Hard Work Is Killing Your Team’s Culture | Tony Holler

Most coaches believe that when things aren’t working, the answer is simple: do more.

But what if that mindset is actually hurting your team’s culture?

In this conversation, track coach and performance innovator Tony Holler shares the moment that changed everything: when his own son didn’t want to be part of the team. That experience led him to rethink what “hard work” actually means and how traditional approaches can quietly damage buy-in, trust, and long-term performance.

In this episode, we cover:

•  Why “do more” often backfires with athletes 
•  The hidden cost of traditional conditioning and volume 
•  What athletes actually experience inside most programs 
•  How to redefine effort in a way that strengthens culture 

🎧 This conversation originally took place inside Momentum Sessions, a free community for coaches who take culture seriously.

If you’d like to join future sessions, ask questions live, and connect with other coaches working on this, visit:
 👉 momentumteams.com/sessions

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I consulted with Saquon Barkley a month before he signed with the Eagles. And he said, I love your stuff. I want to know what to add to my workouts. And I said, I know what you do, and you do way too much. No wonder you're 25 and you feel like you're 35. He goes, Yeah, and I've lost a step. I go, Yeah, I think that's pretty obvious. So maybe instead of doing 20 hundreds, maybe do five. And I said, No, don't do any hundreds. Because anything more than five seconds is not working on speed. And there was a long, awkward pause. And he says, I think I've been brainwashed.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Most coaches believe that when things aren't working, the answer is simple. Do more. But what if that mindset is actually hurting your culture? In this conversation, Tony Holler, who has over 40 years of coaching experience at the high school sports level and creator of Feed the Cats, shares the moment he realized something was off when his own son didn't want to be part of the team he was coaching. And that moment changed everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

The problem that I was trying to solve was that kids did not like track and field. That some kids ran track and field because they were good at it and winning kind of, you know, like draws people in. I know I hated track and field in in middle school and high school and in college. I was a college track athlete and I hated every practice. If I did well, the meets were rewarding. And I think that deep down when we do hard things, I think we feel good about ourselves. We're kind of wired that way. But when it really came down to me being a head track coach and and fighting the battles year after year, and then I was going to fight the biggest battle of all. My eighth grade son, who could dunk a basketball in the eighth grade and was going to be one of my best track athletes ever, uh, said, Dad, track sucks. I'm gonna play baseball. And and I was like, I don't want to do things that suck. You can make a parallel too with high school teaching, which I was a chemistry teacher, and and I think that maybe 70% of all high school kids say that school sucks. And I I don't think that you can be very good at something that you are miserable doing. But yet we just force feed stuff in education, we force feed stuff in in sports, and um, and I just turned it upside down. And I said, I said, no, it's not gonna suck anymore. We're gonna stop running. Our sprinters aren't gonna run laps anymore. And we're going to sprint and jump and get really fast and athletic. And it worked really well.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

What do you think if you could call out one belief that maybe most coaches hold that actually hurts performance and motivation? Do you have an idea of what that maybe that core belief could be?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah, I I think I go back to I I consulted with Saquon Barkley a month before he signed with the Eagles. And he said, I love your stuff. I won't know what to add to my workouts. I said, You're not gonna like this answer, you know, because I'm I know what you do and you do way too much. No wonder you're 25 and you feel like you're 35. No wonder you're getting hurt. He goes, Yeah, and I've lost a step. I go, Yeah, I think that's pretty obvious. And and so he says, So maybe instead of doing 20 hundreds, maybe do five. And I said, No, don't do any hundreds, because anything more than five seconds is not working on speed. And there was a long, awkward pause. And he says, I think I've been brainwashed. And I said, We all have. We all have. We've all been told those Kobe Bryant stories. The reason why Kobe Bryant was great because he woke up at four in the morning every day, and he he got four hours of work in before those lazy athletes even woke up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That sells. That's what you see on the SPN. You see people dragging 200 pounds up a sand dune to become a better football player. Now, that doesn't make you a better football player, but that sells. And every great athlete and every great coach wants to tell you the one reason for their success, and that is I outworked everybody else. So that gets ingrained in us. And so we just have the feeling like if we're not achieving what we need to, we just need to do more, more, more.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

How do you think hard work became confused with high volume?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

I think kind of like what I just said, I was a coach's kid, and and you know, every the answer to all questions was work harder. I do a lot of work with football coaches now because sprint-based football, which is like feed the cats football, has really turned into a big thing. And basically you stop doing conditioning, you stop thinking endurance, you start thinking performance and all that kind of stuff. One of the things I have to teach is that after every loss, coaches get together and and they'll say, damn, they just wanted it more than we did. And then somebody else will say, Yeah, we we look dead in the fourth quarter. And then somebody else will say, you know, I just I think we're soft. We need to get tougher. And and I call those the defaults. Though those are lazy, lazy, lazy reasons that are not true, but those are things that are low-hanging fruit for coaches. And and what they don't talk about are the the two fumbles in the first quarter, the holding penalty, the call-up touchdown, pass back. They don't they don't zero in on the true nature of the game because in our mind, we're just in this echo chamber of I call it the undisciplined pursuit of more. And um, and I like to talk about the disciplined pursuit of less.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Okay, so if you strip down, feed the cats down to the essentials, what are the non-negotiable kind of principles?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Um, the speeds the tide that lifts all boats. Um, but as we get faster, there's magical improvements that happen in everything else we do. Um, maybe even in a cognitive way. I'm working with a cognitive science in Paris who thinks that maybe as we get faster, we get our brain gets better. And and we everybody's always known that walking is really good for creativity and all that stuff. Everybody that's ever written a book talks about they go on walks when they have writer's block, and uh things open up for them. Well, what would happen if we did the extreme human movement sprinting? So speeds the tide that lifts all boats. That that's number one that uh to never let today ruin tomorrow. Don't burn the stake. I go back to uh Atomic Habits by James Clear, where he talks about getting one percent better every day for a year. At the end of the year, you're 37 times the man that you were last year, just by getting one percent better. Now, if you get one percent worse, you're 0.03% of the of the whole person that you were when you started that year. So, in my mind, is we should not take two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward, two steps back, like so many coaches have done. So, you never let today ruin tomorrow. I say that tired is the enemy, not the goal, which blows coaches' minds, because basically the goal of every coach, every practice was to absolutely exhaust their team. For anybody watching practice, they'd say, Oh man, those guys work harder than anybody I've ever seen. Uh, there's things like make practice the best part of a kid's day, which is really unique. Um, there's a pillar that says that kids are good at what they like and they're obsessed with what they love. So we better create the toughness born out of love rather than the toughness born out of doing really miserable things. Sports in itself are miserable enough. I mean, no matter how good your coach is, no matter how talented you are, failure is is always pressing. You're you win games, you lose games. If you're really good, you may win a game and you were still feeling like a failure because you didn't play as well as you should. Um, there's people that are envious of you. There, they attack you, they, oh, he's terrible. They need to play. So we're always going to have those tough things, I think, that make us more of a man or whatever, that we don't need to artificially put kids through hell in order to get them tougher. And I think when you start performing in practice, instead of just, you know, like practice has always been kind of like going through the motions. That's all you could do, maybe high effort, but three-hour practices were just so long that you couldn't really be performative in practice. And the recoveries, you know, like I can remember football coaches having us run between drills. Like, okay, you did one drill, okay, now go down the other end zone, you know, on the hop, on the hop. And we'd have to run to the so we were at constant movement in a game where you play four seconds and rest 30.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

What you mentioned the the James Clare idea of getting one percent better each day, and there's like that, also that compounding effect that happens after time, too, which was really cool. But how do we practically try to get one percent better? And is there a measuring kind of thing that you look into when trying to do that?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

I love that question because it leads right into my idea. One of the things I didn't say about the pillars of feed the cats is that we need to gamify practice. By gamify, I see two different things. One is your practice should look like the game. If your practice does not resemble the game, then what in the heck are you doing? Now, firm examples of that. I can remember when my dad was a basketball coach, he'd say, Okay, put 45 seconds on the scoreboard. You're down five with 45 seconds to go. Win the damn game. That that was fun. That was like motivating, and it was like a game. You know, like we we it resembled the way you would play in a game. So that's one way to gamify. The other way to gamify is to measure athletic outputs. In other words, measure your speed, you know, record, rank, and publish. You need to measure vertical jump, you need to measure horizontal jump, you need to stand at like the baseline of a gym and say, can you uh do a triple broad jump over 30 feet? If you can, you're probably a division one athlete. If you can't, you got work to do. So, so anything that we can do to gamify, and I go back to my dad, uh, we did not just shoot free throws. Instead, we shot free throws in sets of 10 and and then would go over and say, hey, I made eight to the team manager or something. And and the next day before practice, we were all looking at who made the most free throws out of 50. That is so much more important than just shooting 50 through free throws. Data, it's it's performative. So anything that we can do that's more performative is really important.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Okay, so this applies to all sports in terms of the two parts of the gamify. You can make your practices look more like the game, and then the record, let's dig into the record, rank, and publish piece a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Yeah, I I I go back, I had a seventh grade life science teacher that would uh that would post the top 10 scores from his test on the board on a poster. And and I was a good student, and that was like one of the most meaningful things that I've ever done. That you know, I competed in class, and I think we forget that you can compete academically as well. You know, you you don't have to just do your courses, you can try to be the best in the class. And so I think I took a lot of those things, and I was also highly influenced by a program that in the early 90s called Bigger, Faster, Stronger. And in Bigger, Faster, Stronger, they they had several different lifts. They altered each lift for four consecutive weeks. Like one one week you would do sets of five, one one week you would do sets of eight, you know, they did different things, and and so once that four-week cycle was over, oh, and here's the important thing you record, rank, and publish everything you do. Also included timing sprints and jumping and all those things. Well, after four weeks, you you would restart that cycle, and guess what? You start breaking records every day. Um, and and when we see progress, we get motivated. If we don't see progress, practice is just the crap you have to go through to play in the game. Uh, I I read a book called The Motivation Myth by Jeff Hayden, and I'll sum it up to you in one paragraph that we get motivated by seeing progress. That's a sentence. We get motivated by seeing progress, but but I think in our teacher coach world, we always see motivation as bringing in some charismatic speaker who talks for 30 minutes and makes us ready to run through a wall or something. That motivation is very shortly lived because if you go out and shoot airballs, you're not motivated to be a basketball player. You have to have some success. And coaches and teachers need to set up ways that kids can see progress. And it can be as simply as simple as timing sprints and recording those sprints, and next to the spreadsheet, have what the kid ran the previous year as a personal best.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Are there any downsides to the recording, ranking, publishing? I guess the publishing part is where I'm specifically talking about and the public rankings of it. Are there any downsides to that part?

SPEAKER_00 13:56

This will shock you that in 26 years of feeding the cats, and and I I post our rankings on social media, on website. Um, uh in the early days before the world turned digital, um, I would tape rankings to the wall of the weight room with white athletic tape, and it was just as good that way. Uh, I would post it in the main hallway across from the principal's office. Funny story, the principal told me that I had to stop doing that. And I was offended, and I was like, why? It's like the most popular bulletin board in the school. He goes, That's the reason. We can't get the hallway clear enough to get kids to class because you got 30 athletes in front of your bulletin board between every class. I'm like, ooh, that's powerful. I felt pretty good about that.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

How does this all play into like the culture and the environment that you're creating when you have that? How does that kind of all play into something like this?

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Well, I think you know the answer to that. It it changes the game. The idea that a probably the state that has the most sprint-based football coaches is the most traditional state, um, Texas. And the coaches that used to coach old school, who now have focused on things that win, performative practices, uh, where we don't want guys to be tired. Sometimes we take bigger recoveries between efforts in practice than we do in games because we want the game efforts, we want practice efforts to be like game efforts. And if you're half tired, you don't run as fast. So, so let's recover a little bit more in practice. What they have found is that coaches who used to have to be uh mean in order to get high effort, uh they used to cuss kids, pun, punish kids. Somebody makes a mistake, the whole team pays for it. We may practice all night if you guys don't get with it, you know, that kind of thing. Those coaches would go home and have a hard time turning that off. Like I joke that they would go home and kick the dog and yell at their wife, or vice versa. And that is no way to live. And football coaches forever have apologized to their wives before the season started and say, I'm gonna be a monster for the next four months. You know, please, you know, hang with me. What I'm doing is really important, blah, blah, blah. And that's not good for a marriage. Same coaches have a hard time sleeping at night, so they drink too much. And it's just not a healthy way. So you start practicing 90 minutes instead of three and a half hours. You take away the miserable conditioning, you don't have to push kids, the kids feel pulled. That's a Steve Jobs quote that when you love something, you don't have to be pushed. You feel pulled. You know, or as Charlie Francis said, the great ones have to be held back. They don't have to be pushed. And so you start treating kids that way, and you go home a better person, and I think you're you will become a better coach. And you say, Well, I bet there's no big schools that are doing this. The University of Indiana practices for 30 minutes on Monday and Friday, and they practice about an hour and a half or an hour and 40 minutes on Tuesday, third, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And they're ranked now number one in the country. I doubt if Signeti would ever say, Oh, that holler guy was a huge influence on me, we feed the cats here. But somebody has heard this kind of radical talk and has convinced him that's a better way to win, which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

If I'm a high school coach who wants to apply the feed the cats ideas without maybe blowing up my whole program, where do I start? Maybe what's the the first step I should consider?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Well, we have a lot of uh we have a track football consortium that we just finished with two weeks ago. So I'm on the road a lot speaking now. And and so people can catch that, but I'm also on a thing called CoachTube. It's a place where you can buy my courses. And I have 20 courses. It was never my intent to uh be a content creator and you know, like change football and change soccer. But you know, sometimes stuff happens when you just kind of you know start talking.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

I know on social media you're kind of one of the, or not on social media, but just in general, this uh concept is polarizing to some. What do you think the ones that are kind of against your philosophy or speak the loudest, what is their um biggest misconception around what you're trying to teach?

SPEAKER_00 18:49

It's almost becomes political that that somehow I'm a leftist, bleeding heart, you know, kid-centered, everybody gets a trophy coach. Um, anybody that knows me knows that I am not. I mean, like, like if this did not win, I would be doing Vince Lombardi practices. You know, we we would be doing, you know, up downs and gassers and and and you know, cussing kids and all that kind of stuff. If that was the best way to win, I would do that. So in that way, I am old school. The other thing I think is that when when we talk about speed training and specifically, anything you do for more than five seconds is not working on speed. So they portray my stuff as yeah, they do like three fly tens, which it's like running a 40-yard dash, but you only time the last 10 yards, and then you change that to miles per hour. They do three fly tens and go home. You know, what's that? You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't look far enough into my training to understand why we still are a top 10 4x4 team every year in the state of Illinois. The four by four is all four guys runs 400 meters. It's a very long, hard sprint, maybe the hardest event in all of track and field. And we do it real well because fast guys are good at everything. And there are things that we do that are really hard that allows us to run further. Now, there's not as hard as stuff I went through as an athlete, but it's still very hard. I think football is a hard sport, even if you have a feed the cats approach, because it's still violent. And and we we say that uh that fatigue and violence has an inverse relationship in football. Um, because as you get tired, you cannot be as aggressive. You can't run as fast, hit as hard. Um, Lombardi said that fatigue makes cowards of us all. Truer words have never been spoken. But yeah, football coaches will recite that like it's part of their football Bible, and then go out and burn the stake on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then complain about effort on Friday. You which, like, come on.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

So if a coach right now is listening as we wrap up here, or they're watching the replay, if they want to steal just kind of that one key maybe idea to implement, though, kind of a practical thing to implement on practice tomorrow or next Tuesday. What do you think that maybe would be in reality?

SPEAKER_00 21:29

That that would be in reality. Let's say you're in a non-track sport. Let's say you're in football, basketball, yeah, golf, whatever. You need to sprint twice a week. You must make speed the priority in your training, but it will never be the majority because the majority would be your sport yourself. I mean, it'll be your sport. So, what I'm talking about is that twice a week you'll do something like my atomic speed workout, and people can look that up. There's it's a workout that takes 15 minutes. And it only involves 60 seconds of actual athletic work. 60 seconds of work, 15 minutes, and you know where I got that. Atomic habits. You know, atoms are small, but they're powerful. You start all habits small. So what you would do is you would do the atomic workout twice a week instead of your warm-up. People say, Well, don't you run a couple laps before you? No, just do it. Kids are resilient. I've never had a kid hurt doing speed drills. So you do 10 speed drills, two time sprints, and you record, rank, and publish, and it will start to change the way you coach. Because if your entire team's slow, you'll be like, This isn't good. This is not good. Slow is unhealthy. Fast is healthy. Slow is unhealthy. What did we do yesterday to make these kids so darn slow? Or what are these kids doing over the weekend that makes them so slow on Monday? We need to talk about these. So if speed is the uh tide that lifts all boats, that's what you do. And you don't have to be a sprint expert. You don't have to be a biomechanist to do these things. Um, if you simply time sprints, let's say you have a 10-year-old son and you go out, uh, I would suggest getting a timing system like FreeLap or OVR. You can get either for about 500 bucks. Um, OVR is the new thing that I'm really fascinated with. I have both. And you just set that up in your street, and your kid runs a 30 into a 10, which is a 40-yard dash, and then you take 20.45 divided by the time of the 10-yard fly time, that converts to miles per hour. And if your kid runs 13.8 miles an hour, he's thinking right now, I can get 14 tomorrow. That starts it all going. And and so that's what I would suggest. You know, the timing of sprints will organically allow athletes to self-organize. They they will start to run faster. And as you watch, you might actually pick up on some things. Like, hey, don't be looking up, you know, don't look forward or get a little taller. Hey, you're not using your arms. There's little things that you might be able to start to learn, but timing sprints almost coaches for you.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Gotcha. All right. So coachtube.com for some more resources. You can find Tony on social media. And as he said earlier, he's got some dates that he's traveling around the country in the next couple months. So, Tony, really a pleasure to talk to you. And I love that you know you're kind of teaching that better training isn't just about doing more, it's about doing kind of the right things with intention. So, thank you so much for your time today.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Matt, this has been great.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Hey, it's Matt. Thank you so much for listening. This conversation that you just heard originally happened inside of Momentum Sessions, a free community for coaches who take culture seriously. If you'd like to hear the full conversation, join future calls, ask questions live, and connect with other coaches working on culture and leadership, visit Momentum Teams.com slash sessions. We'll see you there.