Developing Elite Competitors
Adopted from our webinar with Coach Bryan Weakley
"Elite" might be the most overused word in sports. Elite academies. Elite shooters. Elite athletes. It's everywhere on social media, and Coach Bryan Weakley thinks that's a problem. Words lose their power when they're used too often, or used incorrectly, and by his count, most of the teams and players calling themselves elite are really just average.
So what does the word actually mean? Weakley looked it up: superior in quality, skill, and rank. Superior — not average with a better hashtag.
He ties that definition to 1 Corinthians: "In a race, all runners run, but only one gets the prize. So run in such a way to get the prize." Everybody plays the season. Everybody runs the race. But only a handful of teams — maybe one, maybe a couple in a conference — actually run it differently. An elite competitor isn't just someone who works hard; plenty of players and teams work hard. It's someone who ticks differently, who has a mission and pursues it every single day in a way that separates them from everyone else doing the same drills.
So How Do You Actually Develop It?
That's the question Weakley has spent a career trying to answer. He grew up the son of a college coach, spent 14 years as a college head coach himself, and now works with the Athletes in Action Prep Team , developing international and U.S. athletes toward Division I scholarships. Across all of it, the question he hears from other coaches — constantly — comes down to the same thing: how do you get a team to compete at a genuinely elite level, day after day, not just in flashes?
Weakley tells a story from about ten years ago that captures the answer. A college coach came to watch his team practice, stayed for the whole session, and afterward asked him directly: "Bryan, how do you get your team to talk so loud and have as much energy in practice?"
Weakley's answer was blunt: "I make them."
That's the thread running through his entire coaching philosophy: elite isn't found, it's built, deliberately and daily. He points to five of those habits, along with a mindset underneath them that has to come first.
Fully Loved, First
Before anything about competing, Weakley insists on identity. An athlete who is "fully loved" — secure in being unconditionally loved by God, and by their coach — isn't easily rattled by outside noise: social media, criticism, a bad newspaper write-up, a tough crowd. He points to a former University of Wisconsin player, Brad Davidson, as an example of someone who played what Weakley calls "in the audience of one" — performing for God's approval rather than everyone else's opinion, and because of that, playing with remarkable freedom and consistency.
The takeaway for coaches is practical, not just spiritual: athletes perform better, and can be held to a higher standard, when they know they're valued as people first and players second.
Five Ways to Build an Elite Competitor
With the definition and the foundation in place, five tangible habits form the core of how Weakley builds elite competitors, especially as athletes move past the youth stage into higher levels of competition.
1. Build a habit of talking — loudly. Communicate like a lion, not a mouse: loud, aggressive, from the belly rather than the throat. Deliberately overdo it in practice, aim for players to lose their voices in the first week of practice.
It's a principle that travels differently across cultures. In places where loudness isn't a natural or celebrated trait, coaches have found they can't install this overnight. Find a way to take these principles and build them gradually. That this becomes a value the team buys into rather than a personality trait demanded of every player. Coaches who have made the transition to more talking and increased volume report a real payoff. On defnese coaches have found that a vocal defense doesn't just organize a team, it confuses and unsettles the opponent.
2. Create a sense of urgency. Weakley trains his athletes to treat the first three steps of every movement — transitioning to defense, sprinting to the next drill, getting to a huddle — like a sprinter exploding out of the blocks. He pairs this with what he calls "violent movements": a hard rip-through, a physical box-out, an emphatic finish at the rim. Getting a defender to string together three or four of these in a single possession raises the whole team's level and becomes contagious.
3. Fall in love with defense. As a self-described defensive-minded coach, Weakley teaches physicality directly — using pads so contact drills stay safe, running charge and box-out drills, and pairing his signature one-on-one drill (defender absorbs the drive, holds ground, then closes out yelling "dead, dead, dead" to disrupt the ball-handler) with genuinely hard preseason defensive conditioning. The goal is to raise defensive intensity at every level a player moves up — youth to high school, high school to college, college to professional.
4. Demonstrate it yourself. Coaches can't ask for a standard they aren't modeling. At 48, Weakley still demonstrates the sprint speed and vocal intensity he expects from his players, on the principle that "yesterday's strengths don't make it through the day" — every day requires recreating that fire, or players won't either. Building a staff of coachable, loyal assistants who can reinforce and demonstrate the culture consistently matters just as much as the head coach's own example. Many coaches may not have the ability to demonstrate it themselves so it is important to find an assistant coach or a player who is able to demonstrate exactly how you want it executed.
5. Bring in outside voices to reinforce the message. Hearing the same message from a different voice — a respected professional player, a former teammate, another coach — helps it land in a way that repetition from one coach alone sometimes can't.
Grace, Accountability, and Love
None of this works without both grace and follow-through. New habits get a few weeks to take root before players are held fully accountable; but once a standard has been demonstrated and repeated, the line has to hold, because athletes need to feel how much they're loved through it, not despite it. Weakley traces his own capacity to love his players to his Christian faith and the example of Christ's love, paired with a simple relational habit: spending extra time with players off the court so they know they're valued as people, not just performers.
Get the video replay of this talk here.
