LINDA MARTINDALE – FOUNDER OF MARTINDALE COACHING – EPISODE 1288

Website – https://martindalecoaching.com/

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Linda Martindale is the Founder of Martindale Coaching where she works with athletes on their mental fitness.  Linda has been a head varsity basketball coach for both girls and boys, most recently as the boys’ varsity basketball head coach at Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Massachusetts.  She is also the host of the Game Changers podcast and a non-profit board member.

Linda played college basketball at Alaska-Anchorage and The University of Arizona. She has 4 children who have all been college athletes.

On this episode Mike & Linda discuss the integration of mental fitness into athletic development. Martindale stresses the importance of fostering self-awareness among athletes, emphasizing the necessity for them to cultivate an inner coach that empowers personal growth and self-improvement. Throughout the conversation, she reflects on her experiences coaching high school basketball and shares insights on the transformational journey that athletes undergo when they confront challenges and strive for excellence. The episode further explores the dynamics of teamwork, highlighting how effective communication and mutual support can enhance both individual and collective performance.

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Grab a notebook and pen before you listen to this episode with Linda Martindale, Founder of Martindale Coaching.

What We Discuss with Linda Martindale

• The importance of nurturing an athlete’s inner coach, emphasizing self-talk and personal accountability
• Her journey from playing college basketball to becoming a mental fitness coach for athletes
• The need for creating supportive environments where athletes feel valued and motivated to improve
• Understanding your ‘why’ in sports to maintain motivation and enjoyment
• The importance of understanding your own motivations and goals as a player
• Fostering resilience and the ability to coach yourself through challenges
• The dynamics of coaching boys versus girls can vary significantly, particularly in terms of emotional responses and competitive behavior during practices and games
• Creating an environment where every athlete feels valued is essential for team cohesion and success, as it encourages them to contribute positively regardless of their playing time
• Continuous improvement, even by 1%, is vital for athletes aiming to reach their full potential

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THANKS, LINDA MARTINDALE

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TRANSCRIPT FOR LINDA MARTINDALE – FOUNDER OF MARTINDALE COACHING – EPISODE 1288

[00:00:00] Narrator: The Hoop Heads Podcast is brought to you by Head Start Basketball

[00:00:19] Linda Martindale: You get some wins, you find your why, it fills you up, and suddenly your heavy footsteps become lighter and you start to get to the gym. And ne- next process of this is now you need to get 1% better.

[00:00:32] Mike Klinzing: Linda Martindale is the founder of Martindale Coaching, where she works with athletes on their mental fitness.

Linda has been a head varsity basketball coach for both boys and girls at the high school level, most recently as the boys varsity basketball head coach at Lincoln-Sudbury High School in Massachusetts. She’s also the host of the Game Changers podcast and a nonprofit board member. Linda played college basketball at Alaska Anchorage and the University of Arizona.

She has four children who have all been college athletes. Ever since I founded Head Start Basketball in 1993, we’ve helped young players develop their skills, confidence, and love for the game. Now we’re partnering with coaches and athletic programs to bring the Head Start Basketball camp experience to new communities.

Our camps run for five days, three hours per day, and serve boys and girls in grades one through six. You or someone on your staff directs the on-court portion of the camp while Head Start Basketball manages registration, promotion, parent communication, T-shirts, trophies, website setup, and administration.

There are no upfront camp planning headaches, and the profits are divided fifty-fifty between your program and Head Start Basketball. If you want to reach more families or strengthen your youth basketball pipeline or just create additional revenue for your program, visit headstartbasketball.com to explore hosting a camp.

[00:01:50] Kyle Kavanaugh: Hi, this is Kyle Cavanaugh from Essential Coaching, and you’re listening to the Hoop Heads podcast.

[00:01:56] Mike Klinzing: Grab a notebook and pen before you listen to this episode with Linda Martindale, founder of Martindale Coaching. Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here tonight without my co-host, Jason Sunkel.

But I am pleased to welcome in Linda Martindale from Martindale Coaching, with a lot of different coaching experience in her background, which we’re going to get into. But Linda, welcome to the Hoop Heads pod.

[00:02:21] Linda Martindale: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

[00:02:24] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Thrilled to have you on.

Looking forward to diving into all of the interesting things that you’ve been able to do throughout your career. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about how you got introduced to the game of basketball. What do you remember? What made you fall in love with it?

[00:02:40] Linda Martindale: Wow. I s- I was the youngest of four kids, all basketball players, so I was handed a ball at a young age. And just remember being out on the driveway and having my dad rebound, and having my sisters and brothers playing. We always, one-on-one, two-on-two. Had a great coach in high school that just built my love for it, I would say.

College basketball became a thing for me probably junior year when I started thinking, maybe playing at the next level. My freshman year I played at University of Alaska Anchorage which was a, a pretty good Division II team. We went to the Sweet 16 that year. But it was very far.

So every single game was, a long way away. So after my freshman year I thought, “I have to find a way to get a little bit closer to home,” and I switched, transferred to University of Arizona, which at the time was in the Pac-10. And had a red shirt year and then ha- played a year there and had a great experience.

[00:03:38] Mike Klinzing: When you think about your time growing up with the game, who was the biggest influence on you as a young player? Was it first somebody in your family? And then you mentioned your high school coach. But just how was the progression in terms of people that you looked up to in the game?

[00:03:52] Linda Martindale: Honestly, I would say it’s probably my siblings.

Because they were playing and they were great players, and I wanted to be like them. My older brother was, a great player. He took it very seriously, and so I got to see him working out. And then my oldest sister was a little point guard, believe it or not. I’m six feet tall, and she was probably 5’4″.

But she was … Sorry. She was feisty and she was a great player, too. So I would have to say it was my siblings, but my parents were super supportive. And my dad was a coach, so I feel like my family was probably led me in that direction.

[00:04:29] Mike Klinzing: You think about competing with your brother and your sister and kinda watching them a- and seeing what they did, and you compare the way that you guys grew up in the time that you did versus the way that maybe the kids you coached here towards the end of your career coaching high school basketball and kinda the way they’ve come up in the game, how was it different?

How do you compare and contrast kinda your upbringing and what you did to become a better player compared to what your own kids did to excel in their sports?

[00:04:59] Linda Martindale: I think we just played a lot, honestly. We just played. All we had was a ball and a hoop, and anybody, any age, any kids in the block that could play, and we played every sport.

We played hockey on the street. We played football. We played baseball. We played anything. So I think the difference was really a lack of infrastructure around our play, and we just went out there and played, and we competed. It was like glory. If you won, you had the bragging rights for the night.

So it was a little less contrived, I would say, and a little more just playing

[00:05:34] Mike Klinzing: Definitely interesting how much that it’s changed in terms of, I think the, as you said, kind of the infrastructure, the autonomous play that you or I had where w- nobody was watching over us. There wasn’t Mom, Dad, there wasn’t a coach every time we played.

It was on the driveway or in the backyard or out on the street, whatever it is that you’re playing. And nowadays it feels like kids just have a coach, a parent, a scoreboard all the time. And I would say there’s good and bad to both systems. I’m always glad, and I don’t know how you feel, but I’m always glad that I grew up in the system that I did with that freedom to choose and experiment and do things, whereas today it feels if you’re an eight-year-old kid, when do you kinda get to just experiment and play?

‘Cause whenever you’re doing anything, there’s always an adult involved in, in, in some way. And kids have much better gym access than us, and they probably have much better coaching in a lot of cases in an early age, which is why I think kids are probably more skilled today. But I just think it’s, they miss out on something that I feel like you and I and our generation kinda had an opportunity experience that they haven’t.

[00:06:37] Linda Martindale: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think, one of the things I do now in my career is really coach, coach athletes to have a stronger inner coach. How are you coaching yourself? The best coach you’ll ever have is the one in your own head, and I feel like back in our days, we just didn’t have coaches every time we turned around.

We had to coach ourselves. And it, what it really came down to is you fall down and get back up, and that’s just the way it goes. So I think there’s probably… I agree with you on the skill. I think there’s more skilled players now for sure, more athletic, more well-trained and all those kinds of things.

But the inner coach, I think, is probably weaker now than it probably was back in our days.

[00:07:15] Mike Klinzing: Let’s talk a little bit about that right now in terms of when you’re working with somebody and you’re trying to get them to coach themselves, what does that look like? What kind of conversations do you have with athletes about, “Hey, can you get and evaluate yourself and then figure out how to improve without somebody on the outside externally giving you that?”

What do those conversations look like when you’re talking with athletes i- in your coaching practice today?

[00:07:42] Linda Martindale: And it’s a great question. I think, one of the things we talk about a lot is self-talk. I think a lot of kids understand what that means, but they haven’t been challenged to really look at the way they talk to themselves.

Oftentimes I’ll talk to an athlete about the way they’ll talk to a teammate. They’ll give their teammate a lot of grace, and I will say why’d you tell her it was okay? Why did you tell her, she’ll get the next one?” I want her to stay locked in. I want her to keep playing well.”

“So why aren’t you doing the same for yourself?” I think when we reflect on the way that we talk to ourselves, the way we coach ourselves, and I’m not soft. I’m not telling you that you need to, coddle yourself. I’m just telling you give yourself grace when you deserve it or when you need it, and kick yourself in the butt, when you need that.

And once you realize you have control over that, and when you have control over the way that you think and the way that you coach yourself, you can start to become a better coach Bottom line, I hear a lot of, “I wish my coach would say this. I wish my coach did that.” We can’t control our coaches, but we can control ourselves and when we realize the power in that I have to tell you, I’ve seen more athletes come back and say, “I just didn’t realize how much I could feed myself.

I was so hungry, I thought the coach was the only one who could feed me, and I realized I could feed myself.” It’s like that’s really empowering. Do

[00:08:57] Mike Klinzing: you think that the athletes that you see are filling their mind more with negative talk, or is it more that they don’t even realize or actually consciously recognize that inner voice just because their mind is going a mile a minute and they don’t stop and really think about what they are saying to themselves?

So I guess the question is it more they’re replacing negative self-talk with more grace and positive self-talk, or is it they’re not even necessarily recognizing that there’s self-talk going on that they can tap into?

[00:09:31] Linda Martindale: Yeah, I think that’s a good question. I would say, there’s a combination of both.

When you become really intentional about what you’re doing it’s like this it’s this idea that I don’t want to overthink, therefore, I’m going to try to think less. If you’re intentional about the way that you think, you won’t have to think more, and so this idea that you can go into something with really strong intentions and then fulfill whatever it is you’re trying to do, I think it’s– there’s a bit of a conflict.

I worked with a golfer today, and I said to him, he’s done really well. He’s a college golfer, and he’s come a long way. And I said to him, what’s the bottom line here? What have you learned about your own mental fitness?” And he said, “It’s really simple. I thought it was really complicated, and it’s really simple.”

And, I love that because I’m not reinventing the wheel by any means. A lot of times it’s a small tweak, but the idea of self-talk, be intentional. What are you trying to do? I’m trying to motivate myself. Great, let’s be clear on what you’re trying to do and then go from there

[00:10:30] Mike Klinzing: When you’re having those conversations how long is the wrong way to say it, but what’s the process for getting an athlete to recognize, as you said, the goal or what they’re trying to accomplish, and then helping to walk them towards what the type of self-talk they need is in order to accomplish what their goal might be?

[00:10:53] Linda Martindale: Y- do you mean in terms of the length the duration of the type of coaching?

[00:10:56] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I know you, I know it’s different for every kid, and sell- telling me it takes three months or it takes two sessions probably isn’t all that helpful. But just in terms of you walking them through a- and really getting them to see “Hey, here’s my goal.

Here’s how I can get there utilizing some of these things and skills that you’re talking about from a mental standpoint,” just what does that look like? You don’t necessarily have to put a timeline on it, but just how do you diagnose kind of what their challenges are and then help them to walk towards what they’re trying to get to?

[00:11:25] Linda Martindale: I would say in general, like most of the packages that I do with college aged athletes is five. So we usually do a couple in a row, like really identify what’s going on. A lot of times kids are, having performance anxiety or performance issues, or they’re having really a lack of joy.

They’re finding themselves overthinking. They maybe are like losing some sleep. They’re getting very nervous before a performance. If we can identify what’s going on pretty quickly, we can have two or three sessions with some really specific, goals, a great game plan. These are highly coachable people, which is why I love working with athletes.

Highly motivated, very ambitious, and these are the type of people that they want to be coached. They come to me and they want to be coached. So two or three sessions, we really identify the problem and get a game plan going. Usually skip a few weeks, let them really work on whatever skill they’re trying to work on and have a couple more.

Some of my athletes will save one because they have some security in knowing, if this goes off track, they can call and jump back on. But in general, between five and seven sessions is almost always more than enough

[00:12:36] Mike Klinzing: When you’re getting them to that point where they now have the confidence and the ability to apply the things that you’re talking about, do you find more that the kids who are coming to you, the athletes that you’re working with, are they more coming to you when they have a problem?

Or is it somebody who maybe is looking to even improve their performance, so maybe they are already performing well and now they want to take it to the next level? Or is it more kids who are like, “Ooh, I’m struggling. I have to get back to what I was.” Th- Is there a balance between the two?

[00:13:09] Linda Martindale: Yeah.

Interestingly I tell people this all the time. Two groups of people generally look for my services: the best on the team and the ones that are not playing as well as they think they should be playing. So in general, really accomplished, elite, high-level athletes want to be 1% better. They recognize that 1% would be enough.

They’re never, ever satisfied and, being the best on the team, being the best in the league, they want to be the best in the country. They recognize that the mental piece could be that small edge. So I see a lot of that, a lot of really good athletes looking to just get better. And on the opposite end players who are really dissatisfied with their performance and are feeling no joy and feeling they’ve have to find a way to get back on track.

I would love to see the middle. I think the middle can be the most impactful. Being 2, 3, 4% better in the middle, puts you in the upper echelon of performance. But that’s how I see it. So it’s better ’cause I work with more teams now. But initially in my practice, those were the opposite ends of what I would see on a regular basis

[00:14:13] Mike Klinzing: When you work with a team versus an individual, walk me through what that process looks like in terms of is it more of a structured program where you’re coming in with, “Hey, this is what I can help you with,” or is it something where you talk to the coach and they give you an idea of, “Hey, this is what we’re looking for”?

How do you design that work when you’re do- when you’re working with a specific team?

[00:14:39] Linda Martindale: It depends, but sometimes I have a coach who will reach out to me and say, “This is what we’re seeing. We’re- we have players who are just dwelling on mistakes. They’re so afraid to make mistakes, we’re playing in fear.

We can’t get to the next level because we’re so afraid of making mistakes.” I hear that a lot. Or, “I have a divide on my team, and I really want to bring my team together, and I want them to be a well-oiled machine, and, I need to figure that, that out.” So all kinds of things, coaches will come to me.

Sometimes I’ll do a general program, which is the five basic pillars of good mental fitness. We’ll walk through it. We’ll talk about performance cues, we’ll talk about visualization and breathing techniques and anything, any small thing that I think would give an athlete an edge. I almost always ask my groups, “Raise your hand if, you struggle with this, that, and the other,” and try to get a sense of it and then dwell on s- a topic that seems to be of great interest.

But in general, most teams, y- there’s a balance of who’s struggling with what on a team. And the five basic pillars are controlling things you can control, which most people struggle with. And by the way, just to be clear, the reason I can coach it is ’cause I struggle with every single one. As a college athlete, I was totally deficient, and I was completely mentally unfit.

I didn’t know mental fitness was a thing you could work on. It took me a number of years to figure it out. But I feel like as someone who struggled with it, I can identify it in others. “I was you.” So controlling the controllables is a big one, dwelling on mistakes really harsh judgment.

We see a lot of these same things over and over on teams.

[00:16:19] Mike Klinzing: It’s really interesting, one, to hear you say that, again, it was something that you struggled with and that you didn’t even realize it was a thing. I think back to my experience as a college basketball player and the exact same thing, and I’ve told this story a couple times now on the podcast with people who have a similar role to what you have, and I’ll just briefly lay it out for you.

But I was a kid that, as a player in high school, I still have the record for the highest free throw percentage at my high school, and I graduated, whatever, 35 years ago. So I s- I shot something like 90% from the free throw line in high school. And then in college, when I started playing, I didn’t play much as a freshman, and as a sophomore, I was like halfway through my sophomore year and I was shooting 92 or 93%.

And then all of a sudden in practice, we had to shoot, I think, make five swishes in a row before we could leave practice. If you didn’t make those five swishes, you had to get up the next morning at 6:00 AM. And somewhere in that thing, something inside of me just broke, and I went from being a 90-whatever percent free throw shooter to I literally could not get the ball to the basket.

Wow. And it was just… It was literally like n- it was like within the space of a week, it all just completely, it completely disappeared. And I got to the point where, again I was afraid to go to the free throw line in practice. I couldn’t make them. It was just every time I got fouled or had to go and shoot a free throw, it was anxiety-ridden, all this stuff.

And not one person Not a coach, not a teammate, not anybody ever spoke to me once about “Hey, maybe it’s something mental.” I don’t even remember anybody talking to me about mechanics or anything. And for the rest of that year, I think I finished the year like one for one out of my last 10 at the free throw line, and it was just, it was a disaster.

And then that summer I had to completely just remake. I got rid of my old routine, did a new routine. I think as a junior I shot like 76%, and as a senior I shot 82, which is probably one of the things honestly I’m, I might be the most proud of, that I got through that somehow myself and was able to at least become competent again.

I never got back to the level that I had been before. But the fact that there was no conversation whatsoever between anyone associated with me in any way and my sport, and now I just look at people who are doing what you do, and I’ve talked to lots of other people, that there probably was some simple things that had I known or had someone had some knowledge of what they could have done to help me, that I probably could have, A, gotten through it much sooner, and B, probably could have gotten myself at least close back to what to what I was.

But to hear you say, again, that I had no idea it was a thing, like I totally understand. I totally understand what you’re saying. And so I’m wondering, in that situation, like what would you tell somebody who went through what I went through? What would be the advice? How would you approach that?

[00:19:14] Linda Martindale: Interestingly you figured out what to do, and that was a total reset.

Y- people don’t l- to use words like slump or the yips or, these, these horrible words that somehow define something as being a real thing. It sounds so concrete to say you’re going through a slump or you have the yips,” or whatever. And I think the first thing that we do is just have a reset.

Did you forget how to shoot? You know how to shoot. Is there something wrong with your me- Allowing you to break it down. Is there something wrong with your mechanics? I’m guessing there wasn’t. But, you decided to reset and restart. It was probably a great idea at the time. You probably got so far down that was the only option you had.

We do hear of people who just suddenly can’t– They get up to the plate, and they can’t hit. And then- Yeah … i’ll say to a baseball player, who’s come to me and said I get to the plate and I, it’s not that I don’t hit, it’s that I don’t swing.” So they won’t even take a swing. So it’s really not a hitting problem.

And, once you identify it’s clearly not your mechanics ’cause you’re not even swinging. So that’s really easy to break off and make– That makes a lot of sense. We would have nipped that in the bud as soon as possible. I’d have to see what happened, but something happened that day, and then you had to reset earlier, and it took some time for you to figure that out.

But we didn’t have sports psychologists, right? We had a guy when I was at Arizona, we had a guy come in and do some visualizing, and we laid on the floor at McKale Center, and we all imagined ourselves shooting free throws or whatever it was, and I can remember thinking, “This is ridiculous.” I’m not doing this, and I was bored, and I was like thinking of something else.

But we didn’t understand it. We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know the benefits, and so a lot of us figured it out, and that, again, that was the inner coach, Mike. Like your inner coach said to you, “What are you going to do? The only thing you can do is start over.” And I probably would’ve done something similar.

Let’s break that back down. You tell me what you tell me how to fix it. You tell me. That preparation, that confidence that you can fix it yourself is oftentimes what an athlete needs. You don’t need new mechanics. You don’t need, a sports psychologist. You don’t need… You just need to break it down and put it back together

[00:21:18] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it was definitely one of those times where you just…

I, in my own head, just played out so many different scenarios and questions and wondering and just trying to figure out, what can I do? How can I do this? How, what it, what is it going to be? And again, it took me till the season was over, and then I just had to, as you said, restart it. And thankfully, I, like I said, I was able to somehow get through that and make it work.

But it always strikes me now when I look at the number of people on a coaching staff and the people that are doing it the way that you’re doing it independently, and just think that, man, here I was, a 19, 20-year-old kid, whatever I was at the time, and I was just kinda, it was just me. It was just me on my own, inside my own head trying to fig- trying to figure it out, and it probably could’ve just taken one person to just say, “Hey, you should try this,” or, “Hey, you could do that,” or, “Hey, you can stop the cycle by doing this.”

And I just think that, again, what you’re doing is so valuable because just like you, I talk to athletes at all different levels of sports, and one of the things that you mentioned a second ago that struck me as well was when you said that, there’s so many athletes who get to the point where they’re not enjoying what they do.

Which again, when you picked up the ball with your brothers and sisters or when I started playing basketball or playing whatever other sports, you picked up the ball and you started doing it ’cause it was fun and you loved doing it. And sometimes when you’re a college athlete and it’s so serious, and now you have the NIL piece of it, right?

When you’re playing at a higher level, where now it’s not just I’m playing for my team and my teammates and my school, and there’s pressure and that kinda thing, but now we also have the monetary part of it, and I think it’s easy to lose that joy. So tell me a little bit about when someone comes to you and says, “Hey, I’m just, I’m not having fun.

I’m not enjoying what I’m doing. I’m feeling so much anxiety every time I go to practice or every time I have to show up at a game. It’s just, I just am trying to get through it instead of enjoying it.” How do you help somebody who’s in that situation?

[00:23:25] Linda Martindale: Yeah, that’s a tough one, but there’s a couple of things.

The first thing is if you want to have a winning mindset, you have to have some wins. So when I talk to people who say, either I don’t get to play in games, and I just practice and practice, and I never play in games. You need a, you need some wins. You have to start treating practice like a game.

You need to set some intentions and find some wins in practice if you’re not getting in games. You’ll never have a winning mindset if you don’t win. Sometimes getting up really early in the morning and getting to the workout was the win. And once you can decipher what the wins are and start to let some of those wins fill you up, you can get some wind back in your sails, first of all.

Secondly, what’s your why? I put a huge thing on my program of my youngest son. So all four of my kids have been college athletes in five different sports. All very different. My kids are different, their sports are different, their schools, their levels, everything about them has been different, but there’s an underlying thing with all of them, and that’s the self-motivating thing that makes you want to play your sport.

So I put a picture of my youngest son, who’s a lacrosse player at Merrimack, his commit post on Instagram. I’d like to thank the Lord, and the coaches, and my friends, and my… You know what I mean. Everyone does it, and we all love it. And then underneath your commit post is, “Go Nolan. Go Merrimack. Go lacrosse.

You’re going to crush it, blue and gold.” All the amazing things that people say to you when you commit. “And you’re going to have an amazing experience. It’s going to be great And then you go and you have your freshman year and you don’t play a lot and it’s not the glory and it’s not the everything that was on your commit post.

So the first thing I say is go back to your commit post. Go back to it. Sit with it. Read every single comment. Let it fill you up again. Don’t forget why you went, why you’re there, what’s your why and, why you’re doing what you’re doing. So if you can get to the root of that, your why I love that for athletes who say what would you write on your sneaker?

What would you write on your cleat if I could told you could write a word on your cleat?” And they say I would put this Bible verse,” or, “I would put my grandmother’s name,” or, “I would put any ki- all kinds of words.” Okay, let’s use that as your driving force now. Now we know some whys. Now we can hold onto that and now we can get through hard things knowing you have a why.

But if you don’t have a why, you don’t even know why you’re there and you don’t know why you’re playing and you don’t have any wins, it’s no fun. There’s nothing fun about it. It’s a grind, it’s grueling, it’s horrible. It’s like having a really hard job that you don’t get paid. So I really do, I sit down with athletes and I start asking them about their whys and where they came from and who inspired them and what motivated them and all of a sudden the light goes on, right?

And all of a sudden they’re talking fast and they’re like, “And this one game and then my sister and then this happened,” and like all of a sudden you’re like, “Hold on right there. Hold on right there. Let’s go back to that.” And when they can have something like a why and they can collect a few wins, and I don’t care what those wins are, I don’t care if the win was you made the last free throw in practice.

I don’t care if the win was you got to practice. You get some wins, you find your why, it fills you up and suddenly your heavy footsteps become lighter and you start to get to the gym and ne- next process of this is now you need to get 1% better. And forget about playing in the game on Friday night.

Let’s get 1% better and then 1% better and then 1% better and you’re filled up. Now the preparation is building the confidence. Confidence is bringing the joy and you know you’re going to start seeing some minutes if you can get back to that. So that’s the process. I mean it sounds simple and I hate to make it sound so, easy and like, “Oh just go do that, you’ll be fine.”

But I do think when we break it down into small pieces it becomes more manageable again

[00:27:15] Mike Klinzing: I do think that, like I said, in my own situation, when you have somebody else who, A, helps you to see that, but then B, also walks next to you on that journey and is encouraging you, I think that is a really big part of it.

Because so often, and I know that you can probably attest to this for yourself, but also just with the athletes that you’ve worked at, with at all different levels, that a lot of times you feel so much by yourself. You just feel like you’re on this island that nobody else is experiencing what you’re experiencing.

Everybody else has got it easy. They’ve got it figured out, and here I am and I’m struggling and I can’t figure out how to make it, how to make it work. And just to have somebody next to you on the journey. And as you said, you can think that it’s simple and maybe it is, but when you’re trying to do all that and figure it all out yourself as, again, an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid, that’s a lot more difficult than when you have somebody walking next to you.

And I just think that, again, it may be simple, but when you have somebody that’s guiding you through the steps, it’s way simpler than when it is when you’re trying to figure it out in your own head.

[00:28:32] Linda Martindale: Yeah, I totally agree. And part of being on a team is really exceptional and I talk to teams all the time.

This is not a family. Family is unconditional love, and a team, there’s conditions to our love. Let’s be really honest. You have to abide by the rules. You have to be respectful. You have to be a good teammate. You have to. That’s the way it is. And sometimes I say to my own kids, “Can we act a little more like a team, please?”

Let’s, listen, if one of my kids doesn’t act appropriately, I can’t cut them from the family team. But a team is a really special relationship, and once you realize the magnitude of that relationship, because we have to act according to team rules, we have to, do all the things that a good team does, that’s what makes us exceptional.

And when we appreciate that, and as a team we realize that the bottom needs to be pushing up instead of pulling down, great things happen and joy comes back, and the wins and the everything that we love about sports starts to seep in

[00:29:32] Mike Klinzing: When you’re talking with and working with an individual athlete, do you have conversations with their coach at all during, at any point during the engagement with them, or are you strictly working with the athlete, or does it just depend situation to situation?

[00:29:47] Linda Martindale: I generally try to have confidential conversations with athletes so they have a f- a free place to speak. I, I let them know, that I’m not going to share anything unless they let me share. Mental fitness is different than therapy and, that kind of thing because I think that there’s more of a, a forward sort of game plan type of work and, we’re not really looking back.

So some athletes love to tell their coach about it, and some athletes are like, if I say, “I would love to tell your coach that,” if they have a great relationship with their coach too, oftentimes there’s a lot of crossover. Sometimes I will say to a coach, “I’m seeing several people on your team feeling a certain way.

I think it’d be a great time to bring everyone together and to talk about X, Y, or Z,” and that kind of stuff. But in general, if it’s a one-on-one with a player we try to keep it confidential. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of performance, issues, and I think people would rather their coach didn’t know how they were feeling, I guess you could say.

[00:30:45] Mike Klinzing: No, it makes total sense. How closely are- The conversations and the things that you work with an athlete, you talked about how it’s the top and it’s the bottom and not necessarily the middle. How closely related are the things that you’re working with the top 1% and the people that are at the bottom that are struggling?

How closely are what you’re working with them, how do those two, two things connect? Is it a complete disconnect of, hey, the 1% is working on this and the bottom 10% is working on this? Or is it the same thing but just directed in a slightly different way? If that question makes any sense at all.

[00:31:25] Linda Martindale: It makes sense and I would say across the board, I’m seeing the same things over and over. So it really doesn’t matter if you’re, elite and you’re crushing it. Sometimes I will meet with an athlete and they will tell me about their experience and what’s going on, and they’ll tell me all about it, and I’ll think to myself “Why are you calling me?”

You seem to have this under control.” And oftentimes they have imposter syndrome. So I have an exceptional athlete. She is in the top in her sport. She has everything going for her. As I was listening to her talk about, why she was coming to see me, I couldn’t quite figure it out until we got to the place where I was like, “You know what kind of work are you looking to do?”

And she said, “I feel like a phony. I walk into a room and I just don’t believe, and I…” She has clear imposter syndrome. You would not believe it if I showed you her and I showed you her results and I showed you… so it’s never– It’s it hits everybody. We all want to be mentally fit, and for me, it’s been an up and down thing.

I know the pillars of good mental fitness, and I have a really strong inner coach, and I work very hard on my personal mantras and performance cues and ev- all of those things, and I still struggle all the time. I catch myself, “That’s not helpful.” I catch myself like, “Turn that around. Time to reset.

This is…” So it’s an ongoing battle for everybody

[00:32:48] Mike Klinzing: There is no question about that, that I think one of the things that, especially in the world today, is so often the world is coming at us so fast, whether it’s coming at us in real life or unfortunately, especially for a lot of young people, it’s coming at us through our phones and scrolling through things.

And so the time to actually stop and process and think about what it is that we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, and to be able to Reset yourself. Sometimes we’re just, our mind is moving so fast that we don’t have the opportunity to really dial back and take the time to think and breathe and figure out, “Hey, what’s my next step?

It’s just everything is coming at me so fast.” And I think that when I hear you, talk about the girl that is a- at the top that has imposter syndrome, I think a lot of times you just don’t have the opportunity to necessarily process ’cause life is coming at you so quickly. I think that I feel that way in my life, and I know that, I, I have kids same as you do, and it just, it feels like sometimes their lives are coming at them so quickly with this, that, between schoolwork and job and sports and everything else, family, that, that come at them, that it really sometimes it’s tough for you to just sit down in a chair and think about, “Okay, what am I really trying to do here?”

Instead, I’m just trying to tick off my next task or my next practice or my next game or my next performance or my next test, and I never really have time to lay out a plan. And I think that, again, working with someone like you that can have the opportunity to have a conversation, just slow that athlete’s brain down.

Do you find that mile-a-minute sort of brain, do you see that with the athletes that you’re working with?

[00:34:27] Linda Martindale: Yeah. I- it’s the piece of being intentional. And I agree with you. Listen, the, the number one pillar to great mental fitness is staying locked in. Can you go into practice for two hours and have competitive endurance?

Can you truly stay locked in for two hours so that you can improve and do what the team needs you to do? I still go to the grocery store and I’m like, “What am I doing here?” I don’t know what aisle I’m in. I watch movies, I’m on my phone. I’m like, I’m always doing seven things. So we’re asking people to do some really hard things in an environment that’s telling them not to do it.

The fact that, when I coach high school boys, they don’t have phones for two hours. And a lot of times in high school they don’t have their phones either, but I’m asking them for two hours to stay locked in. These guys are– They’re developing, they’re getting there. But I’ll see halfway through the practice, everybody needs a break.

We’re fried, including me. So it’s like we’re in an environment that is not really conducive to staying locked in, right? We got things flying by us and all kinds of things going on. So staying locked in takes practice. And for me, I still am practicing it all the time. I catch myself, doing seven things at once for sure.

[00:35:37] Mike Klinzing: Could not agree more with that statement. That is 100% right, Linda. There’s no doubt that I find myself going, “What? I’m doing this,” and then this is popping up, and before you know it, I’m over I was just doing…” And then, yeah, it’s we’re all, I think, all over the place

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So going backwards in time, let’s– When did you first get interested in the mental side of it? When did that become something that you thought, “Hey, this is what I want to get into”? And then we’ll keep– We’re kinda going in reverse order here. We’re kinda working our way, instead of forwards through your life, we’re going to work our way backwards through your life, but how’d you get interested in this mental performance side of things?

[00:37:57] Linda Martindale: I would say, I owned a gym. I owned the Fieldhouse in Sudbury, which is a sportsplex, so I had access to athletes of every age. I taught a basketball taut class for three-year-olds all the way up to college athletes that wanted to be worked out. So I saw athletes at every level. We had a field.

We had lacrosse and soccer and field hockey and rugby, and all, every sport in there. So across the board, I had access to athletes of all ages and all sports. I love to talk to young people, and I’m curious, and I’m nosy, and I ask a lot of questions. So I really did start to hear a lot of stories of athletes that were struggling not necessarily in their sport, but, outside of their sport.

And I had an athlete come in to do a basketball workout, and she showed up and she had a sprained ankle. And she came and she said “My mom said I, we had to pay for, the hour even if w- it was too late to cancel, so is it okay if I just come and hang out or something?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s crazy.

You don’t have to pay. Tell your mom, you, whatever.” She said would it be okay if we just talked for a bit ’cause tryouts are coming up in a few weeks?” I said, “Sure.” So we sat and we talked about how she was feeling about tryouts, and we went through a bunch of stuff, and after an hour she left, and I texted the mom and said, “Hey, don’t worry about paying for the session.

I didn’t realize she was injured and it’s no problem.” And she wrote back and said, “What do you mean? She just got in the car and said it was the best session she’s ever had with you.” So I really had to think about that. She felt like she got so much done in a session where we didn’t pick up a ball.

So that was the first time I thought these kids need something more than just, ball handling and moves to the basket. And I, from there, I started to add a five minute onto my sessions of just talking. From there, I started to talk to more athletes about how they were feeling. When I started coaching high school boys, I had an idea that coaching boys would be different than girls for a number of reasons that I was, I would not, wasn’t necessarily right about.

But I did realize that the boys needed a lot of the mental training as well as the girls. They just didn’t have access to it. So that is kinda how it started, and from there, I went back to get certified, and then I started to really take it more seriously and really get to the bottom of it.

[00:40:14] Mike Klinzing: When did you think it was going to become a business?

Was there a moment when the light bulb went off and you’re like, “Hey, this can actually be a separate business from what I’m doing now”?

[00:40:24] Linda Martindale: I just didn’t know if it was going to be a business, honestly. Like I s- I think every day I just, I just love what I do. I love to be around, athletes. I love sports.

My own kids, my kids will say to you, say to me like, “Stop coaching me. Da, stop being a coach.” So I just think I love it and it was like if it’s going to be a business, it is. I’m just going to keep doing what I love and, you hear stories like that but that’s the truth. I started my podcast ’cause I love to talk to people about great stories.

And then the business just came with it, ultimately. People hired me to do what I love and I was like, “Okay, I guess this is a business.”

[00:41:02] Mike Klinzing: You found the intersection, right? That they’re always talking about. You have found the intersection of your passion and what you love to do, what you are good at, and what somebody would pay you for.

So you did all the, you did all the business book, all the self-help things that you were supposed to do to get to where, to get to where you wanted to go. Which, again is very cool. Let me ask you about the sports building piece of it, because I had a friend at one time that I had put some money into a, a business that he had, and then he was trying to get a building built, and I’ve seen other people kinda get involved in it.

What did you like about owning a building, and then what was… what were the challenges with owning a building as you went through that process?

[00:41:42] Linda Martindale: The challenges were, getting it to work. It was a huge space. It was 50,000 square feet. It was expensive just to have the lights on. Getting enough activity and enough good business to get it going and to make it work.

To have people who worked for me who were passionate and gave so much time and energy to so many things, like making sure that everyone was taken care of. Building the business. We bought a business that was existing. So Steve Connolly started The Field House. He did a lot of the, the work to build it to where it was, and we got it when it had a great reputation.

It was family-run, so all my kids worked there and we just loved it. We loved everything about it. We loved being around everybody. We loved the people who worked for us. Amazing coaches, passionate people who love what they did. When the pandemic happened, we just couldn’t keep our doors open because we’re a business that you rent space, you rent courts.

We had boxing classes and spinning classes and workout classes, and suddenly no one could work out. There was no money coming in. We had to give a whole bunch of money back to people who rented our space. So that was really devastating to lose the business during COVID. But we sold it to 3Step.

They were a huge organization. They could afford to float it, which was great, and they kept it open and they kept it going and that was really positive. So in the end, there was a lot of positives that came from it, but at the time it felt like a failure. So it was, it was devastating to close the doors.

We put a lot into it. But in the end it was the right thing to do, and it all worked out

[00:43:17] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think that one of the things that I’ve always seen with people that I know that have buildings is what you mentioned, just the work that it takes to keep it full, right? That you’re constantly hustling and working and talking and hiring good people to be able to get people to be attracted to who you have working and coaching and all those kinds of things.

And it’s definitely, I think, rewarding and yet at the same time, just very challenging to make sure that you can have the building filled because obviously in order to have revenue and make it a, a positive a- as a business, you have to have money coming in the door, which means you have to have people coming in the door and that, that takes constant work.

It doesn’t– I think people sometimes think you… I, a lot of people that I know have a– I think get, it gets misrepresented because people will go and see a building filled on like an AAU tournament, and the building is packed on a Saturday and there’s tons of teams and whatever. I’m like yeah, the building is packed here on a Saturday afternoon, but go on Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m.-

[00:44:16] Linda Martindale: Right …

[00:44:16] Mike Klinzing: and see that same building.” And then that’s where I think the challenges are, is you got to figure out how to fill it. So it’s always, I have a lot of respect for people who do the building thing, ’cause I know it’s, I know it’s not easy, let’s put it that way.

[00:44:28] Linda Martindale: Agree.

[00:44:30] Mike Klinzing: All right, let’s go backwards further.

Was there a point in your life where you knew that you wanted to coach? Thinking back to yourself as a college athlete coming out, I know you had various jobs in the business world. Where was coaching on your radar as you were coming out of school? Was it something that you knew you wanted to do at some point in your life?

Just walk me through where you get to coaching in your life.

[00:44:55] Linda Martindale: Honestly, I think I was always a coach. I can remember being young and teaching the next-door neighbor how to do layups from both sides. I was coaching from a really young age. My father was a great football and baseball coach.

His ashes were buried on the pitcher’s mound in the place where he was a great coach, and that had a profound impact on myself and my siblings because we know that he made a real difference in people’s lives at that baseball field and the football field where he coached. So I always felt strongly that I was a coach.

I redshirted after my freshman year. I transferred and I redshirted and I coached at a high school, and we played against the school for the deaf and blind, and the players were deaf, and that had a huge impact on me. So I went back and became fluent in sign language. I thought maybe I would coach at the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind.

I just always loved to coach. I just wanted to be around it and so I’ve been coaching since that year and I don’t know, you can probably do the math, but it’s been a lot of years, a lot of camps, a lot of clinics, a lot of high school, middle school, youth sports. I just always loved it and always wanted to be around it, so I think it started really young.

[00:46:10] Mike Klinzing: Let’s start with your family and your dad as a coach and you growing up seeing him coach the kids that he coached. What’s one or two characteristics from your dad’s coaching style, personality that you feel like you took with you that are a part of who you are as a coach?

[00:46:31] Linda Martindale: Oh, I love that question. He’s so feisty.

He’s just passionate. He just loves his athletes, and the story about him is his little football players used to run on the field, and he would take his wedding ring and hit them on the helmet, so it would make a clinging sound or whatever. And, he’d go, “Get on out there,” and he’d hit them in the helmet, hit them in the helmet.

And there’s a story of all the little guys running out in the field, and then one of them come running back Coach, you forgot to hit me in the helmet with your ring.” He was just funny, and he was, just loved his kids, and I feel like- Probably the passion for the game I probably got for him.

I just love the kids that give so much to, being as a part of a team, and I love that some of the kids who don’t get to play a lot still love to be there, and we have an environment where we value everybody. Everybody feels like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. So if I can be the captain of that ship, it’s a incredible responsibility, and I take it really seriously, but I love it.

And I think my dad did as well, and the way he used to talk about, some of the guys that he coached, he really saw them as more than just baseball players, football players. He really saw them as young men, and I think they knew that. So I try to emulate that in my coaching.

[00:47:51] Mike Klinzing: What is that back end of the roster who isn’t getting the playing time that they would like?

I think this is something that all coaches try to figure out, right? Because the back end of your roster can either be a huge plus for you when they are bought in and feel valued, and they’re steering the ship in the right direction. And I’ve also seen situations where the back end of the roster becomes disgruntled and upset and is doing everything that they can to push the ship in the other direction of the way that you as a coach might want it to go.

So what are some things that you’ve done over the course of your career to try to engage the athletes on your teams that maybe aren’t getting the recognition for playing, they’re not getting the playing time? How do you still make them feel a part of it so that they’re rowing the boat in the right direction?

[00:48:48] Linda Martindale: Yeah. It’s so critical. I’ve made lots of mistakes, Mike, for sure. Like I, I can’t tell you that I have been really good at this for twenty-five years because I can think back to times when I didn’t do it enough. The truth is, if there’s thirteen, fourteen people on my ro- my roster, that’s the number of kids I need to coach.

I- it’s easy to coach the best players. It’s easier. It can sometimes feel more fulfilling because you tell a really good player to do something and they do it. It results in, what you want to have happen on your scoreboard, of course. But some of the most fulfilling moments of my career have come with players that, weren’t at the top.

And I have more stories about players who became more than they thought they could be. My job is to believe. You don’t take people on your roster if you don’t believe they can contribute. And then once you believe they can contribute, you believe they can contribute more. I try to be straight, try to tell them how it is.

I think when I switched to boys I wanted to be sure that I could connect in a way that was empowering for them. Somebody gave me a book when I switched to high school boys. Very well-meaning person gave me this book, and he’s an amazing coach and a great person. And he gave me a book about coaching boys And as I was reading it, I was realizing it was like how to raise young men.

And the book was so slanted about men raising young men, I don’t think he realized that I was thinking, “Did he do this on purpose? What the hell is this?” So I realized I’m not a man raising young men, right? But I am a mother raising boys. I am a basketball coach, developing players, whether they’re boys or girls or, whatever.

But with that said, I needed to believe in them because I needed them to believe in me. So it doesn’t go one way. When coaches say he doesn’t believe he’s going to get to play, and I don’t believe he is either.” There it is. You know what I mean? So you can’t ask a player to do something you’re not going to do back.

So I believe you can contribute, and I believe you’re important, and I believe you’re of great value, and I actually believe you could do more than you’re doing right now, and that’s enough. Sometimes the guy at the end of the bench is “You’re right, and I’m going to do more.” And suddenly they’re contributing in a way that’s more meaningful.

[00:51:02] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I think if you believe in them and then you show them the path, right? You show them the way that, hey, this is how you can get to… Again, you may never go from player 14 to player number one, but you can go from player 14 to player number nine or player number eight, or you can go from this role to improving and being this role.

Or hey, we can get you to do X, Y, and Z that are things that contribute in practice or things that contribute on the bench during games. And i- it’s a really, as you said, that is a really hard thing for any coach to be able to do, to keep however number of players that you have. ‘Cause let’s face it, the players who aren’t playing as much as they would like, or players who aren’t playing at all, it’s hard to keep them happy and engaged, and you have to really, I think, go back to a word that you said earlier, intentional, right?

You have to be intentional about that. If you just think it’s going to happen because, hey, I’m a great coach and I’m nice to those kids, yeah, that… It’s not going to, it’s not going to be enough. You have to be intentional about how you engage them and, as you said, get them to believe in themselves and then believe in the greater mission of their team and how they fit into that mission.

And I think when you can do that, you really, you really have something. Before we dive into your experience coaching the high school boys and then obviously your son as a part of that, let me just ask you in general about coaching your own kids in sports. ‘Cause there are a lot of people who have that experience at various levels.

Some people have it when their kids are eight and nine years old. Some people have it as high school coaches coaching their kids. But from your experience coaching your own kids, what are some things that you did well? What are some things that if you look back at it, you’re like, “Ooh, I wish I would’ve maybe done that a little bit differently in this instance”?

[00:52:45] Linda Martindale: I think, letting my kids decide who I was going to be after the game. I’m a mother and I’m a coach and saying to them, “What do you need right now? Do you need a mother or a coach?” I failed at that so many times. I acted like a coach when they needed a mom. And so like understanding that they had to call some shots was really important.

I coached my oldest and he loved basketball and he loved to be coached and he was just different than the others. And when I tried that with number three, he was more resistant. And then when I was number four’s full-time high school coach for all four years, I had to let him take the lead. I had to let him tell me how part of it was going to go.

Every year I asked him if he wanted me to s- be his coach knowing that it’s possible that he doesn’t and that’s okay too. And then letting players know, be upfront like with my players. I’m probably hardest on him. He was voted to be captain by his teammates. I did not choose that. They chose him, so they believed in his leadership and they believed in our relationship being, player and coach.

But man, I loved it. Oh, I loved it. It was so much fun. We had so much fun. We had a lot of success. We had a lot of fun. We had a lot of downtime, uptime. Like we just had a blast

[00:54:04] Mike Klinzing: When you talked about making the transition to coaching high school boys, obviously, I don’t have to tell you that it’s an unusual situation for a female to be coaching a male team.

Obviously, the other way, not that unusual for a male to be coaching females. So for you, do you feel like there was a big adjustment? A lot of times I’ll hear from coaches that go from coaching boys to coaching girls, they’ll say, “I just coached it the same,” or it felt the same. Sometimes they’ll say girls are more coachable than boys.”

I’ll hear that answer sometimes, that the boys sometimes think they, they know more. They’re not as receptive necessarily as the girls. Then the other answer I’ll hear is, “I just coached them exactly the same.” So what was your experience like? W- maybe what did you expect going in? How different was it from your expectations?

Just kinda give me the general overview of how you felt about that transition and obviously the uniqueness of your situation.

[00:55:00] Linda Martindale: I had the advantage of, coaching in my own town. So most of the boys in my program I knew on a personal level. I coached a lot of them in middle school too, ’cause I did a lot of youth coaching.

So I had a, I had an advantage going in that, I knew them. People ask me all the time the difference between coaching boys and girls, and it’s variable. I had a very, very strong team when I was at Newton North. Every one of my starters went on to play college basketball, including Nay and Say.

So they were very competitive. The one thing I found with boys in general is that they would battle in ways that I almost thought “Do I need to stop this?” This seems too much. And then they would run off to Chick-fil-A. Like they didn’t have any problems with turning it on and turning it off.

And I feel like with girls they can carry it a little bit. W- what are you going after me in practice for? So there was a little bit of that I noticed early on. Setting them up to really compete and battle each other. There was a lot of that going on in my gym. I wasn’t used to it.

I had to take a step back and let some of my assistants step in and say this is what this is going to look like,” and get used to it. So that was a big– That was an adjustment. Gameplay A really faster pace, so you’ve have to be ready, and you’ve have to have your game, and you’ve have to know what you’re going to do, and you have to have good plans, and you have to have good scouts.

On the girls’ side, I found that there was two or three really good players in most programs. We could focus on them. On the boys’ side, number five, number six, number seven could go off. We needed to know what their bench looked like on the boys’ side because high school boys could come out the year before they were 5’8″, and then they come out and you’re like, “Who’s this 6 foot 5 kid?”

They’re like- They grew down … “Johnny grew over the summer.” I’m like, “Okay, good to know.” We just needed to know more because I felt like there was more boys that were competing at a high level, so our scouts were more important. Just, it just pushed me to just be on my game a little bit more. I, I know that sounds maybe wrong, but I think on the girls’ side, I got very used to coaching girls, and I got, good at coaching girls.

And so when I switched to boys, it was a challenge for me. I really had to reevaluate myself as a coach and find a way.

[00:57:12] Mike Klinzing: Makes total sense. When you just think about, again the difference, in l- to some degree the physicality. I- it’s funny that you said about just, the 5’8″ kid that turns into the 6’5″ kid.

And it’s funny when you watch high school girls basketball and you watch– I have a daughter who’s going to be a junior in high school this year, and I watch her play and kinda go through the system of of playing in. A lotta times you’ll watch a high school girls game, and you’ll say, “That girl’s a senior, and that girl’s a freshman,” and you’re like, “There’s not really very much difference.”

And then you look at the boys’ side, and you look at this kid’s a senior, and this kid’s a freshman. You’re like, “Holy cow,” like the difference in the physical size- Yeah … of those two kids is… Again, they’re obviously unique freshmen on the boys’ side that sometimes have that physical nature, but there’s just a huge leap that’s made, whereas I think the girls tend to make that leap earlier.

And by the time they’re in grades nine through 12, there’s not a whole lotta difference physically. It’s harder to tell them apart from, hey, this kid’s a ninth grader, this kid’s a 12th grader. Where on the boys’ side, I definitely think that is. And then I think the other interesting thing that you said is just, again, kinda forcing you to grow in your craft and evaluate what you did and who you were.

And I think any time we step in, it probably would’ve been if you stepped into any new situation, not just girls going to boys or whatever. But just going into a new situation, right? You have to kinda reevaluate yourself, kinda what we were talking about earlier. You take a step back and you think, “All right, is what I’m doing still effective?

What do I need to do differently?” So when you think about those adjustments- How did you go about then improving your craft once you took over the boys job? Did you go to other coaches that had kinda been mentors to you to bounce ideas off people? Were you going to more film work? What’s, what did you do to kinda improve your craft as you got into that the side of coaching on the boys?

[00:58:59] Linda Martindale: I definitely talked to other coaches. I’m the first person to say anyone can come into my gym. If you have something to teach, come on in. A lot of great coaches came in the gym. A lot of people that I really respect that I would call. I didn’t make the right call at the end of games, and I would call my brother.

He would literally be driving and he’d be like, “Okay, where was the wing?” And whatever. He would jot stuff down. My oldest son, he’s, he was, he just gave up his professional career. He was an excellent, excellent player, a college player. He would draw things up for me. He’s, he’s someone who really studies the game, and I would call him and he would be like, “Don’t do that.

Try this.” And I talked to a lot of people, and people have just been helpful, like great coaches. In my league I have some really good friends who I coach against, and they were great. I just, I can remember losses and calling guys I play against and saying, “Man, did you know so-and-so is this good?”

And just great people. Great people to talk to and learn from and just develop

[01:00:03] Mike Klinzing: Year to year, as you were looking at your roster over the six or so seasons that you were coaching the boys, how much adjustment did you make year to year in terms of what you did stylistically based upon who your personnel was year to year?

So there’s coaches that have, “Hey, this is my system, and I’m kinda trying to develop players to play in my system.” And then you have other coaches who are like, “Hey, every year I have to kinda just evaluate what I have and figure out the best way to win with this group.” So I don’t know if either one of those best describes you or kinda how you went about your preparation for each one of your seasons to kinda get your team ready and figure out stylistically how you wanted to play.

[01:00:39] Linda Martindale: Yeah. That’s a good question. I love the Gonzaga offense. I think it offers a lot of players a lot of opportunities. It’s good for shooters. It’s good for people to get to the rim. There’s a lotta movement. I love, a pick and roll. I love a hand off. I think that people don’t defend it very well.

So if you get really good at those things, you can run that offense to death. And everybody knows it and you can come into my gym and scout when we’re going to run. If you run it effectively and you swing the ball a couple times, defenses are out of position. You can attack. So I think, we always ran Gonzaga, but every team was different.

Where people would find their money shots, where people would find, what they were going to use it in. This past season I had a couple of bigs. Not my most skilled players, but nice size. So they could we could dump the ball inside, like maybe we weren’t able to the year before.

We had a very talented player who’s at Wheaton now. Great in and out player. A beautiful mid-range, probably the best mid-range in our league. He was the MVP in our league, so we wanted the ball in his hands. My son, who’s a lacrosse player, is tough. He gets to the rim, so we did a lotta back doors with him.

Because even if you slid over, he could finish with contact. So like it just depended. We had players who were really good at certain things, and so we would adjust. We were lucky to always have a really good scrappy point guard who could play the top of a full court press and run ’em. We could run people and, I loved that.

One of my really good players a couple years ago did not make the team as a freshman. He came out as a sophomore and we were like, “Who’s that?” “Where’d that kid come from?” And he was like, “Coach, you cut me last year.” He never played JV. He never played freshman. He went from nothing to varsity as a sophomore.

So he’s an example of you never know what’s going to happen with boys. And he was so athletic He would cherry pick and we would just throw the ball. He was crazy athletic, so we had to change what we did because we had a kid who just had great instincts. So yeah, every year, it’s fun.

You think you know what’s going to happen and who’s going to come, and you think before tryouts, you kinda have a sense. And every year I’ve coached, somebody comes in the gym and we’re like, “Wasn’t expecting that.” That’s always really fun in high school. You always get something.

Something comes out of the woodwork, so you can’t do everything you thought you were going to do, but you kinda wing it a little bit

[01:03:06] Mike Klinzing: That’s a great lesson there that goes back to the mental fitness side of it, or even the parenting side of it, right? Is you have so- and I’m sure you’ve had this conversation with people where they’re, “My kid’s have to do this and they’ve have to be that, and I want ’em to be in this sport.

I want to be…” And I- I’m always like, “Listen, until your kid hits puberty and you figure out are they going to be tall, are they going to be strong, are they going to be fast, are… Until you figure out what their characteristics are, which you’re not going to know until they hit maturity, then you want to keep their options as wide open as you can.”

‘Cause suddenly, to your point, here’s a kid who doesn’t make a team, and then suddenly, boom, he’s right on the varsity. We had a kid that he w- my son, who’s now going to be a junior in college, but when my son was a freshman in high school, there was a kid who was two years ahead of him who, same as the player for you, when he was a freshman, got cut.

Wasn’t on the team, came back the next year and he didn’t go right to the varsity. He played JV, but then his last two years, he was probably the best player on the varsity and didn’t play at all as a ninth grader, was just playing rec basketball a- as a ninth grade kid. ‘Cause again, he just hadn’t developed and he decided, “I’m going to become a good basketball player,” and between ninth and 10th grade, guess what?

He got in the gym, he worked at it, he improved, and then he came back. And again, it’s a great lesson for- Those stories- … for

[01:04:31] Linda Martindale: people that are out there listening … happen all the time. I mean- Yeah … I have so many- Yeah … of those stories where a kid gets cut and comes back and I say to parents “The hardest lessons have the best rewards.”

If you face it the right way and say, “I’m going to come back, I’m going to be better, I’m going to get better,” like it’s so powerful.

[01:04:48] Mike Klinzing: It is, and I think that i- it’s so easy in today’s world for us to move on as, “Okay, th- this is, this didn’t work out for me. I got cut in seventh grade,” or, “I didn’t make it in eighth grade,” or, “Man, this, there’s five kids that are better than me,” whatever.

And so often, I think people drop out before they give themselves a real chance, and it’s part of the problem with our youth sports structure the way it is of we’re cutting kids when they’re eight years old from this travel team, and it’s so competitive to be on this AU team, and if I’m not on this team, then everybody gets discouraged, and we have the whole fear of missing out thing with parents, and it’s just a whole…

there’s just that could be a whole nother podcast that we could- Yeah … that we could dive into for sure. There’s tons of tons of other things we could discuss there. Let me ask you specifically about coaching your son. What was the best part for you and him? What do you think you… W- what do you say is the best part?

What do you think he would say was the best part of you being his coach when you think about just the time that you guys got to spend together?

[01:05:54] Linda Martindale: Oh, I know a lot of people have asked him this, and he’s answered this question a lot, but, just so great to watch him develop as a leader and to play a sport that he loves and to be a part of it.

I never, ever let him get away with anything that anybody else didn’t. He had to be better, and I got to watch just the joy of the season for him and his best friend. So his best friend was my point guard. I’ve known them both since they were in kindergarten. Getting to watch these two guys get past the first round of the playoffs, we were the lower seed to go into Arlington and, they had a brand new gym.

It was the first game in their gym. They were a higher seed. They had the player of, the conference player of the year, and we went in there and just had a great game plan and executed and had a great game. And letting these guys have that amazing opportunity as seniors to rise up was awesome.

But just every day, every single day in the gym, we had so much fun. We wor- they worked so hard. These guys were just busted their butts every day, and we had such a good time, and just to be the leader of that was amazing. And a great staff. We had such awesome staff. It just so much good came from it.

[01:07:11] Mike Klinzing: How’d you put together your staff, just curious, when you first got the job?

[01:07:14] Linda Martindale: It was hard. It’s hard to find. These are not jobs that pay very well. They’re often, you have to have people who are willing to get to the school, early in, on a Wednesday and a Sunday and, just it’s a lot.

So I got lucky finding people through the gym that I owned. Word of mouth, AAU guys that were looking to learn and grow and develop and just, my assistant coach is now the head coach at Ashland. Great guy great opportunity for him. So I love to watch my guys go on and do other things, and I just got really lucky, honestly, word of mouth, I would say.

[01:07:49] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think having a great staff as a high school coach, it’s, as you said, it’s not easy to put that together. I think sometimes you have this idea that, “Oh, it’s going to be super easy. I’m going to get this person.” Then you realize they have to be at school at 2:30 and- Yeah

hard to have another job, and we’re going to pay you $3,000 to- … do that, and you’re going to make, you’re going to make a nickel an hour.

[01:08:07] Linda Martindale: Yep.

[01:08:07] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. It gets really tough really fast to have put together a great staff. Final two-part question for you, Linda. Part one, when you think a- ahead to the next year or two, what do you see as being your biggest challenge?

You’re going through a new chapter here with the mental fitness business, stepping away from high school coaching. So your biggest challenge. And then the second part of the question, which I’ll remind you if you forget after you answer the first part, is your biggest joy. So your biggest challenge, and then when you think about what you get to do every day, your biggest joy.

[01:08:40] Linda Martindale: My biggest challenge is probably, just continuing to get the word out of what I do and just trying to meet the right people and continue to network. And the biggest challenge for me is the same as everybody, and that is when I take a step backwards, is just to get up and go forwards again.

I think that’s a challenge for me continuing to push forward when there’s days where I’m like, “Is this worth it? Is it– Am I doing good work? Is this impactful?” And really coaching myself through it. So that’s the challenge, I would say. And what was the second question? The-

[01:09:13] Mike Klinzing: Biggest joy. Your biggest joy in what you get to do.

[01:09:16] Linda Martindale: Oh my gosh. I get to do the greatest work because I get to watch people get better and be better, and I get to experience the joy of teams. I’ve been working with a team for three years at Holy Cross. I started when the sophomores, a big sophomore class and they had a lot of work to do on team rules and their locker room and this and that, and a whole bunch of things, and now these are seniors and they’re just crushing it.

And they’re just, they’re so happy that they’ve put in all this work, and the team is… They just came back from a trip to Europe and oh, it’s so fun. It’s just fun watching them start. There’s so much promise and excitement. And a lot of work. A lot of time in the classroom, and a lot of time one-on-one with girls.

A lot of time, with an amazing coach who believes that it could be better, and it is, and so I get to watch. I get to sit on the sidelines and watch the fruits of their labor, really. I can’t say it any other way.

[01:10:14] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that’s awesome to be able to have the impact, right? And to use the game of basketball to be able to have that impact, to be able to have an impact through sports, something that you love and that’s been a whole part of your life, to be able to then pass that on to the athletes that you work with.

I think that’s one of the things that all coaches and people who are in athletics, it’s one of the things we love about it, right? Is that we can use the things that we love to be able to pass that along to the athletes that we work with to have a positive impact on not just them as athletes, but them as people as well.

And as you said, just to see the joy on those girls’ faces as they’ve come together and figured it out, there, there’s nothing, there, there’s nothing better than that.

[01:10:55] Linda Martindale: Agree.

[01:10:56] Mike Klinzing: Before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance to share how can people find out more about what you’re doing, connect with you, share email, website, social media, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:11:10] Linda Martindale: Yeah. So Martindale Coaching is really where you could find everything. Instagram, Martindale Coaching. My website, martindalecoaching.com. LinkedIn, Facebook, all s- all socials, but mostly my Instagram has a lot of reels and videos and people I find inspiring and stories and stuff like that.

So you can reach me through martindalecoaching.com.

[01:11:31] Mike Klinzing: Awesome. Linda, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening, and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.

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[01:12:35] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads podcast presented by Head Start Basketball