Kevin Kelly was a high school football coach for Pulaski Academy, located in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 18 years as the head coach, Kelly won nine state championships.
Kelly’s success as a coach can’t just be attributed to having talented players or solid culture of winning. Kelly took a risk — a very big one.
In football, you have four tries to gain ten yards. If a team doesn’t successfully gain ten yards in three tires, it is typical for a team to punt the ball away to the other team on the fourth. Teams do this because if they don’t get the first down on the fourth try, then the other team gets the ball wherever they left off. This is one of the ways that the transfer of possession happens. The other main one is a kickoff. After a team scores, they will line up and then kick the ball to the other team. However, if a team wants to keep possession after a score, they can attempt what is called an onside kick. This is where the kicker softly kicks the ball and his teammates try to jump on the ball to recover. This is very dangerous because it is relatively easy for the other team to recover the kick and then take over possession. Because it is such a short kick, the kicking team is now at a major disadvantage if they don’t recover the onside kick. They have just given up around 30-40 yards of field position.
Kevin Kelly hardly ever punts and he attempts onside kicks until his team has a substantial lead. Before Kelly took over as head coach, Pulaski Academy had never made it past the final four. Under Kelly’s direction, the program has become a dominant force.
“We play up a couple of classifications in our state,” Kelly told Bleacher Report. “And other schools have more kids to pull for a football team from, three and four times as many. So we couldn’t play the same game as them and expect to have better results. So what we did, we started using analytics.”
Kelly knew that talent for talent, his team was consistently behind other teams. So he thought outside of the box. He figured out that if he coached differently, his team would be able to win a lot more games.
Rick Barry was one of the greatest free-throw shooters in NBA history. He made 89.31 percent of his free throws. For comparison, LeBron James — who is widely regarded as the best basketball player in this generation — is just a 73 percent free-throw shooter.
Most basketball players shoot free throws just like any other jump shot. They hold the ball at about eye-level, bend their knees, and then flick their wrist and release the ball. But Barry shot his free throws very differently. He shot his free throws underhanded.
Many people thought Barry looked like a fool shooting underhanded free throws. But it worked. He converted on a higher percent of his foul shots, which in the end helped his team win more games. Many of the top players in the NBA today are poor free throw shooters, but they are not willing to try shooting underhanded for fear of how they would look.
A sociologist named Mark Granovetter came up with the theory of thresholds. He called it the ‘Threshold Model of Collective.’ People with a low threshold don’t have to see other people doing something before they join in. They just do it. People with a high threshold have to see a lot of people doing something before they opt to participate.
Kevin Kelly and Rick Barry are similar in one way: They both have a very low threshold. All of the football coaches that follow tradition instead of reading the data are high threshold people. All of the basketball players that refuse to shoot underhand even though Barry has proven it to be more effective are high threshold people.
Now, because Kelly and Barry care so little about other people’s opinions, they are not always the easiest people to be around. But, they have found great success in their field because of their willingness to try new things.
For Barry and Kelly, it worked out well. They both thought outside of the box and were rewarded for their risk. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes you try something new and it fails. Failing alone is bad and embarrassing. But failing while doing something that is new, is ten times worse. If Kelly lost more games with his system, he would likely be fired and mocked on the way out. Think about how silly Barry would look if he air-balled every underhanded free throw.
But the outside perspective doesn’t matter to either Kelly or Barry. What matters is winning. If one strategy didn’t work, they would scrap the idea and move onto another one.
In our life, we should strive to have a little bit of Kelly and Barry in us. We don’t have to be so low threshold that we aggravate everybody we cross paths with, but it is important to not follow all the norms. If you see an opportunity to try something new and unique, do it. And if it fails, so be it. Just move on and forget about it. Don’t be afraid to step out from the crowd and do something that nobody else is doing.