The Undercooked Steak

The visit has gone perfectly.

The top recruit got along with potential future teammates, was impressed by the program’s facilities, and gave thoughtful responses to the coach’s cookie-cutter questions.

But when the steak comes back undercooked at dinner with the coaching staff that night, the player gets annoyed at the server and snaps about how it’s maybe the worst meal he’s ever had.

The dinner incident is a snapshot into what long-time University of Oklahoma Women’s Basketball Coach Sherri Coale recently said is a crucial, yet undervalued, element of evaluation — watching how prospects “do life.”

“People can come up with the right answers to boxed questions and tell you all the things you want to hear, and you can look at a resume and see all the things you want to see,” she recently said on The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk.

“But the best decisions are the ones that are void of all the strings pulling at you.”

Coale considered a variety of hypothetical questions when evaluating top prospects, beyond just what their highlight tape looked like or what the recruiting services said.

• How do they respond when their food comes back cold?• How do they handle it when their flight is delayed?• How do they interact in a room full of people who can’t do anything for them?

“We can want a thing to work so badly because of what the paper says,” she said.

The point isn’t that we should trick prospective employees or candidates to see how they react to adversity or that we overemphasize any potential character flaws.

But before we offer someone a top position or rave about his/her resume and our brilliant new talent, we might want to gather some additional data about how they really “do life” and observe their reactions to some turbulence.

Because once we offer them that top cut of steak, there’s really no sending it back.