen is when guys start repeating mantras that the team has talked about all year long. They will actually start making those words their own, and they start saying them with such belief and with such urgency. You hear guys repeat things and you’re like, wow, this is so fantastic. And I think when an organization is led from the middle, in our case, the players, that’s when it has real power.
And then when that messaging actually comes from players, it feels like it’s part of their DNA and they say it with such passion. It has 100 times the power with their teammates than it does coming from me.
BM: I’ve always loved Jack Welch. His turnaround at GE was so phenomenal. But he often talked about how his real job was to be the chief meaning officer, and to just help people understand, this is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing i, and here’s your space in it. I’m always critical of Washington. Washington always says, “trust us, trust us, we’ll fix it.” But I think when you’re the chief meaning officer, you’re reflecting that out and saying, “No, don’t trust us. I trust you. I trust you to make this decision.” And I think that’s what you’re describing with your players,
MP: Certainly, and in my experience, working on these teams and in these organizations, without fail, that’s where you have really special things happen — when guys can own it. Then they can start to espouse it, and you can grow that way.
And you’re right, having the meaning is important. And for us, just as much as the meaning maybe even more powerful, is the belief, right? In so many different things — belief in their work, belief that there’s going to be a payoff.
I actually sat down with a with a young entrepreneur who was so terrific, and I’m going to try and say this, right, but he talked about insightful self-interest. And I don’t exactly know what that means, but I think what it means is that when you have enough trust and insight, you recognize that to obtain your own personal goals, you have a better chance of obtaining them by losing yourself and your own agenda within the framework of the team. It’s almost like you give all that up. And then when you do that, you get it back better than you ever could have imagined.
And this is certainly a gospel principle. Those who lose their lives shall gain them, right? It’s an incredibly poignant concept. It’s something that we worked on as a team every single day. And that was one of the things we realized, as the season went on.
In fact, Cody Fueger and I were a third of the way through the season, and we were dealing with a whole mound of frustration over one particular player who we had been working with for quite a while. It seemed like every step forward ended up in a step backward. It felt like we were treading water.
We came to the very simple, obviously clear personal revelation that these things are not decisions you make one time at the beginning of the season, and then it’s all good. You actually have to reaffirm this decision every single day, sometimes hour by hour, you have to keep pronouncing your commitment and your belief that you’re going to push down your own agenda and fully give yourself to the team. And then you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re going to trust that, at the end of the day, you’re going to have this enlightened self-interest, recognizing that it’s the pathway to actually achieving all the success that you want personally, and even more meaningful success.
At some point, I’m gonna be able to verbalize that concept much better, but I’m telling you, it’s true, man. It is so true. And it’s certainly so true for our organization. Our guys dug in and made an incredibly valiant attempt to do that and what they’re seeing, all of them, is that they’re reaping the rewards of that tenfold of what they could have got on their own.
BM: I’m gonna come back to the the team and some of the ups and downs of the season in a minute. But I want to stick on this culture concept because not only did you build that from the middle, from the team first in the locker room and on the hardwood, but you extended that to the fans. And I’ve only seen this done a couple of times where a coach can come in, whether football or basketball, and literally recreate a culture in this amount of time. So I want to have you walk us through how you engaged the fans, and in particular, how does the coach say, “OK, guys, eventually we’re gonna need to storm the court.” Tell us about that. I think that is magic beyond all that is magic.
MP: I can tell you this: We’re all familiar with the great stories of Jim Valvano, for good and for bad, right? All of us in basketball are familiar with his idea of every season cutting down the nets and having his guys practice and visualize it and imagine it, and he coached for a long time but he only actually got to cut down those nets one time.
I remember reading about this and getting a haunting feeling in my mind, and to this day it is a little bit unsettling to me. It’s such an extraordinary story that they cut down the nets and had one of the most unexpected runs in the history of the NCAA tournament, and in their conference tournament also. And then they cut down the nets for real and the haunting question for him is, what did he do every other year?
Did he did he lose his guys every other year? Because, he had laid down this foundation of belief, and then ultimately they didn’t get there. How do you manage all those other years? And I think that’s the paralyzing fear that we all feel.
There was some type of reporting locally. I think in February, early in February, we had won four or five games in a row in February. And, you know, I’m unfiltered, I say all kind of ridiculous things. And I made the comment that I thought our team had a chance to become really, really dangerous by the end of the season.
Then there was some kind of commentary about, “Is that wise? Should you talk about your team that way? Wouldn’t it be better to kind of stay under the radar?” But this is very valid approach. The idea of “Hey, let’s just fly under the radar and then we will ultimately let our accomplishments speak for themselves.”
But at the end of the day, I’ve said this 100 times and I’ll keep saying it, I’m a dreamer. I think that’s why we’re here. I think if we’re paralyzed by a fear of failure and so we don’t try our hardest and dream our biggest, I think we’re shortselling ourselves.
I think the reason we all do it is because we’re afraid of failing. We’re afraid of people thinking badly of us. We’re afraid of hoping too big because then we actually have to live with the dust and ashes of what actually becomes of our deepest and greatest hopes. But at the end of the day, I think that while it’s really common, and there might be some smarts to it genuinely, I just think sometimes it can limit where you can get it.
I think if we can get over the fact that we’re going to fail, like we know we are going to fail ... I got hired for for seven NBA jobs, and I got fired from seven NBA jobs. I got fired seven times. How bad was I? I got fired from seven NBA teams. And I guess that’s not entirely true, but it’s something like that. But the thing is, if you just keep taking big swings, then you’re destined, if you refuse to stop, if you’ll be relentless, then ultimately you’re destined to achieve things that are actually bigger than you ever expected.
I really believe that, and so when you talk about the scariness of closing your eyes and saying, “All right, we’re going to rush the court and I’m telling you guys we’re practicing because we’re going to do this for real,” and when you have a complete inability to control that 100%, but actually you have a very fervent belief that we would celebrate that way at some point — that’s where you get to that bold/stupid move of throwing that out there. And we were really blessed to have great players this year that actually earned that in real life.
BM: Yeah, we always say that the miracles happen within the parentheses of a crazy idea.
I want to go through the course of the season just a little bit because you talk about this ability to be resilient and be relentless. We often quote around here a saying from Gen. Patton, who said that successes is not about how high you soar, It’s how high you bounce when you hit bottom. And so describe for me some of the the ups and downs of the year and the adversity that you hit. What was one of those bottom moments? And how did you turn that into some bounceability and get the players up to even higher levels?
MP: I was probably too scared to tell you before what happened on my very first day of the job. Right before the press conference I walked into the locker room and all the players were there seated, and there were only a couple of them that actually had any interest in looking me in the eye. And that was somewhat of a deflating moment. Now, it was incredibly understandable because, you know, the greatest coach to ever coach at BYU, and maybe that will ever coach at BYU, Dave Rose, had just retired. You can imagine how hard that was for everybody.
And so, you want to talk about tough moments, that was a little bit of a tough moment — walking into that locker room for the first time and just getting at the very best, you could call it a chilly reception. And I clearly had a lot of work to do in a lot of different areas.
And then other than that you just you just count them out. I mean, they’ve been pretty well chronicled, but we get here and Yoeli Childs has already determined he’s leaving. And then from within him this burgeoning desire to actually come back and take one more swing at this thing. He’s one of the extraordinary people I know in life and he just wanted to do this one more time and so he comes back. But then six weeks later, it turns out that he’s, going to be suspended for the first nine games of the season. And so that was certainly a blow to our team.
And we had some personnel issues during the summer that became increasingly public that mostly lay on my shoulders. They got complicated in our locker room and, it’s kind of one hit after the next. We finally kind of get rolling and we’re starting to feel feel decent about ourselves and then Zac Seljaas breaks his foot, so he had to miss a lot of the summer. Then at the beginning of the season, we lose Gavin Baxter for what we expected was the entire season, and he wasn’t available to play at any point.
You go through the season and then midseason Yoeli finally gets back and then he gets a compound dislocation to his finger so he’s out, and then Dalton Nixon breaks his leg. And you just go this series of things that were really complicated for us. And throw in there things of my own doing — some poor coaching early in the season in critical moments, and there were a lot of opportunities for all of us as an organization to retreat and lick our wounds and maybe feel a little sorry for ourselves. But we had such unbelievable leadership from our seniors this year that was never a consideration on this team.
BM: That’s that’s so critical, so important. And clearly as you went through that season, through all of those ups and downs, you get to the great win over Gonzaga. You do get to storm the court. I think the students did a pretty good job.
MP: I didn’t hear any reports of injuries, so I’d give them a 10.
BM: We’ll have to look for a repeat performance for next year. So you get that great win, you’re climbing up the national polls, you’re looking at the postseason, March Madness is just around the corner, all of us are just chomping at the bit for a ticket to the Big Dance. And then all of a sudden, things just start to spin out nationally, internationally and suddenly March Madness goes from maybe postponed, to maybe a unique no-fans contest to a complete cancellation. Tell me about your ride through that. And then tell me, what did you teach your team? What do you hope your players are taking out of this really tough, really challenging lesson?
MP: I’m equally as emotional as my players, so we kind of share that together. I don’t know if that’s good coaching, but we’re in this together. So sometimes, it takes an incredible amount of work, and a lot of times I fail, to control my emotional ride for the benefit of the team. And certainly there have been moments in this process the last few weeks where I felt as devastated or more devastated, than my guys, which is crazy, because this is their one shot. So that was really difficult.
When we heard the news, we were actually meeting as a team. Ironically, we were about to go out on the practice floor. Guys were getting taped up in their practice gear, we were in the film room. We had watched a couple of clips on concepts we were going to work on that day. And we had prepared a five-slide, educational PowerPoint on the coronavirus, actually, so our guys could speak in some sort of educated way on it. We were in the middle of that presentation. I was sharing that information with the team, and my assistant coach Cody Fueger waved his phone in front of my face with the announcement that the tournament is being canceled.
We had been hoping desperately that they would hold it with no fans, and then when that looked like it wasn’t promising. And it all happened so fast over the course the next 16 hours. We were hoping desperately that they would postpone it so we would at least have a chance. And then when it came out a straight cancellation, it was a hit for us.
And I have to say this every time because we fully understand the really, really awful global life and death implications of this on the world. Not just health-wise, but also job-wise and mental health-wise. And we don’t fully understand it, but we can grasp it. We understand the gravity of the situation. And so I would never want anybody to misunderstand us when I say that it was an incredibly devastating moment for our team. It was devastating.
And when I think about these guys, they’ve been dreaming about this their whole life. But they’ve also been literally in the throes of physically and mentally chasing it for years. For four or five years they’ve been chasing this elusive prize that they treasured so much, and then they finally got it. It was right there, there was no work left to be done except to prepare for it. And then for it to be pulled from them like that ... it was really hard.
There were a lot of tears and a lot of a lot of silence, uncomfortable silence, sad silence and then we just have been trying to deal with it every day since then.
Your second part of the question is what I feel like I’ve been able to teach my team. The truth is, most of the time this team teaches me all the important lessons. What we’ve spent some time talking about is what we talked about with all those other little things that came up during the course of the season.
We always talk about how the game is just asking you one question. It’s always asking you one question. It asks this one question during the course of the game, after the game, after a win, after loss. All the game cares about is, how are you going to respond?
You go 0 for 5 shooting, how are you gonna respond on your sixth shot? You get two bad foul calls that you don’t agree with, how are you gonna respond right after that? You take a bad L(oss), and the community has kind of lost faith in you, and and everybody’s frustrated with you — all the game wants to know is how you’re gonna respond. They don’t care about how you feel about it. They want to know how you’re gonna respond. The game wants to know that.
And you can just as well insert life in there. Life doesn’t really care about how you’re feeling or what happened before. Life wants to know what is your answer to whatever you’ve just experienced, whether it was the greatest moment in your life, or the worst. Whether it was the greatest victory or the toughest loss. How are you going to respond? How are you going to ring the bell? And this team did it over and over and over and over again this season.
“Life doesn’t really care about how you’re feeling or what happened before. Life wants to know what is your answer to whatever you’ve just experienced, whether it was the greatest moment in your life, or the worst.” — Mark Pope
And then, of course, their biggest seemingly irretrievable challenge was the cancellation of this tournament. And so, the guys get to answer the question again. How are you going to ring the bell? And in this case, when you don’t have another day to compete, when you don’t get to have another game, it can be so disorienting. So the other thing we talked about is, when you can’t see ahead, when things don’t make sense, you have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other until things become clearer.
You’ve got to just keep working and keep fighting and keep trying. So if there was any team that was prepared for this, it was us, in a really sad way. Because these guys have done it all season long, and they’ve handled this like champs, and you know, the guys that don’t get to come back, they’ll go on and have this in their back pocket forever and understand it. Life just wants to know how you’re gonna respond. For the guys that get to come back, they’ll cherish every single moment they have on this court.
BM: We’ve made the full journey from breaking stuff to building something special.
MP: I did get a new chair by the way so I’m sitting comfortably right now.
BM: That’s good to know.
Well coach, as we wrap up the show, people have been listening for a good 20 minutes now, a lot of people are hunkered down trying to find something to move them forward, what’s the takeaway? What do you hope people think different? What do you hope they do different after listening to this episode today?
MP: Well, I hope that we all do the same thing. Because we’re fighting to do the same thing as a team and as a staff and me as a head coach, and that is to find opportunity in everything.
We can kind of rail against our situation right now. And we can feel sorry for ourselves and complain. Or we can take advantage of it to not have to be as focused, or not have to work as hard. All those are legitimate options. Or we can look really hard for the opportunity that we’ve been provided by this first-ever circumstance in any of our lifetimes.
And so that’s what my guys are doing. They’re trying to find the opportunity in this, they’re trying to find the opportunity where maybe they can find some way to grow themselves in a unique way, where they can find some way to jump ahead of the competition because other people might be distracted by the circumstances of the moment. They’re trying to find a way where they can actually love people and serve people better because it’s built into the moment.
So I think that’s probably the takeaway of ringing the bell and life asking you how you’re gonna respond. We have this right now, so where is the opportunity in this? You don’t have to look that hard to see how this moment in time is chock full of unique opportunities for each of us to do things and chase things and grow in ways that we’ve never had the opportunity to grow before.
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