Lonnie Moore

Greg Olsen says sometimes kids need to be pushed and parents are lying to themselves if they think every great athlete was self-motivated from the time they were 10 years old “If everyone thinks the NFL is full of just 100% self-starters and self-motivators from the time they were 10, they’re lying to themselves. There are guys that were forced to play, that were driven there against their will, and then over time, of course, they developed. But there is a different journey for every single kid.” “Creating those environments, both at home and obviously around their teams and their schools and their coaches, that fosters that.” “When we do our middle school teams, we are the first to tell our families at our opening meeting, ‘I’m going to bet your kid has never been pushed harder than he’s about to be with us.’ For a lot of the new families, this is going to be a little eye-opening.” “By about the first month in, the kids start getting accustomed to it, and the light bulb goes off. They go, ‘First off, I can do this. Second of all, they’re not pushing me because they hate me. They’re pushing me because they love me, and they believe in me, and they see more.’” “I always tell the parents, ‘There’s going to be two people that are going to limit how far your kid can go: us, the coach, and you.’”

DeSean Jackson explains why star players should be disciplined harder than everyone else on the team “Man, I think accountability is first and foremost the ultimate. That’s number one in anything you do. Being a coach now and kind of going back to when I was playing, I understand from a coach’s perspective why my coaches were the way they were on me. Because when you’re a player, you don’t understand, you just think you can do it however you want to do it.” “You got attitudes, you mad, like, ‘Give me the ball,’ this, that and the third. Or like, ‘Why my coach being so hard on me? Why he disciplining me for this and that?’ So when you’re a star player, you got to get disciplined a little harder. Because if the team sees the star player being disciplined and being yelled at and certain things that you know he’s not going to let you do, then it’s like everybody got to fall in line.” “So I feel like now that I’m in this position, you got to own up to the accountability. Like when you’re wrong, you’re right, you’re late, every little thing. Because I think a lot of people don’t understand how hard it is being a professional athlete. And then football, we play once a week, the amount of work leading up to the game determines the wins and losses on Saturdays or Sundays, whenever you’re playing.” “Going back, I really didn’t understand that. I was like, ‘Man, my coach tripping about practicing on Tuesday. The game ain’t till Saturday. I’m trying to make it to Saturday.’ But if you bullshitting all the way through the week and you just think you’re going to show up on Sunday or Saturday and it’s automatically going to be right, you’re fooling yourself. So the respect for the work leading up to the game, I respect it a lot more now.”

Sean Payton reveals the late night text exchange he had with Alvin Kamara after watching him coast through a practice, and explains how he challenged him to raise his standards if he really wanted to make the Hall of Fame “I text Alvin one night, Kamara, and he’s one of my favorite players, right? And it was a Wednesday. He had a tendency, he was so gifted, he could get bored. And then if he got bored, he might drop an easy pass.” “And he had one of those Wednesdays. In season, Wednesday is the first day of practice. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And it was just a nonchalant day, and yet for someone who was so elite.” “I text him that night and I said, ‘Hey, I want to ask you a question. Can I coach you hard?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, why are you tripping?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.’” “And then, you know, it bothered him a little because he had to go to sleep. And then the next day he sees me in pre-practice, and I said, ‘Just let me explain this. Do you see yourself being in the Hall of Fame someday?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’” “And I said, ‘All right. Well, I don’t think your trajectory right now is steep enough to make that goal happen. I think your trajectory is five Pro Bowls, a couple All-Pro teams, phenomenal career, all-time leading rusher, but I think your trajectory, and I think your practices have to be.. And then he starts complaining to me, and I said, ‘I thought you told me I could coach you hard.’ And then, you know, it hit him.”

Tom Brady says his career turned around when a sports psychologist told him to stop complaining about what he wasn’t getting and start stewarding what he had the right way “Greg said to me, ‘Why don’t you quit bitching about all the things you’re not getting, and how about you do the best with whatever opportunities you get?’, ‘Stop worrying about what the other quarterback’s getting. Stop worrying about what the coach is saying to you.’” “‘Every time you get in there, you bring the juice. You bring the energy. You bring the enthusiasm. You treat practice like a game.’ Because if you just decide to go out there and you’re blaming everybody else, where does that get you? So I started to change my attitude.” “I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself. And when you don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself, you blame other people. When you gain confidence in yourself, you start pointing the finger at yourself.” “I would encourage every athlete to look in the mirror after every day of practice or a game and say, ‘What can I do better to help the team? What can I do better?’” “Not, ‘What does the coach need to do better?’ Not, ‘What do my teammates need to do better?’, ‘What do I need to do better?’ If every player does that, you’re going to have an incredible team.” “You can’t have a false confidence. You don’t only gain your confidence because of your physical ability. You gain your confidence because you’re prepared, because you’re competitive. I couldn’t just show up and be better than everybody.” “I had to show up prepared. I had to show up with energy. I had to show up with my body feeling right. I had to show up like I was on a mission.”

Drew Brees believes he would not have made the hall of fame if it weren't for a film session in 2003 where Marty Schottenheimer told him to stop making excuses “I’ll never forget a film session in 2003. I was coming off a tough game. As we watched the tape together, Coach asked me the question…” “‘Hey, why didn’t you throw to this receiver?’ ‘He was wide open.’ My response was… ‘I couldn’t see him.’ The tape paused. There was a moment of silence. Coach glared at me and said… It’s your job to see.’” “You reach a point in your career when you stop making excuses. It’s usually a moment or an event where you flip a switch. Or make a very conscious decision. And it becomes part of your being. Coach was right.” “And never again would those words or thoughts come out of my mouth. I would need to find a way to play the game a little bit different. Even if it was in a way that had not been done before.”

Doc Rivers explains why friends and family can become the “peripheral opponents” every championship team must overcome: “There are a lot of guys who say all they’re trying to do is win. I say, ‘Yeah, not really.’ You’re trying to win as long as you get to do whatever you want to do. That’s not how it works.” “The individual has to lose for the team to win. There’s a lot of truth to that. You have to give up something that’s real. Everybody isn’t going to get the role they want. But if you want to win, you have to buy into the role the team needs from you.” Kevin Garnett: “I was taking 19 shots. I went from 19 shots to 12 shots a game. I was like, ‘Damn.’ But now we were winning.” “We called the people outside the locker room the ‘peripheral opponents.’ Everybody outside the locker room can become the opponent.. Including families at times.” "They’re never going to tell you what you need to hear. They’re going to tell you what you want to hear. They’ll tell you, ‘You need to shoot more. You aren’t getting enough shots.’ If you aren’t playing, they’ll tell you that you need to play more.” Garnett: “We had to battle the outsiders. Family. Friends. We had to battle those outside voices.” When someone came into the locker room feeling a certain way, we reminded them that it was bigger than that.” “It was about what was inside our locker room. That was key for us.”

🚨 Everyone needs to hear Ken Griffey Jr.’s perspective on why comparison is the thief of joy: Comparison rarely steals your joy all at once. It creeps into your habits, distorts your decisions, and makes short-term approval feel more important than long-term peace. It creates anxiety. Anxiety creates urgency. And urgency can bend you toward choices that offer a shallow reward today but leave you carrying regret tomorrow. Eventually, comparison can rob you of one of life’s deepest joys: looking in the mirror 🪞 and respecting the person staring back. Because every time you abandon who you are to become more like someone else, you do not just lose yourself in the moment. You risk taking away the person your children were proud to look up to in the future. Don’t compare yourself to someone else’s idea of goals. Protect your integrity. 🛡️ Don’t rob yourself of being your kids’ idea of goals. Your kids do not need you to become somebody else’s version of success. They only need their hero to remain themselves. 🦸‍♂️ – at Elkridge, MD

Worth 40 seconds: Kobe's epic explanation of the three costs every great leader must be willing to pay. ⬇️🔥 🌲 Leadership is often lonely. The higher you climb, the fewer people can make the decisions for you. Solitude isn't a sign you're on the wrong path, it is often the cost of carrying responsibility. If you need constant approval, you'll eventually trade conviction for comfort. ⚔️ Avoiding confrontation doesn't preserve culture, it erodes it. Every difficult conversation you postpone quietly becomes permission for the behavior to continue... Leaders don't confront because they enjoy conflict. They confront because clarity is kinder than confusion, and short-term DISCOMFORT prevents long-term DYSFUNCTION. 📏 Accountability is an act of belief. Holding someone to a high standard is one of the clearest ways to communicate that you think they're capable of reaching it. The easiest leader to follow is the one who expects little. The most transformational leader is the one willing to endure uncomfortable moments so people can become who they're capable of being. The moments that make leadership feel the loneliest are often the same moments that make your leadership matter the most. 💯

Kobe's speech to @AlabamaFTBL in 2016 will always be legendary and packed with timeless wisdom for leaders: 🐍 Edit your life. If your habits, relationships, routines, or distractions don't align with who you say you want to become, ELIMINATE THEM. Simple as that. That clarity will help you create commitment in your life. 🎥 Excellence begins with curiosity. You have passion to learn but you have to stoke it like a fire in order to grow. The separation isn't talent, it's the willingness to OBSESS over details others overlook. Kobe didn’t watch film just to confirm what happened. He watched to uncover what could happen. He was feeding his curiousity. What if the defense adjusts? What if the first option gets taken away? What counter exists after the counter? Anticipate, prepare, and think multiple moves ahead. ⚡ Excellence isn't an event, it's an identity. Kobe believed coasting against weaker competition only creates bad habits because standards don't change based on the opponent. If you want to perform at an elite level when it matters most, you have to practice excellence when nobody's watching. Everybody wants to be the beast, but not everybody wants to do what the beast does. Fall in love with the process, because the habits you repeat eventually become the person you are. 🐻

Love this perspective from Marcus Freeman (@Marcus_Freeman1) on turning negative experiences into fuel ⛽️ for @NDFootball: Failure can either become your excuse or your foundation. The lessons are there if you’re willing to OWN them! But the moment you spend your energy blaming others, you waste the very adversity that was meant to grow you. 🪴 📧 Great leaders don’t let people outsource responsibility. Every day, they remind the team: your response to adversity matters more than the adversity itself. 🧑‍🏫 Pain is a teacher. Blame is a distraction. One helps you grow from failure, the other helps you avoid it. 🤨 Teams get stronger the moment they stop asking, “Who caused this?” and start asking, “What can we learn from this?” You can't win back your past losses. You can only learn from them, so that you win and grow going forward, and build a future so strong that it casts a shadow over the failures behind you. Success is the only real retribution. Not because it erases the past, but because it proves the past didn’t stop you.