I have written a few times about how I got into coaching and more importantly how I never imagined at the start of it all that I would spend 27 years, non-stop, sometimes 12 months a year ( or so it seemed) involved in coaching.
This past blog past is one that probably summarizes quite well what coaching has meant to me but certainly not the only one I posted on the topic. If you have time and interested, I invite you to browse through the various posts, but via this link, I think you can get enough context to the rest of today's article. a-coaching-life-well-spent.html Today's blog post is more about sharing insight on how I feel that often times, when someone is involved in coaching, the short term frustrations make it hard to see the long term benefits. I want to start off by sharing two anecdotes from my own coaching experiences. The first one, relates to the summer of 1998. Prior to heading out to the week long national provincial team championships with my U18 provincial team, I had arranged a little mini pre-camp with some practice sessions, a team dinner, followed by an overnight stay and direct transport to the hotel. As this was outside the approved training arrangements, there were some out of pocket expenses and deal making required but I saw it as an important step in preparing the team. As players were informed about the arrangements, most of the parents appreciated our efforts to bring the players together prior to what for many of them was the first major competition and offered to help chip in with the cost. However a number of parents contacted me asking if they were allowed to attend the team dinner. When they were told it was a team only retreat, they complained saying “If we did not drive our kids to practices and team camps,the coaches would have no team to coach.” Worse off, these same parents withheld their thanks and said nothing about chipping in to help with the costs. Luckily these problem parents were in a minority. The second anecdote, a few years later with a different group, involved a team captain from my U16 provincial team. Returning from a week long training camp in the States training and playing alongside some top US players from the ODP programs , (for reference, you can visit this link.) www.usyouthsoccer.org/olympic-development-program/ I took the chance on the bus ride back to chat with many of the players a a type of debrief. This team captain, shared some concerns about her level of fatigue and frustration with soccer at the moment. She mentioned her club team didn't have league games but would be playing in a tournament that she didn't really want to participate in. When I suggested she take some time off to recover, she told me her dad would never go for it. Having what I thought was a good relationship with the parents, I spoke to her father who quickly shut down any discussion about his daughter taking a break and most surprisingly of his comments was one about the said tournament " it's a really fun tournament where all the players and parents get to spend time together and there is no way she should miss it". Ironically, in the first game of the tournament, the player suffered a broken nose and concussion going into a mis-timed tackle.... coincidence or related to her fatigue, we can never know for sure.. .but had she taken two weeks off, she might not have missed the 6 weeks she ended up needing to recover. These stories of petty parental ingratitude and over-involvement illustrate how difficult, and sometimes downright aggravating, coaching at any level can be today. Earning players’ respect has always been challenging for coaches, but recent times have brought even more frustrating situations to deal with. The point here is not to debate the merits or demerits of new challenges, or to arbitrate whether parents might be right or wrong in a particular disagreement with the coach. Sometimes parents become nuisances to the team, but sometimes parents correctly criticize the coach for crossing the line. Parents and coaches alike make mistakes. The point of my two anecdotes is that unprecedented pressures these days lead too many young coaches at all levels to leave the coaching ranks before their time, and lead too many youth league coaches to remain active only for a few years while their own sons or daughters participate. “Long termers,” men and women with tenures measured in decades rather than years or months, seem a dying breed. When an experienced youth coach hangs up the whistle with more still to offer, the coach’s departure can deprive future players of valuable leadership and instruction. Talented coaches are hard to come by. Select team or high school, cegep, university varsity coaches may leave because of sniping from parents whose real beef is that their children did not crack the starting lineup. Social media can make coaches fair game for critics emboldened by the anonymity of the keyboard. Coaches may sense that their reappointment each year depends more on the win-loss record than on whether the team plays to its potential, or whether the coaches teach life lessons that parents say they want. When school administrators pressured by resistant parents countermand reasonable disciplinary decisions, the coach’s relatively modest stipend may seem not worth the cost of frequent year-round commitment. The youth league coach’s lot may not be much better. Silence or conflicting signals from the club administrators may leave the coach at the mercy of parents who disagree among themselves about whether to provide each player reasonable playing time, or whether to play a “short bench” to win. Because volunteer youth league coaches normally make no pretense of being professional educators or professional coaches, they can be easy marks for parents who question their knowledge of the game and second-guess their decisions. Whispering campaigns can be as mean spirited as at the high school level, and parents’ expectations about their children’s prospects for a college scholarship or other athletic advancement can be just as unreasonable. And more often than not, club officials well stand with the parents as a means to keep their registration numbers high and / or to not jeopardize fund raising initiatives. Whether to leave coaching is an individual decision for the coach and his or her family. The family figures into the mix because sooner or later, pressures on the coach usually also weigh heavily on the spouse and children. Because time spent coaching can intrude on family commitments, coaches and families must decide for themselves when coaching stops being time well spent. But when a coach seriously weighing the pros and cons of turning away seeks my advice, I suggest considering not only today’s frustrations (which are real), but also the long-term rewards from years of continued service (which are also real). Here is what I tell them: In the long run, dedicated youth coaches usually win deserved respect and affection because their players never forget. Coach-player relationships frequently ripen into lifelong friendships based on good memories and mutual esteem. Most of my former players range in age from their early 20s to their early 50s. It is quite a charge when one phones, emails, or approaches me on the street with, “Hey Coach, remember me? You coached me 25 years ago.” The teacher-student bond can be one of life’s most lasting relationships, behind only the parent-child and child-sibling bonds. Interscholastic coaches and their youth league counterparts are teachers, and players are their students. For a coach with more yet to offer, resisting today’s pressures to quit can bank “deferred compensation” for a job well done, redeemable years later in the form of lasting shared memories. It is like many other things, the short terms frustrations, when they lead to people giving up, can impede the benefits down the road that one can not even imagine. In the works of Ted Kennedy in his biography True Compass “This is the greatest lesson a child can learn. It is the greatest lesson anyone can learn. It has been the greatest lesson I have learned: if you persevere, stick w/it, work @ it, you have a real opportunity to achieve something. Sure, there will be storms along the way. And you might not reach your goal right away. But if you do your best and keep a true compass, you'll get there.”
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AuthorAfter many years of coaching at various levels and with different teams, I thought I would share some of my experiences and thoughts about coaching. Archives
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