University of Tennessee Athletics
The Program Builds Tennessee Leadership
February 27, 2015 | Football
By Brian Rice
UTSports.com
KNOXVILLE, Tenn.
-- Leadership is influence, a concept that the Tennessee Volunteers learned all about Friday afternoon at the Anderson Training Center.As part of the team's offseason development, Tennessee is once again going through The Program, a leadership development and team building program led by Marine veteran Eric Kapitulik and his team.
"It is outstanding to work with The Program," Tennessee defensive line coach Steve Stripling said. "They stress the same core values, they speak the same language. We have continuity in that they have been with us our first two years at Tennessee and we'll have them here multiple times so the message is consistent."
With the two prior years of experience working with Tennessee, Kapitulik has seen the growth that the football program has made. He talked about that growth sometimes being an obstacle in and of itself. Reading the press clippings of how far the team has come can provide confidence, but it can also spark complacency, something that can halt a team's progress far faster than it was built.
"Getting to good is fine," he told the team in the full session. "Going from good to great is extremely difficult."
Kapitulik shared a message of leadership and accountability with the team for the first of several sessions over the spring and summer. The lessons apply both on the field and off, because the concepts that allow leaders to pull their football team through tough situations on the field are the very concepts that allow a Marine leader to pull his team through a life-threatening situation in battle.
"There is one step where it starts and that's trust," Kapitulik said. "The foundation of every relationship is based on trust. This is one relationship that they have with their teammates. They have 100 different relationships, but without trust, we have nothing. Everything we have is formed out of that trust. How do we build trust? By acting consistently."
Kapitulik provided a real-life example by having players act out a situation that Marines face in clearing a room of a potentially dangerous situation. Joshua Dobbs, Curt Maggitt and Jashon Robertson played the part of a team entering a potentially hostile situation. Alvin Kamara played the part of a target.
As the first team member through the door, Robertson saw the target in Kamara, but knew his job was to turn the corner to eliminate a possible threat there, trusting his teammate Dobbs to take care of the target straight ahead in his vision.
"It's vitally important in anything that we do that we can develop trust on a subconscious level," Kapitulik said, describing the situation that applies to both the scenario that played out in the team meeting room and the ones that the players will face on the gridiron. "We have to inherently believe that my teammate is going to be where he is supposed to be and they're going to be there every single time. That allows us as the individual to do our job and not be worried about our job and their job."
Consistency is key, particularly in the face of adversity. Kapitulik referenced the intense repetition that is a part of both military training and football training. Those reps are no for when conditions are perfect, but for the situations where everything is stacked against you.
"The idea of rising to the occasion sends completely the wrong message and is inherently false," Kapitulik said. "We, physiologically speaking, do not rise to the occasion. In times of great stress, we fall back on the habits that we have created up until that moment. Not in the games that we're up by five touchdowns, but in the games where we're up by three points and the other team has the ball and we need a big stop."
In addition to the full team session, Kapitulik also met individually with members of the player staff to assist them in setting goals for individual leadership and for the team as a whole. He had an honest conversation with them on the difference between setting goals and executing them.
"Every team we meet with says they want to be league champions," Kapitulik said. "To do it, we have to go and prove it every single day, not just on Saturday afternoons, every single day by creating habits that, in that uncontrollable environment to perform at our optimal level. We will never be able to perform at our optimal level if many of those things that allow us to perform at that level have not be ingrained in our subconscious. So in those times, we don't have to think about doing it, we just go and do it."
