An Interview with Valorie Kondos-Field
By Emma Baird
Valorie Kondos-Field, commonly known as ‘Miss Val’, is a highly revered and successful Greek-American gymnastics coach. During her time as the head coach of the University of California, Los Angeles Bruins Gymnastics Team (from 1991-2019), she led the team to seven NCAA championship titles. She was named ‘PAC-12 Gymnastics Coach of the Century’, is in the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame, and is a four-time ‘National Coach of the Year’, to name a few of her accolades. Gymnasts who flourished under her guidance and mentorship have included Olympic Gold medalists Madison Kocian and Kyla Ross, as well as the viral sensation and esteemed former gymnast, Katelyn Ohashi. Valorie is known for her unique, unorthodox, vibrant and holistic coaching style. She is now much in demand as a public speaker, and her TED Talk, ‘Why winning doesn’t always equal success’, has received over 4 million views.
The most extraordinary fact, however, is that she has never done gymnastics. Valorie grew up training and working as a classical ballet dancer until the age of 22 before beginning at UCLA, allowing her to bring a fresh perspective to the world of athletics training. She spoke to me about her coaching philosophy and shared the most important lessons that she has learned.
Emma Baird: What is your attitude towards the traditional methods of coaching elite gymnasts, and the ‘win at all costs’ culture?
Valorie Kondos-Field: ‘I have spent many years considering this question. I first went to UCLA in 1982 as the choreographer and assistant coach for the UCLA gymnastics team. Eight years later, I was promoted to head coach. I had never done a cartwheel in my life and had no clue what I was doing. This whole world of athletics was so foreign to me, but there was one main thing that I could not grasp: coaches are hired to win, so I had to figure out how to win, and it did not matter at what cost because my job was to win. Thankfully, with this approach, we did not do well in our first two years at all. I say ‘thankfully’ because had we had success, I don’t know if I would have been motivated to change.
‘Athletics is, for the most part, about being able to say ‘haha, we beat you’, and it’s about bragging rights. How many gazillions of dollars are spent every year, worldwide, on athletics, the World Cup, and the Olympic Games, for bragging rights? How immature. There has to be more to it than that. Then, I understood: athletics is a masterclass in learning really tough life lessons that one does not learn in a classroom. These include resilience, how to be able to make a mistake (we call it shortening the distance between failure and recovery), finding motivation in working hard at things we don’t like to do, and how to be a team player. I was going to develop champions in life who were going to make a difference in the world, and my classroom would be the gym.’
EB: Please could you explain the holistic way in which you approach your athletes, and how this can lead to better performances?
VKF: ‘In order to develop champions in life, instead of just looking at the one part of this person that was an athlete, I looked at everything else too, and what made them come to life. I grew up enjoying a very full and varied life: I was a ballet dancer, a pianist, a cheerleader, and I went to football games, Greek dances, church, choir rehearsals and so on. Every once in a while, I would tell our ballet director that I couldn’t make a rehearsal because, for example, I was the homecoming queen, and he would become very angry. However, he later told me that I came to life on stage unlike anyone else in the company and that was because I was a whole human being who had fuelled the parts of me that made my heart sing instead of just the parts associated with classical ballet. For my athletes, I felt the same way. Yes, we should focus on technique and skills, but to make the performance come to life I had to develop the whole person. One way I did this was by encouraging them to look up TED Talks, to find what interested them beyond gymnastics. They started paying attention to what they gravitated towards, and it would open up their world. LeBron James has coined the motto: ‘I am more than an athlete’. I have believed this for virtually my entire career.’
“Yes, we should focus on technique and skills, but to make the performance come to life I had to develop the whole person. One way I did this was by encouraging them ... to find what interested them beyond gymnastics. They started paying attention to what they gravitated towards, and it would open up their world.”
EB: The late John Wooden (former head coach of the UCLA Basketball team) was a great friend and mentor to you. What lessons did you learn from him that you would like to share with us? Could you elaborate on the Wooden Pyramid?
VKF: ‘It took him fifteen years to develop that pyramid. When you study it, it is a masterpiece. He not only thought about which blocks to include, but he chose where to put them in the layering of the pyramid up to the top, which is competitive greatness. I could teach a whole class on the Pyramid of Success. I teach a graduate class at UCLA on transformative leadership, and the first leader we study is Coach Wooden. If you don't have time to study the Pyramid of Success, the most important part to grasp right off the bat is to understand the two cornerstones which hold up the structure: enthusiasm and industriousness. Bringing these two qualities together, no matter what you are doing in life, you are going to have success.
‘Another thing he taught me is not to waste time on things that you cannot control. In gymnastics that means taking the steps to become as fully prepared as possible before competing, and not focusing on scores, social media, or what your parents will say. In UCLA, we have what we call the ‘Bruin bubble’. Everything inside it is what we can control, and it's in our power to fortify the walls of the bubble. Everything outside is simply noise, things we can’t control. Noise which takes up brain space which could be used in better ways. Control the controllables.’
EB: Which methods of mental preparation for peak performance did you teach your athletes?
VKF: ‘A visual that I have come up with is ‘thought bubbles’! In any given situation in life, thought bubbles pop up. When I was dancing and waiting in the wings to go on stage, bubbles would pop up which were not productive: ‘I hope I don’t fall’ or ‘there are so many people in the audience’ and so on. It is an important skill to practise inserting another thought bubble which is positive and calming, and we must feed that one and therefore starve the rest.
‘I also coached balance beam at UCLA. It is a harrowing event. The beam is only 3.8 inches wide. More often that not, athletes will say to themselves as soon as they get up there, ‘don’t fall’. So, we trained their mental cues. I call it ‘mental choreography’. Most people think of choreography as movement to music. But choreography is any intentional movement... which starts with our thoughts. Laurie Hernandez, Olympic gold medalist, had the simple thought bubble ‘I’ve got this’ which she would repeat over and over again when she felt nervous. You cannot hope that your mind will be in the right place. No. You have to take control of it by choosing which thoughts to feed and which to starve.
‘When I was a ballet dancer, there often was a bucket in the wings for dancers that needed to throw up before performing due to nerves. I never understood that: I didn‘t understand why they didn’t train with more intention so that they could show up mentally, emotionally and physically calm, confident and enthusiastic. Actions are a repercussion of emotions, and emotions are a repercussion of thoughts. We have to be intentional with our thoughts.’
EB: Could you explain your process of working with troublesome or damaged athletes, such as Katelyn Ohashi?
VKF: ‘Katelyn was stuck in this world where she hated gymnastics, so she needed a coach to help her move through that. The only way to help her was to motivate change, not dictate.
‘The first step, with any athlete who is having difficulties or being rebellious, is to get them to talk. Ask them ‘what would you like me to know right now?’. They were allowed to say anything to me, as long as it was honest and respectful. Then, the most important part is to listen. I love this: when you rearrange the letters in the word ‘listen’, it spells ‘silent’. You cannot truly listen unless you silence your mind. Most of us, when someone else is speaking, we are too busy formulating our response. When you do that, you are not hearing the person and you are also not observing how they are speaking to you. Again, like the thought bubbles, this is a skill which must be intentionally practised, daily.’
“When you rearrange the letters in the word ‘listen’, it spells ‘silent’. You cannot truly listen unless you silence your mind.”
EB: Do you have any advice on how athletes and performers can thrive whilst working in competitive and judgemental environments?
VKF: ‘First of all, define success: what does success look and feel like to you personally? Then, simply ask how you will get one percent better towards that vision of success today. Don’t ever try to be perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist. A basketball player, who was coached by Bobby Knight (an extremely verbally abusive coach) once told me that one of the greatest lessons he learned from being coached by him was this: there are two ways to go through life. The first is like a sponge, where you take in everything that someone says to you. The other is like a sieve, where when someone talks to you, you let the nonsense and the insults fall through, so that what is left is purely the information that is going to help you play better. You become impervious to anything that makes it personal. Again, this is a skill. I have studied athlete after athlete, and know that the greatest ones will respond to mistakes and abrasive coaching as simply information without taking it personally.’
EB: Since retiring as a gymnastics coach, you are much in demand as a public speaker. What is your mission now?
VKF: ‘We are living in a really exciting time right now. During the 1980s when I first entered the world of athletics, there was no talk about mental health and wellness, and it wasn’t on the radar. I currently teach a class at UCLA on transformative coaching and leadership versus transactional coaching. The latter is a reward-based system which most of us have been brought up with. Transformational coaching, however, involves helping the student to transform into an amazing human being whilst they learn the craft. By doing so, you actually transform into a better person yourself. I love speaking with groups of parents. One thing I encourage them to do is to ask their child questions about the experience, instead of reward-based questions such as ‘Did you win?’ and ‘Did you get an A?’ One of my favourite books on this topic is The Conscious Parent by Dr. Shefali Tsabary. She explains that when a parent asks questions about winning and status, it ultimately is all about the parents need for validation. If you are really wanting to help your child to develop into a true champion in life, you will ask questions about the process, such as ‘what did you learn today?’, and ‘did you figure out how to work really hard at something you don’t like to do?’
EB: Are there any final words you would like to share?
VKF: ‘As I mentioned earlier, I used to think that ‘choreography’ meant movement to music, but it is not. Choreography means any intentional movement: how you walk into a room, or how you choose to address someone, it is all your personal choreography. Often when I speak to an audience, I like to leave them with the invitation to ‘choreograph’ their life, one intentional and courageous choice at a time.’