Build The Jealous Free Zone 🚫

Tactics get you results for a season. Culture gets you results for a generation… and when it matters.

That’s the thesis. And if you’ve been coaching long enough, you know it’s true in your bones. Even if the day-to-day demands of training sessions, selection headaches and match preparation don’t always give you the time to act on it. You know that the team with the better pressing structure doesn’t always win. You know that the team that plays for each other usually does.

In this third article in our series drawing on the wisdom of basketball legend Coach K and the field hockey experts in The Hockey Site’s catalogue, we’re going to dig into the very important, often neglected, and most misunderstood word in coaching: culture. What it actually means. How you build it deliberately rather than accidentally. And, crucially, how you know when you’ve got it.

We’ll look at where culture starts (values — and not just words on a wall), how it becomes operational (standards — the lived, daily expression of those values), what it looks like when it’s working (the jealous-free zone), and what threatens it and how to respond. Along the way we’ll draw on Coach K’s values framework and championship stories, on Adam Commens’ remarkable perspective from inside two of the greatest team cultures in hockey history as well as his earlier insights on Values Based Coaching, and on Theo ten Hagen’s practical work on team dynamics.

Coach K opens his lesson on core values with a simple image: a fist. Five fingers — communication, trust, care, collective responsibility, and pride. Each meaningful on their own, but only truly powerful when they come together. “The five values working together create a powerful unified team, like fingers forming a fist.” The framework is simple to understand, he says, but not necessarily simple to execute.

That gap between simple and easy is exactly where most team cultures either take root or wither. Because the values conversation in most sports environments looks like this: a coach writes three or four words on a whiteboard at the start of pre-season, asks players if they agree, everyone nods, and by match three of the season, nobody mentions them again. Coach K is blunt about this:

Adam Commens makes the same point with equal force. As Belgium’s High Performance Director, he has spent years building and sustaining values-driven cultures at the highest level. First as a player and coach with Australia’s Kookaburras, then as a key architect of the Red Lions’ Olympic and World Cup gold. His verdict on values that live only as posters: “A lot of companies or federations or sporting clubs, they have values. But quite often, you see them just as words on the wall, and there’s not much underneath that. With every value, you try to go into depth about what does this mean, what are the behaviors that would demonstrate that particular value on the pitch, how would that work on or off the pitch.”