As a coach, one of the most challenging aspects is reaching your players. Should you criticize, yell, scream, and punish? Should you praise, not raise your voice, and reward? Either way, you want to remain relevant. The best way to do this is by interacting with other coaches and getting to know your athletes.
The coaches you admire and interact with will often guide you in your approach. You will frequently find yourself identifying and displaying the coaching style and ideas of the coaches you have had in the past that positively impacted you. You will also find yourself not doing the things that coaches you had did that negatively impacted you.
No matter who or what you learn from, there is nothing like hands-on experience.
Hands-on experience is what lets you know what to do in different situations. No matter what the “coaching textbook” says, you will come across a situation or athlete that will require you to adjust. Using the information you already have stored along with knowing your athletes and situations will allow you to make the most optimal decision.
It takes a balancing act of learning from older concepts and embracing new concepts.
A Personal Story
As an athlete, one of the things that really bothered me was when I would make an error a coach would inevitably say something along the lines of “you have to make that play”. Whenever I heard this, I would think about how I had just let my team down and everything that I had done wrong. This would often carry over and have a negative snow ball effect on the rest of my game.
As a result of this experience, once I began coaching I decided to approach errors a different way. Instead of telling the player “they need to make that play” I ask them a question. That question would be either “What happened?”, “How did you feel while making that play?” or “What did you see?”. If I do not ask a question, I point out things gone right (TGR), followed by a modification that could help them do better.
This has worked very well. In response I once had a player tell me, “I feel free to make a mistake while playing for you because I feel as though I’m getting better with each mistake I make. However, I’m not happy with making the mistakes because I know I am capable of doing better. I’m better able to handle my mistakes and look forward to the next play more than I ever have, because I’ve learned to better control my response to both good and not so good plays.”
That’s what the coaching balancing act is all about—combining older and newer concepts to keep your players energized and excited about what comes next.
A lot of times veteran coaches go for tried and true, new coaches go for exciting and new, I encourage you to go for energizing and woo!
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