We're winning. Why would I change anything?

T is for terminal players. "those are players who were just hanging on, wanting to be there, not necessarily for the right reasons, weren't pushing themselves as hard as they might." Every squad has candidates. The hard part is that in a winning side they're easy to carry.

R is for recycling. "that's just necessarily doing what we'd done before because it was successful before. We wanted to stretch and push for new things."

Read that next to Kerr. Recycling is the Sigmoid Curve stated as a symptom, by a hockey coach, years earlier, without any of the framework. Worth being straight about what that does and doesn't mean, though. Charlesworth reaches a similar place by his own route. He never mentions Handy, or Kerr, or curves of any kind, and nothing here says he'd endorse the model.

A is for acceptance. This is the one that describes club hockey best. "it leaks into the team slowly... oh, it's someone else's turn. We've been successful for a long time. Now it's someone else's turn. And my approach was, well, no, it's no one's turn to win at the Olympics. You better earn it."

G is for group-think. “We wanted to avoid group think. This was the G of the acronym... whatever the group thinks, we want to challenge that. Sometimes the group gets it wrong. I'm happy for an individual put up their hand and say, no, I don't agree with that.”

E is for expectation. "yeah, it'll be okay on the day. You know, if we cut a few corners, it won't matter, because when it comes to the day, it'll be all right. That's a fatal mistake."

D is for doubt. This is the letter that works differently from the rest, so it's worth being precise. Charlesworth wasn't asking a successful group to get rid of its doubts, he was asking them not to pretend the doubts away. "I remember seeing Roger Federer before the Australian Open 10 years ago, expressing his doubt about whether he had prepared enough. The best athletes, the best teams have doubts. You've got to be able to live those."

So expectation is the belief that it'll be fine on the day, and doubt is the honest voice saying it might not be. A team that has been winning for a while tends to lose that voice first, because nothing in the results table is asking it to speak. Six of the letters are things to keep out of the changing room. This one is something to keep in it, and the tragedy is a group that can no longer hear it. That reading of where D sits in the list is mine, not his words.

Y is for yes-men. "you better challenge your opinions and your views and your ideas and your tactics... you better continuously think, is this the best thing? Is there a better way?"

What strikes me about the list is that none of it is about tactics. It's all about what a group starts to believe once it has been winning for a while. And Charlesworth framed the whole eight years as a slow process rather than a series of overhauls: "you evolve and the team evolves and the coach needs to evolve with them."

Run all seven down your own squad list some Tuesday. It takes ten minutes and it's uncomfortable, which is probably the point.

Three different explanations for the same outcome, which is that after a good season nobody really looks.

The first is the coach's own reasoning. Wade Gilbert quotes the wrestling coach Dan Gable in Coaching Better Every Season: "With a string of nine NCAA titles under my belt, I said, 'If it's not broken, why fix it?' The answer became evident when that string of championships was broken." Gilbert's answer to that is Bill Beswick's readiness-to-repeat checklist, and the thing that makes it useful is that most of its questions ask about raising the bar rather than holding the level. Ask what would have to improve to be better next season, not as good. Rate the squad's hunger honestly rather than its talent. Work out what succeeded because of the system and what succeeded because of luck.

The second is Mike Krzyzewski's point that handling winning is sometimes harder than handling losing. After a defeat, everyone reviews. Nobody has to be talked into it. After a win, staying hungry is a discipline that has to be chosen, and most of us don't choose it.

The third is the one worth sitting with. Stanley McChrystal, in Risk: A User's Guide, writes that "Leaders who are perceived as being successful aren't always given a crown, but often do get a hall pass." When someone delivers results, the people whose job it is to hold them to account quietly stop looking, and behaviour that would end anyone else's involvement gets reframed as character.

In hockey, that looks like a youth coach whose teams win titles and whose players stop playing at eighteen. A committee reading the results table rarely asks a single hard question. That's a safeguarding point as much as a performance one, and it isn't an accusation aimed at anybody. It's a description of how oversight behaves around winners, including when the winner is us.

None of the above tells you that changing is free, and it isn't.

James Clear calls the cost the valley of disappointment, the flat stretch where the work is being done and nothing shows yet. "Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees."

His own worked example happens to be a hockey one. A coach switches from a passive block to a coordinated high press. Weeks two to five, the team concedes more. So the coach counts successful press triggers per game, shows the squad the rising line, holds the change, and by week eight the concession rate drops below the old baseline.

The part that matters for anyone mid-change is the timing problem. The moment a squad most needs reassurance is exactly the moment there's least evidence to reassure them with. Which is why the process markers exist at all.

And Clear's caveat has to travel with the idea, or it becomes an excuse. The valley explains delayed results from good work. It does not rescue bad work. The way to tell them apart is whether the process markers are moving while the outcome isn't. If neither is moving, it isn't a valley.

This is where Darren Cheesman is useful, and he wasn't talking about complacency at all.

In a Coach Chat back in 2021 he described three phases. Exploration, where there's a challenge and nothing agreed yet, coached through questions. Fine tuning, where the agreements exist and you do more of what works. Performance, where you stop changing things and execute.

The part that matters here is that it nests. His words: "I have this across a whole season. So you can have first half of the season can be exploration, second half of the season can be fine tuning and playoffs... or the last three games that are super important for your team. That can be your performance... But equally, this can be a block of three weeks. This can be across one week where your Tuesday session is exploration... Or it could be within a training exercise."

So the change doesn't have to be a season bet. Explore the new thing on Tuesdays, keep the settled version for Saturdays, and the dip gets paid for in training rather than in league points. That's a dial, not a switch.

Which brings us to the argument that stays open. Kerr says jump onto the new curve while you're near the top of the old one and accept a short drop. Gilbert closes his season cycle arguing the opposite emphasis: repeating success is evolution, not revolution, a step and adjust and a step and adjust until something big has quietly happened, and attempting revolution every summer is the failure mode. Kerr's own list of ways this goes wrong includes changing too early and too often, which is more or less Gilbert's revolution, so maybe they only disagree about size and horizon. I don't think there's a clean answer, and I'm not going to invent one.

There's an honest problem underneath both of them too. Everyone making this argument is working on a national squad timescale, three or four years to a tournament. A club side plays eighteen to twenty-two matches. Four rocky weeks is a fifth of the season, and it might be the difference between a promotion place and a mid-table finish. None of the sources prices that. So what's a fair price in your league, and who at your club gets to decide it?

If this one landed, these three are worth exploring as well:

A national coach has several years to a tournament. A club coach has eighteen to twenty-two matches every season. So what's a fair price in your league for four rocky weeks, and who at your club gets to decide it?

Hit reply and tell me. I'll put the answers together, credited, and send them back round.