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Monday, July 21, 2025

Slappin’ Glass: Brook Cupps- Building Culture


No surprise, another great podcast from Slappin’ Glass. They interviewed Coach Brook Cupps from Centerville HS in Ohio. Coach Cupps has a couple books and a website that deal with changing your perspective as a coach and about building culture in your teams. Here are some highlights from the podcast:



Storytelling

Coach Cupps uses “storytellng” to clarify and enforce team values and team culture. This means that he uses stories about former players approach, mindset, and behaviors to emphasize characteristics important to their culture. 

One example he used was that everyone in their program knows a player by the name of Joey Weingardner. They tell the story of Joey being the only player who attended their “Breakfast Club” for two years by himself. Today they have 45 players attend regularly. 


Core Values & Critical Behaviors



Tough- body language

Passionate- choose extra work

Unified- speak and act with urgency

Thankful- show love

It is important not just to have the core values but players need to know specific behaviors that demonstrate the values. 


Focus As Coach

Achievement Piece vs. Impact Piece

Outcome Oriented vs Process Oriented

Great Coaches have these characteristics: 1) Authentic, 2) Intentional actions, 3) Consistent


Establishing Team Goals


Question for players- What do you want people to leave saying about us as a team?

Follow up question- What do we have to do on daily basis to be a team and be players who reach our goals?




Developing Roles


In the podcast, he goes thru an interesting exercise he uses with players to help them understand their strengths, their weaknesses, and the roles they can fill to be help the team. Much of it is player (teammate) driven vs. coach driven. 




Skulls Sessions


An important part of Coach Cupps culture building and value education with his players are “Skull Sessions.” The “Skull Sessions” are 15 minute classroom lessons used at all levels of his program. They focus on topics related to team culture, being team-oriented, and role identification. Examples of topics that he uses are: Are you anti-fragile?, Critical behavior identification, Core Values identification.

His “Skull Sessions” are available on his website. 




Nuggets


** Individual players are NEVER allowed to celebrate their made threes. Teammates can celebrate their teammates made three but the player themselves cannot.

** One of the most critical parts of learning roles is for a player to learn whether they should be shooting threes or not. 

** Promote passing by giving even “hockey assists.”

** Develop a way to keep stats on great screens. 


Coach Cupps Resources

The following is the link to his website:

Blue Collar Grit


He is the author of two books that are available on his website or on Amazon. 









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