Coaching Sports Teams
Posted on July 23, 2013
I’m a huge sports fan of mostly collegiate level sports. I’ve always thought that college athletics brought out the best in a student – in order to compete at the college level, you need to be athletically gifted for sure, but there is an implied emphasis on improving your skills and techniques as you mature and progress toward graduation. No one can compete at a major college level on skill alone. Players of every sport need to work at their game every day and receive guidance and instruction from their coaches in order to reach their maximum potential. In addition, athletic participation also requires a major amount of discipline and time management. The time demands placed on student athletes that are far above what the average college or high school student is used to. This is where the coaching staff comes in – the coach’s job is to provide the athletic guidance and skill instruction in the sport, but to also instruct and guide the student athlete in the very important skills necessary to succeed in the classroom.
I was never skilled enough to participate in athletics beyond my college years, and my participation at the college level was limited to bench warming status on the baseball team. This was a humbling experience for me, because I was one of the better players on any team I had ever played on right on through high school. I was amazed at the differential between my skill level and the best players on our team, and even more amazed at how much better most other college teams were in comparison with our team. However, one of the things I have always loved about baseball is that the most talented team doesn’t always win. A team that is not very talented can win a fair amount of the time by being fundamentally sound, intelligent, and detail oriented. Our college team won its fair share in that manner, despite being less physically talented than most of our competition and I credit those wins to our coach. He tirelessly worked with us on the cerebral points of the game as well the physical, and many times we won because the other team didn’t pay attention to the details. My coach was an old-school coach who expected us to be adults – he provided the guidance we needed as 18 year old kids, many of us away from home for the first time in our lives, and had a very low tolerance rating for any kind of deviation from the path of responsible adulthood.
No cursing, uniform shirts tucked in, pants rolled down a certain way over our stirrups, cap on at all times while on the field or in the dugout, no spitting on the field or in the dugout, never criticize a teammate, never argue with an umpire (no matter how bad the call was!!!), and never, ever, ever let your temper get away from you. Minor violations would usually result in laps and loss of batting practice time, and more major violations were usually punished by immediate removal from the game and loss of playing time in the next game. Repeat offenders? Only one in my time with the team, and that individual lost the remainder of the season.
We weren’t a scholarship program, so participation was voluntary and considered a privilege, and Coach made us keenly aware of that. None of this was a surprise – on the first day of tryouts, Coach handed us all a folder with all of the rules and regulations and guidelines for participation, with the express stipulation that our participation was conditional on our representing the school in a positive way, as responsible adults and sportsmen. None of us, not even the best players on the team, entertained any illusions of playing the sport professionally, but we all loved to play and accepted Coach’s program without complaint. Coach never raised his voice except in praise, and I don’t ever remember him dressing down a member of the team in front of the team. If Coach had a criticism, he would wait to get you in private and explain what you had done wrong and give you ways to correct the problem. He was a great guy, and I’ve always tried to live up to his standard, even though our last meeting was 40 years ago.
When I watched Woody Hayes run out onto the field and tackle an opposing player during an Ohio State University football game, or when Bob Knight throws a chair across the court at an Indiana University basketball game, I wonder if these men, these coaching icons, understood the message that they were sending. Acting like a five-year-old throwing a temper tantrum is not a character-building exercise, nor is it an exemplar of higher learning. Watching the video of the recently dismissed Rutgers coach verbally abuse members of his team made my skin crawl. And then the final straw – recently, the baseball coach at Eastern Connecticut, a man that I have been personally acquainted with over the years that I was a baseball coach, a man that I learned from and respected, has been removed from his position of 45 years for allegedly the same type of behavior. I can’t tell you how difficult it was for me to read that story in the newspaper.
Winning is fun and rewarding, there’s no doubt. But there’s much more than winning involved in scholastic sports – there are life lessons to be learned which are much more valuable than Ws and Ls. I thank my lucky stars that I had a coach in my formative years that “walked the walk” – how to lose with dignity, to address deficiencies, and to mature as individuals.
Well said
Thanks, Lee.