113: Rise. Rule. Repeat. — The Championship Framework That Changes When You Win with Matt Knoll

Matt Knoll walked into Baylor in 1997 and told the local paper his goal was to win a national championship. The reporter laughed out loud.

At the time, that reaction was fair. The program hadn't won a conference match in eight years. The courts were slanted. There was no bathroom, no equipment room, no stands. Twenty-two seasons later, Knoll left with a 510-150 record, 13 Big 12 titles, and Baylor's first team national championship. The hard part wasn't getting there. It was learning that the way he led to get there would stop working once they arrived.

In this episode, Matt joins Gabe McManus to break down his three-phase framework, Rise, Rule, and Repeat, and explain why the leadership that carries a team from nothing to something can quietly undermine a team already capable of winning it all. He shares the moments in his career where he got it wrong, how he figured out what needed to change, and what he now brings to coaches and business leaders who are trying to push through their own ceilings.

About Matt Knoll

Matt Knoll served as Director of Men's Tennis at Baylor University for 22 seasons, retiring in 2018 with a career record of 510-150. Under his leadership, Baylor won 13 Big 12 Conference regular season titles, eight Big 12 Tournament championships, and the 2004 NCAA National Championship. A three-time National Coach of the Year and six-time Big 12 Coach of the Year, Matt was inducted into the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame in 2008. He now works as a leadership consultant and coach and is the author of Rise. Rule. Repeat.: The Champion's Framework for Building and Sustaining Elite Teams.

What We Cover

• Why Matt saw opportunity in eight slanted courts and no bathroom when nobody else did, and how he framed that vision to recruits from day one
• How he raised over $22 million by connecting donors to a community vision before the program had earned any national recognition
• The "Leadership Gremlins" concept and the season Matt's own coaching nearly cost his team a championship from the inside out
• What championship coaches across football, swimming, and wrestling taught him about when to push and when to let go
• The PPH framework (Professionalism, Pride, Heart) and why his team kept it a secret while ranked number one in the country
• How to know which phase your team or business is actually in, and why misreading it is the most common leadership mistake

Resources Mentioned

• Book: Rise. Rule. Repeat.: The Champion's Framework for Building and Sustaining Elite Teams by Matt Knoll

Connect with Matt Knoll

• Email: matt@mattcanola.com
• LinkedIn: Matt Knoll

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Snapshot

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Influential Advisor Podcast. Today we're sitting down with Matt Knoll, a three-time national coach of the year, who spent twenty-two seasons at Baylor, finished five hundred and ten and one hundred and fifty, and led the program to its first national championship. Matt recently published a book called Rise, Rule, Repeat. We're going to get into how he raised $22 million when nobody knew who Baylor tennis was, why the same drive that builds a championship team will eventually start working against you. And the season he almost destroyed everything he built.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Doing great, Dave. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you.

Work Ethic Fearlessness And Love

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Matt, to start off, could you tell me about your background and how you got to where you are today? It's not very exciting.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

I was I'm from Pittsburgh, Kansas, a small town in Kansas. My my story, my great-grandfather came over from Germany to dig coal in the mines. He went down in the earth six days a week. It was peace work. You got paid for what you dug, so it was pretty tough. I think that work ethic is something that really got our family ingrained with the idea that you get what you work for.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Tell me about your career and about how you got started with coaching and where that was leading. I was an athlete.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

I was always hearing stories from my childhood about my relatives. My dad was a high school quarterback. He has a great story where this was back in the days when high school quarterbacks called their own plays and you passed about three times a millennium, and they were backed up on their own one or two yard line, and he dropped back into the end zone and threw a 98-yard touchdown pass. And the crowd went crazy and everybody's excited. And he went over the sidelines, and they had a well-known coach, Spigarelli, smacked him on the side of the head and said, Who the heck do you think you are? It was that kind of an environment. I think to have the courage and the fearlessness and the not being afraid to fail, I think that influenced me a lot. I think the other thing was my mom just showered me with love, unconditional love, always made me feel like I was a little bit better than I really was. I was so blessed. And every time I made a decision, she'd back me. She always felt like I was heading in the right direction. And I made plenty of dumb decisions. But it was, I think for me, those three things really influenced me the most. The work ethic, the fearlessness, and the unconditional love. I think those things really influenced my coaching and my look, coaching is teaching, right? And just what I'm doing now with helping others, I'm teaching. And I think those three things really influenced the direction of my career.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

That

Why He Wrote The Book

SPEAKER_01 2:34

direction, you've captured it recently in a book. And so, Matt, tell us about the book and uh the writing of it and who is it intended to reach and to help?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah, it's a great story. We won Baylor's first team national championship, and the Baylor Publishing came to me and said, Hey, we'd like to write a book about that. They introduced me to a writer, and we spent the summer doing interviews and they transcribed everything, and it was a big thing. And then it just didn't really get off the ground. It didn't execute. I got busy the next year and it just didn't finish. I've had this idea of a book in my head for a long time. I just felt like the lessons that we learned with kind of the rise rule repeats, building our program and winning a championship and sustaining the excellence was just something that I wanted to get out there and I wanted to share with others. And now we finally be able to put it all together.

Seeing Opportunity On Broken Courts

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Okay, I'd love it if you could paint the picture for us. And so you, Matt, first walk onto those courts at Baylor and tell me what you saw that nobody else was seeing, and about how your beliefs and your vision led to that rise and the rule and the repeat that you accomplished there.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

I think backing up a step, I was at the University of Kansas. I'm from Kansas, I got my master's there, and we were good. We were 11 in the country, won the big eight, uh, and had a great team. But we were practicing off campus on three indoor courts at a tennis club, and we had to practice at 10 p.m. We've got our team out there starting at 10 p.m. So we're out there on these three slanted courts indoors, and we always talked about as coaches, talked about how our the key competitors, Stanford, UCLA, Texas, and others, were able to practice outside and really spread out and have more effective training, and how we really only felt like that was a disadvantage to us. The other piece is there was there weren't any good teams around. So for us to play a competitive match, we had to we'd either drive a great distance or get on an airplane, where in some of these other places there were a lot of great competition nearby, which we thought was a big advantage. When Baylor came open, I'd never seen a Baylor player. You know, I'd been around, I played and I'd been a coach. They absolutely were not in the national scene at all. And when I got down and saw the courts, like you say, they had eight, eight slanted courts, no bathroom, no stands, no equipment room, no anything. Um, but I just felt to contrast with where we were at Kansas, they had a great private school. They were in super weather, they were a really strong conference. The Big 12 was just kicking off, and there was a lot of competition within easy driving distance. I just thought all those factors really made it super desirable. I thought from a recruiting standpoint, the fact that Baylor's 65% female wouldn't hurt us. Help with recruiting for sure. We're looking for everything that we can. And then, of course, the leadership, right? At the end of the day, you've got to have great alignment in any organization. And we had great alignment. We had a new president, we had a new athletic director. They'd both gone to Baylor. They were both very passionate about us doing well in sports like tennis. They showed me some drawings of some facilities and some things they were gonna do. They hid the budget from me when I asked to see it and said this is gonna get better. But yeah, there was a passion, and I just saw that there was a great opportunity there.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Were you the only one at that time with no bathroom and the slanted courts? Do you think they could see the rise all the way to the championship, or was it just your vision at that point?

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Yeah, I really just looked past the challenges that we had. I I'd been to Texas and TCU and Stanford, all the places, and I knew that they had incredible facilities and tradition, but I just felt that we could pass them. And again, we made it a point never to focus on our liabilities. We always focus on what was positive. And I think one of the keys, Gabe, honestly, was when guys came in, we never talked to our guys about being less than. We never felt we didn't have a Nike contract, or we didn't have the best facility, or we didn't have this or that. We always felt like Baylor was paradise on earth. That was my phrase, paradise on earth. And that's how we talked about it. That's great.

Raising $22 Million Through Relationships

SPEAKER_01 6:22

There's as you're in that rise phase, it's even more than the players and the athletic directors' support that really this comes down to there's a big piece of fundraising. And you raised over $22 million and built a world-class facility where those slanted courts and no bathroom had been. Matt, tell me what racial what role are the relationships and what did you know, role did they play? And maybe can you share a story about somebody else who was believing right along with you early on?

SPEAKER_02 6:51

Yeah, you know, look, we did build relationships. We had a Dr. Scott Livsay, who was on the committee that hired me, was a prominent guy in the community, and he was 100% on board. And the thing that he did is he introduced us to other people that had the capacity to help, and then we had to talk them into it. And one of the great stories was that first year, we of course didn't qualify for the NCAs, but I started talking a lot about our vision for hosting that tournament and the impact it would make on our community. Waco is a town of 100,000. And to have that tournament in town with the athletes and the officials and the fans filling the hotels and the restaurants and the economic impact it would make was something that really resonated. We got one of our local leaders, Monty Holse, who was the chairman of a local bank. Monty, a great guy, and he was going to give a large donation to football in honor of his son Bradley, who unfortunately had passed our accident. And we were able to take him to Athens, Georgia, where the NCAs were held that year, show him the excitement, show him why the layout of the facility was important, and give him the inside scoop on what was really happening there. And we just convinced him look, you can give money to football and be like everybody else and just be another guy on a long list, or you can give your money to tennis and stand out and be special. And he bought into the vision and the grandstands at Baylor's wonderful facility, now in big gold letters, say LeBradley Holse's grandstand. And then Monty was an advocate in the community. He was chairman of the bank and he knew everyone. And when he joined and put his money in behind it, it really motivated others. And he was an advocate for us. And guess what? All of a sudden, it was the thing to do. And we caught some momentum, right? We were good. People, even people that didn't know anything about tennis, they sure loved beating Texas. They sure loved beating Texas AM. They sure loved having all this success. And we captured lightning in a bottle with the people around us, and then having some success, the momentum really grew.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Having that community support and that excitement when good things are happening, that must have just created made it a lot of fun during that time period.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

You know, what they call it the uh the innocent rise. We were on the innocent rise, just going straight up. And again, that's what it is. That's the rise phase. You're putting all the pieces together, you're building the community, you're raising the money, you're building the team, you're building the schedule, you're improving the training, all the things. We did that very intentionally and continue to build momentum through that rise phase.

Relentless Recruiting And Persistence

SPEAKER_01 9:04

I want to ask you because your book has some great stories about recruiting and about the things, the places you looked, and the lengths that you went to to find these right players for your program. So, can you tell me what you were doing that was different than what other programs were doing and maybe finding some people that were overlooked?

SPEAKER_02 9:23

We were relentless. We this was back before the internet. You couldn't just pop online and find players everywhere. You had to get on the phone and make phone calls. And yeah, we'd call tournament directors and ask them to fax us the draw from their tournament so we could go through the draw line by line and figure out who might be who might be a good fit for us. And again, calling every tennis federation around the world and getting the rankings and just really chasing things down. Look, it sounds easy, but I don't speak Czech. I don't speak Russian.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

So, what do you do in those situations?

SPEAKER_02 9:51

How do you approach it? Yeah, well, a lot of hand signals or grunting or whatever. Uh, the word tennis is universal and ranking, and so you gotta figure it out. We tried really hard to just find guys no one else was finding. And I think one of the keys, as you mentioned, we didn't lose recruiting battles because we were finding guys no one else was finding. And and one of the great stories is we heard about this guy, Michael Kokta, in Czech Republic, and I got him on the phone. I was able to find his number, and he said, There's nothing in the world that will ever make me play tennis again. I said, Michael, what do you mean? He said, The last tournament I played, I lost to a guy that was just terrible, and I just threw all my rackets in the river and literally threw all his rackets in the river. He was done. So he threw him in the river and he was done. And he was going to university in check and just was going to be a get a degree. We chatted, and I said, Okay, I understand. And that was it. That was the end of the conversation. About three months later, I thought, heck, I'll just call him back again. So I called him back and we started chatting. And I said, Look, I'll fly you over, I'll pay for you to make the trip, and you can just come to a match and just see what you think. So he came over and he came to the airport and he was really out of shape. You could tell he hadn't done anything, he was not looking like a top-end athlete, which was we made we had fun with that. But yeah, he came to the match, we played a match, and he I looked up in the stands and he was cheering louder than anybody else. He was totally captured by the collegiate sporting experience and the team vibe, which is not what it's like to play tennis by yourself. And yeah, long story short, he came and he ended up being just a superstar for us, one of the best players we ever had. I think we won six Big 12 championships in his career.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

So he was awesome. What does that say about the value of persistence, Matt, and you know how you showed it by not giving up even when he threw the rackets in the river? What made you make the second call and to keep showing that persistence?

SPEAKER_02 11:39

It's funny. I think I work with a lot of coaches, I work with a lot of sales teams, and if there's one theme, that might be it. It crosses across everything. I think until you get the firm know that you know the the end of the road, you keep going. And in my own career as an entrepreneur, I can't tell you, Gabe, how many times I call somebody 10 times and can't get them to answer, can't get them to commit. And finally they'll say, Gosh, thanks for being so persistent. I've just been busy. I've been thinking about other things. Yeah, and I really want to do this, and they do it. And so you get it is frustrating, but I think that's part of it. And I think if I have a big skill or a gene that uh puts me in a different position, it's the I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to be told no. And that's served me well in recruiting.

Fix Your Face Culture Under Stress

SPEAKER_01 12:25

You mentioned the team vibe, and I wanted to ask you, you had this phrase your players heard constantly, which was fix your face. So can you tell me where that came from and what does it mean? Well, we're trying to build an identity.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

We had nothing to start off with. And I think to build the identity, we thought that toughness was an identity that we could lean into that really grew from my background. And so we we talked about fix your face, which really is more of a mindset, you know, a physical thing. But we all know that when you get under stress, you want somebody to help you. You want somebody to bail you out, and that's normal. And so we put our guys into situations in the training. For example, we had this incredible workout called the four quarters in the weight room, where you and I are partners and we've got dumbbells, and I do a series of 10 kind of quick exercises. I put the dumbbells down, you pick them up and do the 10, and then I pick them up and I do eight or ten of something else and pick them up, and then you pick them up and we go back and forth. And the counting is it's fast and intense, and people are on you, and it's really rocking and rolling. And we were very specific with the way that we did it. The technique had to be perfect, the counting had to be right, and we did things like sometimes you get excited and you lose your count. Maybe you even do too many. Let's imagine they did that in the first of say the seven exercises. We'd wait till the whole quarter was finished and we'd say, Hey, Gabe did nine on the first rep, and so we're gonna do that quarter over again. That's rough, right? But what it did was all of a sudden, obviously their focus got better. But then you know what? Then their partner started counting for them. And the guys really came together to understand that look, we're all in this together. If one guy fails, we all fail. If we're all gonna succeed as a group, and so they all started really investing each other as a group and keep a certain tempo and invest in each other. And it's amazing how when one person lets go of the rope, it's really easy for the second person to let go. If the first person doesn't let go, then the momentum of the team really carries you. But everybody's got to keep going and pulling the same time to keep that momentum and that fix your face. One of the cool things about it is if you couldn't buy into that, if you weren't able to become part of something bigger than yourself and grind through tough times, you couldn't play for us. It was a way to self-select. And we talked a lot about this in recruiting. We made sure the recruits saw that workout, saw really tough workouts, and we had some talented guys say, look, that's not for me. And that's great, good. This is what we're gonna do. And we wanted to be very transparent and let them go where they felt comfortable. But that conference that we built sustained us in some really tough situations, and we won a lot of matches because we believed that we were more prepared and tougher.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

So if they heard fix your face while you're doing grueling workouts like that, and then they also heard it during a match, did it bring them just like instantly to an understanding of what needed to be done? Did it change their mindset just by hearing those words? Do you think?

SPEAKER_02 15:15

No doubt. I think that mantra of who you were and what it was about was super important. And again, the I can't say this enough. The workouts were gut-wrenching, people are losing their breakfast and we're still going. It doesn't mean you get to stop. And that's an example. Guys that come in, they throw up, and it was like, okay, now I'm breaking something. No, now you gotta still make the time. And it's oh, okay. Yeah, and it's again it's just like competing, that's just like business. You got to do it, you know. There's no excuse, and sometimes it gets really tough, but you got to do it. And it's nice to have a team around you, but there are times when you've got to dig down with your own character and your own resolve and resilience and find a way to get over the hump.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

That culture, the things you're describing, you can see I can see just how that would get such tremendous buy-in and everybody, like you said, pulling on the same end of the rope and nobody lets go. What were other specific rituals and things that you did that got instituted into your program that were meaningful for you and for your teams?

PPH Standards And Handling Adversity

SPEAKER_02 16:14

You know, one of the things I think of is the PPH that we did in our championship season. Yeah, we sat and talked about what are the things that we're really going to focus on. And this is when we were in the rule phase. We'd moved, we'd moved beyond the rise phase. And we could talk some later about how I messed that up over the course of my career. But at this stage, I I recognized we were in the rule phase. And so we sat with the whiteboard and had the guys talk about what are the things that are important to us. And and they talked about professionalism, pride, and heart were the things that really were the ways we would evaluate ourselves, the how of the match, if you will. And so we'd sit in a circle after and say, How are we professional? And we talked about that. Do we show pride? Do we play with heart? So we put PPH on the back of our shirt and made a decision in the group not to tell anybody what it stood for. That was neat because again, we were number one in the country. So when we showed up at a tournament, people would see that shirt and be like, What is that? And they'd talk about it and we kept it a secret, which created another sense of pride, closeness with the group, but nobody knew what it was. So that was an example of something that we did. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Matt, when your players faced adversity, which that happens during training camps or during the season or even just during their college life, how'd you help them to overcome adversity that came up during the course of their college careers?

SPEAKER_02 17:28

One of the things we really thought was important is spending a lot of individual time with each guy. And we made those times sacred so that you could really dig in and get to know them as people. And I think that's any manager, that's a challenge to find that extra time with your direct reports and make sure that you really know how they tick. A lot of people, we did the disc analysis with the team to kind of learn about their personalities, and a lot of people do enagrams and other things like that that are pretty cool. And and I think those things help. They're not the end-all be-all, but you certainly can get an idea of who you're dealing with. We had a great story where Lars Perska was a freshman on a team that was uh an elite team, defending champions. We had some strong seniors on that team, and we got to the NCA finals, we were undefeated, frankly, in the NCA finals. And he was last match on, so it's him all by himself. And if he wins, we win, and if he loses, we lose. And unfortunately, he lost. Just devastating for him as a young guy. He told me later that it he he didn't get over it the whole summer. He was depressed the whole summer. So the next year he came back, and at the end of that fall season, he was ranked number one in the country. So he took that disappointment and channeled that energy into something special and became the best player in the country. And he told me a story. Then later he was working for Oracle and they were asking them to do a presentation about why he should get this big job. And they asked him the question if he'd ever overcome adversity. And he had a clip from ESPN of him losing that last match on in the NCAA finals, and he showed it in the room with all the people, which is just again makes me want to cry and just sit here thinking about it, and then told the story. I think that uh Lars is a guy that took that and took it to heart and dug down and found a way to make it a positive, and not only for his tennis, but also for his career beyond tennis. And that's a great example of something I think we take a lot of pride in.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

What do you think it was that if he spent the summer depressed, what changed in his mentality when he came back in the fall that just led him to doubling down and recommitting and to moving forward from that experience? What do you think he did?

SPEAKER_02 19:28

I'd be speculating a little bit gay, but I guess he felt a little fear in that moment. Again, you think about it, you're a freshman, it's a full house, ESPN cameras in your face, you're playing a senior, the team's undefeated, all your teammates are there cheering for you. There's a lot at stake. And I think he probably was a little scared. And I think he decided I'm not going to be scared anymore. I'm going to stop being scared. And I think when he stopped being scared, then he became a different guy and allowed him to really reach his full potential.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Matt, you did something in your career that I thought was really cool.

Championship Project Lessons From Winners

SPEAKER_01 20:01

You interviewed championship coaches across multiple sports, calling this the championship project. So tell me about that and maybe a piece of advice or two that you got from that changed the way that you were operating.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

The thing, Gabe, we had been good enough to win for a few years in a row, and we hadn't won. And I felt like something was missing. So at Baylor, as you've heard me say, no one had ever won a team championship. So I didn't have any role models there that I could go to. I'd been to UCLA, and at the time they have this room with 120 championship trophies. It's just incredible. And so I thought I'd go to my friends that were that I trusted and say, hey, give me the names of some coaches in any sport that have won multiple championships that I could approach. And so I got all these names and I wrote them all a letter. And they were football coaches, basketball coaches, rowing coaches, swimming coaches, wrestling coaches, all these different sports. The best of the best. And I got some fantastic responses. One, Bob Stoops, who was the football coach in Oklahoma at the time, but just won a national championship. And he wrote me a long five-page letter that believe it or not, I threw away. You threw the letter away. I don't know what in the world. I wasn't thinking too well there. It would have been really fun to have that now. But essentially, his thing was they worked a lot on blocking and tackling. And and again, I think as you think about these things, you're like, what magic pill? What are they doing that's different than everyone else? And it was frankly just fundamentals. Fundamentals. Leaning into the basis of the game, tackling and blocking, the most simple things. And he felt like if they could be the best at those two things, then they would really improve their chances to win. And it was working, right? Another great one was the swimming coach at Auburn, Dave Marsh, who won, I think, even 22 national titles or something. And he had some great advice from me about be intense, but you don't have to live in that space. That was really important for me. The one that probably resonated the most, John Smith, the wrestling coach at Oklahoma State. John was a, I think, a four time NCH. I think he won two gold medals as a wrestler himself and had won 10 or 15 team titles there. And his advice was when you're good enough to win, train through the season, train through team matches. And what that meant was set your training schedule to where you played, where you're at your top, your peak during the NCAs. And if as your training schedule evolves, you happen to have a match, just train right through it. And so he told a great story about their most physically demanding week of training was during the week leading up to their match against Missouri. They never lost to Missouri in program history, but they trained super hard. The guys were blown out, they went to Missouri and they lost. And of course, Missouri celebrated like they'd won the national title, and their guys felt not very happy. But they he said the guys came back the next week at practice and just tore the doors off the wrestling room. Just were at a different level of intensity. Sure enough, they won the NCAs. But it worked. And so we did the same thing. And it's not easy. We you again, you we happened to run into a match against Texas AM, who's was a rival of ours in our conference, and we trained really hard that week, and we lost a match that I'm confident we wouldn't have had we prepared for the match more properly. But same thing, the guys got it, and I think, Gabe, that's a big part of what we did with the championship project and others. We communicated directly with the guys, we didn't keep it a secret. I brought them in. I told them all the same things I just told you. This is what this is what Coach Stoops said, this is what Coach Marsh said, this is what Coach Smith said, and others. And this is these are the adjustments we're gonna make. I wanted them to be along for the ride. I didn't want them to be surprised, looking at each other, going, Why are we doing these sprints the day before we play at AM? What's going on? And it didn't mean that we weren't gonna try to win that match, because obviously we were, but we had a bigger plan, and uh that really elevated us into the rule phase where we really were thinking about that phase, winning championships, and then on into the repeat phase where we maintained a different kind of focus than what we had when we were trying to rise.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

I like that you said that because you talk about in the book that what's made you successful in one of those phases can actually hold you back when you get to the next one.

Leadership Gremlins And A Lost Season

SPEAKER_01 24:07

So, Matt, tell us about leadership gremlins and a time, what that is, and a time maybe that you recognized one in yourself.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

Yeah, leadership gremlins are just that, just things that you've done or you are doing that are doing they're detrimental. It can be changing your training methodology too quickly, it can be holding on to training methodologies, it can be being unorganized, it can be there's a lot of different ways that you can block yourself. There's a whole list of them. And I think that when you look through those as a leader, it you can find yourself. And I think one of the challenges, and I speak to this in the book, you've got to be careful not to label others. It's really easy, of course, to label others that you've experienced or you're working around, but you have to really be introspective and look at yourself. The biggest one for me, and a lot of these were because of the mistakes I made. And so that's how I learned most of these things. But we had made the quarters one year, and we had a great team. And one of our guys in the last match on hurt himself, twisted his ankle, sprained his ankle, and he wasn't able to continue. So we lost this match that we felt like we were gonna win. And then that team went on to win the championship, which was heart-wrenching. Yeah, uh, good for them, but that was tough to watch. So we had uh the core of that team back, and we felt like this was a really good chance for us to have a really special season again and go ahead and win a championship. And our first match of the season was on the road against another top five team playing indoors, remembering that we didn't have indoor courts at Baylor, so we didn't get to really practice indoors, so that was a bit of a disadvantage. We lost the match to them, and then the team was in the locker room, and then their Jack S head coach, which that's me, went into the locker room and just lost my mind, just screaming and yelling and acting ridiculous. And again, I didn't recognize this was not a team in the rise phase anymore. This was a team in the rule phase. This was a team ready to win a championship. This team had sacrificed, this team had proven themselves, this team was all in, and the last thing they needed was the head coach in there challenging them in a way that was inappropriate for who they were and their effort level early in the season. I just ruined that season by the end of the year, game. We all hated each other. I hated them and they hated me. And you know, we went to the final side to the NCAs. And yeah, I think about this now, and it just makes me sick. We always had this thing where we'd eat together, we'd do everything together, we had a really strong bond. I was it was such a tough year that I just here's your real money, I'll see you tomorrow in the morning. I remember I went to the movies by myself, I was eating by myself. It was just it was terrible. It was all my fault, but I learned. I learned, and the championship project helped me go back to what Dave Marsh said, the outdoor swimming coach, don't live in that space. When there are times you have to be intense, you have to challenge them. You can't be that way all the time. And I learned the next time we had a team that was at that level to let them have some space and trust them a little bit more. And it was better for me. I wasn't exhausted, and it was better for them. It allowed them to grow and to thrive in a way that was

The Match Point National Title Moment

SPEAKER_02 26:55

really healthy.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Matt, I'd like to hear if you'd tell me about the national championship run, about what was happening that season leading up to it, and then the moment when you win.

SPEAKER_02 27:05

We were full of confidence, and we really felt like we had a very good team. And the previous year, again, somebody got injured, one of our number two player, and we made the quarters again without one of our best guys. And so we were disappointed there, but we came back and had our group together, felt really confident. It was a great season. The training was at a very high level, everybody was really committed. We got them the final site. I've heard people say we got off the bus, and people felt like the championship was over. We were just really trained at a really high level and just had a lot of confidence. The match was at Tulsa, and the courts there are unusual. They have banks of two, kind of like a country club, instead of a college court that's six in a row. So I was over on two courts by myself. I always tell the coaches, look, don't look around at the scoreboard because all that does is distract you. Just focus on the courts that you're managing. One of our alums came over about an hour into the match and said, Hey, you're about ready to win. And I looked up at the big scoreboard in the distance and I realized Matias Moran had a match point on number three. We were up 3-0 just like that. So I broke my own rule and I left the court. I'm thinking to myself, I've worked my tail off. I'm not gonna miss the national championship point. I have no chance I'm gonna miss that. So I'd run over there, and there it's about 20 deep. I can't see. There's so many people crowded around the court. I can't see the court. So thankfully, he lost the first match point and gave me some time to elbow my way through the crowd, and I was able to get up close enough by the next one that I was able to see it. But yeah, just an amazing thing for him. So happy, so proud of him. He'd had some tough times in his career where he'd had some moments where he could win and wasn't able to. So for him to handle that moment in such a classy first class way was really neat. And again, I think for tennis, you don't get this all the time until you get into these big matches where it's last match on. And again, the SPN cameras all come and they converge on your court. And so as a player, you're not used to that. Well, we talked about it, but look, the cameras are coming, so you got to be ready. So it's a special moment for a young guy to be able to be in that situation. So yeah, that that was really neat. And all the Baylor people were there, all our all the alums, all the people that were bled their green and gold, because even if they weren't tennis fans, the word went out we're gonna win our first national championship. And people didn't want to miss that. So we had a lot of the regents and prominent people all flew in, the president to try to be part of that.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

After you won, how did the team feel? How did you feel personally? What were some of the conversations that were had the rest of that day?

SPEAKER_02 29:34

I think the whole thing about what we were doing is about building this brotherhood. I think that's what it was. It was about being part of this brotherhood. And I think it really did winning, of course, makes life easy, but it did create cement a bond. They'd done something special together that you can never take away from a group of guys. It's really special.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

And then what happened that summer, and just as you're preparing to go in, as you're moving now from one phase to the next, what changed in your approach and the way that you were showing up for the team the next year?

SPEAKER_02 30:03

It's funny, Gabe. I think that we'd already entered the rise phase before we won. So the year of the previous year, we were ranked whatever we were in one or two or in the country, and then we just didn't happen to win. We had an injury at the end. But I think our mentality, even though we hadn't won, we had the rule mentality. So I think that there's a little bit of a misconception. You don't necessarily have to win the championship. It's more about your mentality shifting to where you're not just building to become relevant. Your mentality is look, we're a championship caliber team. We're doing the things that championship caliber teams do to put ourselves in that situation. So now we really shifted to the repeat phase. The thing that the challenge we had then is we had two guys that were undergraduates that wanted to turn pro or talk to me about turning pro. That was a challenge. We had to manage the roster that way and help them to make a good decision for their lives, which was important to me. I wanted them to be successful. So that became part of it. And then again, Baylor came to me wanting to do a book, and all of a sudden you had some more attention and some more things happening. It allowed me to just focus more on doing some other things with endowing the program, building professional, bringing professional tennis events to the community, which is something we did a lot of. We were able to build momentum at an even broader scale to make the program even more long-term and more self-sustained.

Building Lives Beyond Tennis

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Matt, when you look at where your former players are today, you have Olympic medalists, grand slam champions, successful professionals. What does that tell you about what you were really building with your program?

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Well, I'll tell you a neat story that just came up the other day. Alex Olsen, who was our trainer at the time, was now doing some fundraising for Baylor, and he was in New York City meeting with Matt Brown, who's one of our players. Matt's a senior vice president with Goldman Sachs. He's done really well. And Alex called and told me this story. He said I was talking to Matt, and he told me the story about when he came in your office and wanted to switch his major from finance to communication studies. And Matt came in and told me that. Long story short, I talked him out of it and said, Look, I think you've got the capacity to do this. I think this is the direction you need to stay with. He's done really well. And it's what's neat about that, Gabe, is that's a story he told someone when I wasn't in the room. That's something he's still thinking about and the impact that had on his life's really need. And another story I always think about when we have these conversations is this Dennis Lukach from Hungary. Dennis came from not much, and his father passed when he was in college. And I think the context is important here with all of our guys. These are guys that were number one in their country. These are the best players in their country. And you have to remember if you're number one in England or Hungary or America, wherever, everybody's telling you, look, you're Roger Federer, you're John McEnroe. Your future is winning Grants Lands. You're going to pour every ounce of your time and energy into your tennis. I think what a lot of people don't understand, Rafael and Dahl quit school at 14. Roger Federer quit school at 14. These guys didn't even get high school diplomas because they were on a different track. So our guys got high school diplomas, but not with much focus. Maybe their parents made them or whatever, at least get through high school. They weren't academically focused. When they come to college now, for them to get a degree and go on and work at a place like Goldman Sachs, or the story about Dennis, who I'm telling you about now, who was less prepared coming from Hungary and didn't speak the language. The language was difficult for him when he came. Hungary's a difficult language compared to English. And he went out and played the tour a little bit and then decided to transition into getting an MBA. And now he works for Oracle. And when I go back to Dallas, I stay at his house, and we've got a 7,000 square foot house and two BMWs in the driveway and a pool and an outdoor kitchen. And the guy lives like a king. And when we're sitting around chatting, I always say, Your dad's looking down on you from heaven. I'm really proud of what you've been able to accomplish. I've been to Dennis's house in Hungary. It's not like that, I promise.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

So for him to do what he's done was really inspirational. Matt, today, when you talk to coaches, and if they're feeling stuck, how do you use the lessons that you learned during the course of your career to help them move past that and to get unstuck in the challenges that they're facing?

SPEAKER_02 34:07

The first step is just to be realistic about where you are. It's amazing. It's hard to do. Really hard to do. It's really hard to be honest. And I try to come in from 30,000 feet and bring some information to the table and say, well, look, coach, this is what I'm seeing. Or can we talk through that? And that sometimes that crucial first step can take as long as anything else, getting them to understand where they are. And then once you do that, that we can talk about the lessons that we learned in Rise and Rule and Repeat. And how can we apply them to your situation? Every situation's different, but we want to try to apply those to your situation. I'll tell you a quick story. I was working with a team, and they the team's ranked about, I don't know, 40 in the country or something. And they're a good team. They make the NCAs, they're competitive, and that's their histor history. And they're getting ready to play a team that's ranked three in the country. And the coach is excited. He feels like we can win. And so he's motivating the guys and talking that way. And he says, We're not going to beat them, but we're going to win the NCAs. You can see the guys all roll their eyes. And I told him later, I said, Look, you're not in that phase right now. You're in the rise phase. It doesn't mean you can't have a big win. I love that. You can upset this really good team. But your guys don't think for a second that you're going to go out in the NCA tournament and win five or six matches in a row against a really good competition. So please stop saying that because you're ruining your own credibility when you say stuff like that. And he was just blind. That's exactly what the leadership gremlins are. He was just blind to how his message, which was a pretty cool message, was being interpreted by the team and by the people he was working with. And that's something I'm seeing a lot is they're blind to the message that they're sending. And we want to try to help them refine their message so it's on point with where they are, and so that then they can grow

Honest Vision Plus How To Reach Him

SPEAKER_02 35:47

from there.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

So then take us back to those courts when you first walked on at Baylor and it was slanted no bathroom. And you had the vision in your head. Did you wait to tell your team to share that vision? Or how did you gradually lead up to where they were buying in and it was the right time to get them inspired for that goal?

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Yeah, I think we needed a vision. We needed somewhere where we were going. But I think we had to be honest about where we were on our path to get to the vision. So I immediately, in my very first interview, the new Waco paper interviewed me and said, What's your goal? And remember, this is a team that hadn't won a conference match in eight years. They didn't, they were they won two matches the previous year against non-division one competition. So they were as bad as you can get. And I said, My vision is to win a national championship. And he actually laughed out loud. And I just looked at him blank and he got himself together and he kind of wrote that down. I understand how he felt, but I felt like we had to put the vision out there. And then now we have to put the things in place. We had to get better players. That was important. We had to improve our schedule. So we had a strategy for that. We had to improve our facilities. We had to improve our weight room. We had to improve our training. Everything had to get better. And we we talked to the Olympic 400-meter coach about how to train better. We talked to the best people in athletic training about how to manage recovery and injury better. We talked about the best sports physiologists about training all three systems. And we got those people in the room with our guys, and we heard from their mouth. This is what we do. And these are people that have worked with, again, gold medalists and the best people in the world. We brought those people in and we saw a vision for where we could go. We stacked in all the hard work and the adding good players and all the other stuff to eventually put ourselves in that position.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Great stories, Matt. For listeners that would like to get in touch with you or to get a copy of your book, how should they do that?

SPEAKER_02 37:30

Matt at mattcannole.com is my email. That's the easiest way to do it. We have a website as well. It's not quite up yet, but the my email is gonna work. And I think it's important for people to know we're qualitative. It's a qualitative system. We're gonna talk. I want to be a thought leader. I want to know what's in your head and how we can help you to think differently or think in a better way to advance your program or advance your business. And it's really, again, very immersive, very personal. And we win. We're gonna win. We're gonna figure out a way to help you achieve the things you want to achieve, no matter how hard we have to work, what hurdles we have to climb.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

I've enjoyed our conversation, Matt. Thanks so much for being here today. Gave you the best.