Using Crucibles to Find a Diamond in the Rough
Whether people are born with talent or their talent is a product of never-ending practice, one thing is for sure, coaches and leaders want top talent in their programs. But what’s to say the talent you recruit is going to perform in the situations you need them too? We can never be 100% sure, but there are methods for hedging our bets that our recruits will sustainably perform the way we need them too.
In the SEAL community, we relied on the Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S) to weed out the people who would likely not have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL. In sport, coaches rely on whatever systems or processes they have in place to recruit the right talent for their programs.
While I am not about to provide you with the answer to all your recruiting woes, I am going to ask you to consider something many recruiters don’t — crucibles.
We all have experienced moments, accidents, challenges, confrontations or events we wish had never happened in our lives. But they did, and each event was followed by a response of some sort. At BUD/S, training crucibles are manufactured, the most infamous called HELL WEEK. It challenges students to continuously work through and thrive in physically and mentally stressful environments.
When recruiting potential athletes for their programs, coaches don’t have the luxury of creating mental and physical crucibles to test the intestinal fortitude of their prospects. But they do have the ability to ask meaningful questions to help provide a historical picture of the recruits response to their personal crucibles. Meaningful questions can help inform the recruiter of the character and behavior the recruit has demonstrated in the past and will likely pull from in the future.
The challenge you face when recruiting is to not overly focus on a recruit’s physical and technical skills. You need to really dig in to get a glimpse of how they are likely to respond to the future challenges in your environment; both on and off campus, with and away from teammates, on social media and under the pressure-packed situations of your sport.
Response to crucibles can be handled in many ways, but you want to find the recruit who has demonstrated the ability to overcome their personal crucibles. Ask them to identify various crucibles in their lives, and explain how they reframed them in order to learn and grow. If you can find a recruit with the physical and technical talent you require and who can responsibly answer those questions — you may have found your diamond in the rough.
