What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Bird by Bird
The season plan document had a title, a date, and nothing else, three days before Elena's team's first practice. She kept trying to design the whole progression from opening drill to championship-ready in one sitting, sketching a perfect arc in her head before typing any of it down, and each attempt collapsed under the weight of trying to account for every player's needs at once. She knew roughly what week one should look like — basic footwork, get a read on where everyone actually stood — but that felt too small and obvious to count as "the plan." Late that night, she finally typed up just the first week, nothing more, in blunt, unglamorous language. It wasn't the document she'd imagined writing. It was, however, a document she could actually run practice from the next morning.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Permission for a genuinely awful first draft
A coach delays writing feedback after a difficult loss, waiting for language that will motivate without discouraging anyone, and by the time the message finally goes out three days later, the team has already moved on and stopped expecting it.
Write the feedback the same day, in blunt language, covering exactly what you saw happen. Revise the tone afterward if needed, but let the specific content go out close to the event it describes rather than waiting for the ideal phrasing to arrive.
Break any overwhelming project into the one small piece directly in front of you
Asked to build a development plan for a promising but inconsistent player, a mentor tries to map out the entire year's growth trajectory before the next session, gets stuck balancing every skill gap at once, and shows up to the session with nothing concrete prepared.
Plan only the next single session, targeting the one skill that showed up as a problem most recently. Let this session's small, specific focus be the whole plan for today, and build next week's plan only after seeing how this one actually went.
Specific, honest observation of ordinary life is the real material
A progress note says an athlete "has a great attitude and just needs more consistency," a phrase so general it could describe almost anyone, and gives neither the athlete nor a parent anything to act on.
Before writing any progress note, recall one exact moment from a recent session — a specific rep, a specific mistake and what led to it. Build the note around that one real moment instead of a general impression formed after several sessions blur together.
Writing as a practice of attention
Keeping a short, specific note after each session — what one person actually did, not just whether the session felt productive — is a way of paying closer attention to individual development as it really happens, rather than in the aggregate. That attention matters even after ordinary sessions with no breakthrough, because a coach who notices specifically is building the evidence that makes next month's feedback accurate instead of generic.
Writing quick feedback to keep pace with a busy schedule can mean skipping the specific detail that would make it useful, while waiting to collect enough detail for a fully precise note can become a reason to delay feedback an athlete needed this week. Navigate this by sending a short, rough note the same day using whatever detail you already have, then adding a more specific follow-up once you've had time to reflect further.
Name one thing, honestly
What is one specific moment from a recent session that you haven't written down yet, that would sharpen your next piece of feedback?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before writing any progress note, recall one exact moment from a recent session — a specific rep, a specific mistake and what led to it. Build the note around that one real moment instead of a general impression formed after several sessions blur together.