THE COACHING ZONE BOOK - Key Persons
Dr. Wally Bzdell is a sport psychologist who specializes in providing comprehensive sport psychology services and high-performance mindset training for teams, coaches, and individual athletes. He teaches principles and skills that help individuals organize their inner experiences and mental skills to build capacity to perform well in consequential moments.
Jim is a high school teacher and coach at South Windsor High School in Connecticut. Athletics have always offered him an environment to develop as a person. He wholeheartedly values the opportunity that being part of a team can have on an individual. A former lacrosse player and team captain at Springfield College, Jim has had the opportunity to coach lacrosse at all levels from kindergarten through eight years as a college coach at Western New England College. He has been named the Connecticut High School Lacrosse Coach of the Year, as well as the Connecticut Assistant Coach of the Year.
His evolution as a teacher-coach is a credit to the remarkable mentors he has been privileged to have over the years. Jim's coaching beliefs are grounded in growth mentality for all stake holders (players, parents, coaches, and administrators). He is motivated to help others build meaningful team cultures. Jim's strengths also lie in coach curriculum development and experiential/adventure-based curricula.
Drawing on his illustrious lacrosse playing and coaching career and his organizational behavior work with athletic, educational, and business organizations, John Yeager's presentations and training programs have inspired audiences around the United States.
As a former elite lacrosse goaltender at the high school, college, and professional levels, he is a member of the Halls of Fame of New England, Eastern Massachusetts, and UMASS Boston/Boston State. He was named one of the top 20 New England lacrosse players of all time by the New England Lacrosse Journal.
As the co-author of The Coaching Zone: Next Level Leadership in Sports, John is the executive director of The Coaching Zone Initiative and CEO of The Yeager Leadership Group. His role models have been coaches who have continually reinvented themselves as they strove to bring out the best in themselves, their athletes, and their teams.
John has always tested his ideas about effective coaching behavior, for example, in his doctoral work at Boston University and as an assistant professor in human movement in Boston University's Wheelock College of Education. Later, as a student in the country's first graduate-level applied positive psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, he focused on developing specific strategies to bring out the best in coaches, athletes, and teams.
John has authored four other books and chapters about coaching:
• SMART Strengths: The Parent/Teacher/Coach Guide to Building Character, Resilience and Relationships in Youth
• Character and Coaching: Building Virtue in Athletic Programs
• Our Game: The Character & Culture of Lacrosse
• Positive Psychology Coaching for Sports Leaders
For over 40 years, he has worked with many high school and college coaches and their teams, sometimes as a colleague, sometimes as a consultant invited to help a team emerge from a slump and/or move to higher levels of performance. John finds that it always helps if they spend time clarifying the why, what, and how underlying performance. A huge differentiator of effective coaches is that they are skilled at self-management, leading and empowering individual athletes, and systems-thinking for the whole team.
Sara Metzger is an ACC, ICF credentialed, personal development coach, mother of two and founder of Vista Coaching. Sara spent 20 years as a teacher and after retiring from the world of education she began her own coaching practice. She specializes in working with schools, leaders and student athletes.
Job Titles:
- Head Coach of the Cannons Lacrosse Club
Sean Quirk is the Head Coach of the Cannons Lacrosse Club in the Premier Lacrosse League and Associate Director of Athletics at Endicott College, an athletic specialist, motivational coach, and expert leader in terms of building championship-caliber athletes, teams, programs, and organizations. He teaches people how to unleash their inner potential, based on many years of experience as a dynamic head coach and athletic director.