<h3 style="text-align: center;">
thinking out loud about issues related to coaching...</h3>
It's easy to get discouraged as a coach, but it's still a very important job with a lot of daily upside.
One of the benefits of the end of the year is that there is actually time for most of us to slow down and think about things that we don’t often have time for during the year. Near the top of that list, many of us find time to ponder why we do what we do.
For me, that question has already been reflected, at least in part, by the beginning of a series of profiles of some of the household names among track and field/cross country coaches in our community.
While doing that series is a natural outgrowth of pondering over the meaning of coaching, it doesn’t do much to answer the gnawing questions that dog our days of deepest doubt as coaches. What is a coach for, really?
In attempting to answer that question, I have aimed to speak to three audiences more or less simultaneously. I am, of course, aiming to speak to coaches, but I am also aiming remarks at the parent and athlete demographics. It does only a small measure of good if we as coaches understand what we're here for but the two groups of people we interact with most don't share at least some of our understanding of what a coach is and does.
I invite you to sit down for a while and join the conversation.
1. A coach is there to affirm. The need for affirmation is at the very core of our being. So intense is the need that each of us has, on various occasions, gone looking for affirmation in all the wrong places. As coaches, we dare not withhold affirmation from those to whom it is due and as it is due. While it is true that insincere affirmation poisons the psyche, we must never make that an excuse for not doing it at all.
2. A coach is there to make people uncomfortable, not comfortable. As humans, we don’t stand in need of someone to help us seek comfort; we do that quite well enough on our own. Left to ourselves, we resist all messages unsettling and uncomfortable. We protect our personal comforts tenaciously. An effective coach identifies behaviors and patterns of thought that require change and persistently nudges the athlete, sometimes willingly and sometimes unwillingly, in the direction of those changes.
3. A coach is there to keep athletes from working too hard. I see it every season I coach. I see it especially in certain personality types and especially in certain early-season workouts. It is manifested as a desire to address all deficiencies by working harder. The willingness to work harder is of no small value, but it is of greater value still to work smarter. A body broken or in a perpetual state of fatigue cannot perform to its maximum ability.
4. A coach is there to keep athletes from working not hard enough. Most of us need someone to be accountable to. Without that person, we define a level of work we will commit to and never venture beyond that point. We define what risks we will take and rarely, if ever, step outside of that circle. The coach is there to coax people over the boundary and introduce them to the bounty that lies on the far side of their boundary.
5. A coach is there to provide a necessary alternate perspective. Every athlete both deserves and requires the occasional benefit of an evaluation unfiltered through his or her own colored lenses. Some appreciate that input and others not so much so, but it's still part of the job.
6. A coach is there to remind athletes that any goal worth pursuing necessarily involves a commitment to the long road of sustained effort. If you would see small dividends, make short-term investments. If you would see greater dividends, well, that takes longer. Nobody ever cheats time.
7. A coach is there to remind athletes that the humility and relative obscurity of team-mindedness are always to be preferred over the trappings of celebrity. To our enduring detriment, our culture is obsessed with celebrity. At one moment or another, most of us imagine we want to be treated as celebrities. We make far more of celebrities than is healthy, either for them or us. We fail to observe that celebrities are people with all the same insecurities that we have, only bent beneath an excessive and unforgiving load of expectations. It is little wonder that celebrities fail as frequently as they do. And, the younger the age at which we make a celebrity of someone, the greater risk of self-destruction we assign to them. We forget, perhaps because we never really learned it in the first place, that life’s enduring joys and accomplishments are shared joys and shared accomplishments. As coaches, we do well to introduce young people to heroes with warts, heroes they can touch and talk to, and heroes who will probably never grace the covers of magazines.
8. A coach is there to remind athletes that life is about more than a single discretionary activity. No sport should be the all-consuming passion of any individual. Ever.
9. A coach is there to remind athletes that life is about making choices and commitments. Just as life is not about a single activity, so also does life require us to make some choices about which activities we will commit to. Keeping a thousand irons in the fire is more indicative of self-deception than of industry. Until you make some choices and narrow the scope of your commitments, you will be forever treading your own personal waters of mediocrity.
10. A coach is there to remind athletes that appearance is a veneer. Time and attention devoted to the care and feeding of the veneer is time and attention diverted from the realities beneath. Our culture's obsession with appearance rivals its obsession with celebrity, and there is a great deal of overlap between the two.
11. A coach is there to remind athletes that good character is a precious commodity, is easily compromised, and is restored only with the greatest of difficulty.
12. A coach is there to remind athletes that sport is a microcosm of life. No lesson learned in sport ends up devoid of application later in life.
It troubles me some, though, that none of these items appear as bullet points on my formal job description.