The Three Roles of an Athletic Coach

In truth, I have come to loathe the term Teacher, even though the underlying role is the one I enjoy the most. My distaste for the term is because it focuses the attention on the person already possessing the knowledge and diminished learner. I’m sure I am not unlike many who early in my career had an ego centered around me. I had days where I just knew I had knocked it out or the park. I would get home and say to myself or someone else “what a great lesson I taught”. Unfortunately, at that stage of my career I was too obtuse to have any significant awareness of the only thing which makes a lesson great. I’m not saying the student didn’t have an amazing learning experience. In fact, I sure many of them did based upon how rapidly they improved relative to their competition. I was just too inwardly focused to know for sure. Consequently, I am now using the term Learning Facilitator.

As a Learning Facilitator, the Athletic Coaches wear the hat of introducing new concepts. They find ways of getting the Learners the work with spend time exploring subject matter which is either new or getting them to examine the matter in ever increasingly nuanced levels. Put another way, the Learning Facilitator is responsible of getting the brain of their Learners cooking at a full boil. If I were to put this role on a scale with one end representing how hard it is and the other being how difficult, it would sit almost all the way at difficult. 

Next on the list is Trainer. This is the person who designs exercises and drills the Learner my go through to fully explore the concepts brought forth by the Learning Facilitator. You may have heard someone say it’s easy to choose between something good and something bad, more difficult to choose between two good things and most difficult when the decision has two probably bad outcomes. That’s the place a great Coach lives when serving the role of Trainer. The challenge associated with this role is designing practice opportunities where there is a somewhat definable gray area between where one decision or another has the highest risk:reward and keeping the Athletes as close to that place as possible. This is something I have and will continue to dig into other places. 

Personally, Trainer is role I enjoy the least. Consequently, I have enormous admiration for those who do it well and out of pure joy. Out of necessity, I have developed a skill set where I can fill this role extremely well. However, my joy is limited to knowing I am serving my client in a critical function necessary for them to reach their desired destination. Today, probably because it’s the role I enjoy least, this is an area where I spend a great deal of time helping other coaches get really good at. Okay, let’s call a snail a snail, I most likely spend a lot of time help other coaches become good at it because it also allows me to slip back into my preferred role of Learning Facilitator. One the scale I mentioned earlier, Trainer falls toward the hard end.

The concept of the Iron Fist inside the Velvet Glove is one I speak about often. Understanding how to effectively wield this weapon is what makes a Coach GREAT or reduces him/her to a stumble bum. The role of Coach is where you can truly have Superpowers! Obviously, superpowers in the hands of under trained operators can result in disastrous consequences. 

I once heard a Coach, I believe it was Tom Coughlin but I might be wrong, talk about the two offensive tackles on his Super Bowl winning team. I’m paraphrasing as this was long ago. He said he had these two massive behemoths of men who he needed very different approaches to get them to perform. While the viciousness with which they dominated their opponent was almost indistinguishable, it never would have worked if he had treated them the same. One only responded when Coach would get in his face, scream while almost frothing at the mouth and challenge him publicly. Coach Coughlin then went on to explain that this approach would have the opposite effect on the 300 plus pounder anchoring the other end of the offensive line. Coach learned to never challenge this man publicly. If he had something negative which needed to be said, he would take the player on a little watch, put his arm around the player’s shoulder and softly discuss the matter. I’m sure you can see both the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove in this scenario.

A great coach treats everyone fair but different. There is another kind of Coach who you will find. One who undoubtedly have a great pedigree and can point their many successes. These coaches are ones who I refer to as either Hammers who view everything as a nail or Carpenters who only own coping saws. These are Coaches with a limited range in terms of their style of coaching. They are world class at doing things the way they do it and have no desire to do it differently. As long as the Learner put in front of one is the equivalent to rafter which need to be secured and the other a crown molding needing to be installed the relationship is heavenly. However, as soon as the former encounters a screw or the other a 2x4 there is friction which hinders productively. What we should all recognize is the Learning represented by the screw will never be a nail. In the role of Coach we should each equip ourselves with tools which allow us to adapt to the Learner rather than believing they will ever adapt to us. As you might guess, when wielding a tool like the Iron Fist inside the Velvet Glove the Coach has find the right balance yet always be using the tool to perform one job or another. For this reason, I place this role squarely in the middle between hard and difficult.