John Yeager

Drawing on his illustrious lacrosse playing and coaching career and his organizational behavior work with athletic, educational, and business organizations, John Yeager’s presentations and training programs have inspired audiences around the United States.

As a former elite lacrosse goaltender at the high school, college, and professional levels, he is a member of the Halls of Fame of New England, Eastern Massachusetts, and UMASS Boston/Boston State. He was named one of the top 20 New England lacrosse players of all time by the New England Lacrosse Journal.

As the co-author of The Coaching Zone: Next Level Leadership in Sports, John is the executive director of The Coaching Zone Initiative and CEO of The Yeager Leadership Group. His role models have been coaches who have continually reinvented themselves as they strove to bring out the best in themselves, their athletes, and their teams.

John has always tested his ideas about effective coaching behavior, for example, in his doctoral work at Boston University and as an assistant professor in human movement in Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education. Later, as a student in the country’s first graduate-level applied positive psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, he focused on developing specific strategies to bring out the best in coaches, athletes, and teams.

John has authored four other books and chapters about coaching:
• SMART Strengths: The Parent/Teacher/Coach Guide to Building Character, Resilience and Relationships in Youth
• Character and Coaching: Building Virtue in Athletic Programs
• Our Game: The Character & Culture of Lacrosse
• Positive Psychology Coaching for Sports Leaders

For over 40 years, he has worked with many high school and college coaches and their teams, sometimes as a colleague, sometimes as a consultant invited to help a team emerge from a slump and/or move to higher levels of performance. John finds that it always helps if they spend time clarifying the why, what, and how underlying performance. A huge differentiator of effective coaches is that they are skilled at self-management, leading and empowering individual athletes, and systems-thinking for the whole team.