Leave Your Backpack at the Fence
This week on Drink O’Clock, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Janet Dickey, head field hockey coach at Westbrook High in Connecticut, certified mindset coach, and founder of Victory Mindsets. Janet is about to head into her 36th season coaching the same small-town program she played for as a kid, and she’s built one of the smallest schools in the state into a conference champion by doing things a little differently.
The Blade 54 Generation
One of the ideas Janet dropped that stuck with me is what she calls the “blade 54 generation.” These are kids who want their coach to tell them exactly which blade of grass to run to, where to pass the ball, and what to do next. They’ve been raised on so much structure and so much fear of getting it wrong that they’ve lost the ability to problem solve in real time.
Janet’s response to that is something she picked up from a coaching course with a guy out of Australia called The Coaching Lab. The idea is simple. Coaches are problem setters. Players are problem solvers. If your kids can’t figure things out on the fly in the middle of a game, how are they going to figure anything out in the middle of a workday, or a tough conversation with a coworker, or any other curveball life throws at them?
Drop the Garbage at the Fence
Westbrook practices on a field that sits in the outfield of the baseball complex, surrounded by a pond and away from the school. Janet tells her players that when they walk through the fence, they leave their imaginary backpack of garbage from the day on the outside. Phones stay in the bag. You’re present with your teammates. When practice is over, you can pick the backpack up on your way out if you want it back.
I loved this. We talked a lot about how kids today can’t unplug, and how the constant fear of judgment and failure has made them more fragile in some ways than generations before. Giving them permission to be fully present, even just for two hours a day, is a gift most of them don’t get anywhere else.
Why She Got Certified
Janet won a state title in 2016 with a team that was mostly freshmen, and after that season she realized she was onto something but didn’t know exactly what. The positive performance certification she eventually pursued through Lindsey Wilson gave her the framework to name what she was already doing instinctively. She got certified in 2019, worked through most of the program during COVID, and now combines those techniques with the problem-solving approach from The Coaching Lab.
The results speak for themselves. Westbrook ran a co-op program this past season, went 15 wins to 2 losses and 2 ties, and took home the conference title. Janet thinks it’s the first co-op in the conference to ever do that.
36 Seasons, Same Town
Janet grew up in Westbrook. She lives on the same street she grew up on. Her youngest son now lives in her childhood home. Her husband is in year 42 at the same company. The whole conversation had this beautiful undercurrent of rootedness that I don’t think gets talked about enough anymore. Everyone wants to level up and move on every two years, but Janet made the case that when she looks at a resume full of job hops, it’s a red flag. She had a chance to jump to a college job 25 years ago and turned it down because she hadn’t finished what she started at Westbrook.
I don’t know that everyone has the option or the temperament to stay in one place for that long, but there’s something worth paying attention to in the idea that longevity creates value that leveling up never will. Her middle school coach was one of her former players. Kids from the park and rec program look up to the high schoolers. The circle keeps going because she stayed put.
Raising Competitors
We got into sibling rivalry too, which was a fun detour because it’s something I relate to hard. My brother and I used to play one on one basketball games that got borderline violent, and Janet’s kids sound like they did the same thing with knee hockey in the living room. She thinks that competition, the real kind where you might lose and it might sting, is what’s missing from a lot of kids’ lives now. Everyone gets a trophy. Nobody learns how to lose gracefully, which means nobody learns how to keep going when life inevitably knocks them down.
Her mantra, which I think is worth writing down: “It’s how you react to the situations you’ve been given that defines you as a person.” That’s the entire job in a sentence.
A Note for the Parents
If you’re a sports parent, this one is going to hit you somewhere. Janet has a rule she gives to her parents at the start of every season. When your kid gets in the car after a game, if you can’t think of anything genuinely positive to say, the only thing you should say is “I loved watching you play today. That was so much fun.” That’s it. Don’t replay the game. Don’t critique the mistakes. Don’t tell her why she should have passed instead of shot. Just let her know you loved watching her. Apparently that sentence does more than a thousand post-game breakdowns ever could.
Find Janet
If you’re a coach, a parent, or an athlete who wants to work with Janet, you can find her at victorymindsets.com, or reach out directly at victorymindsets@gmail.com. She’s also on Instagram and LinkedIn. She was generous with her time and her ideas in this one, and I think a lot of people listening are going to see themselves in the conversation.
Thanks for listening. Cheers.
Want to be a guest on Drink O’Clock? Send us a message on PodMatch here: podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/drinkoclock