ABA Banking Journal - October 2007 - (Page 32)
Okay. Listen up Brad Rock has led his bank team to 12 consecutive years of record earnings. Now, as ABA and ACB get set to merge, he’ll bring his coaching skills to a larger field I t’s ten after seven, starting to get dark. Parents are waiting to pick up their kids. The players have been pounding on each other for hours. They’ve run the drills, practiced hard, done their sprints. Everybody is panting. Coach runs down the field and whistles through his teeth to get everybody together. “Look,” he says, “it’s getting late. We’ve run 20 sprints. That’s enough for any team to run. We’re playing Melville on Saturday. They might be off the field by now, or maybe not. I’m not sure. We can take a chance and go in, or we can make sure we’re in better shape than they are and we can run some more. What do you say?” Everybody shouts, “Let’s do it.” Coach smiles, thinking, “They get it.” Two days later with the game on the line in the fourth quarter, coach goes out during a time-out to rally the troops. By Bill Streeter, editor-in-chief 32 OCTOBER 2007/ABA BANKING JOURNAL “All right, listen guys. Look over at the other side. Look at them, they’re sucking wind. Remember Thursday night?” “Yes, coach.” “This is what we were running for, this next down. We’re not sucking wind. This is why we ran those sprints. Let’s punch ’em in the mouth and go into the end zone right now!” When Brad Rock tells that story, complete with the whistle through his teeth, you feel like you’re on the field, even though you’re sitting in his office at Bank of Smithtown. It’s real because he’s done it. He was head varsity coach of Smithtown High School for five years. It’s real because he was a player himself, an All-American quarterback in high school. And it’s real because he’s still coaching every work day as chairman, president, and CEO of $1.06 billion Smithtown Bancorp, and its Bank of Smithtown subsidiary, based in Hauppauge, N.Y. No, employees don’t run sprints around the office, but his whole approach to running the bank is to get everybody on the same page, to get everybody to buy into the Bank of Smithtown way of doing things. www.ababj.com/subscribe.html
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