The Fundamental Role of a Coach. Part 1.

What Makes a Good Coach?

For a long time I was hyper focused on strength and conditioning in and of itself. I wanted to be a good strength and conditioning coach, so I thought exposing myself to all the literature I could would make me a good coach. My time was consumed by textbooks, articles, and blog posts. I even pursued a Masters degree in Exercise Science.

This devotion was sustained because of what I thought a good coach was. I thought a good strength and conditioning coach was defined by their ability to create a successful training program. And that is true. A good strength and conditioning coach should be able to create an effective training program. This perception of a coach is lacking however, and fundamentally incorrect.

Let’s broaden the discussion from a strength and conditioning coach to a coach in general. For rhetorical purposes, a coach constitutes anyone who leads and governs an athletic program or part of an athletic program. Under this umbrella, a strength and conditioning coach, a head baseball coach, or an offensive line coach would fall. Each of these coaches is responsible for a unique portion of the load but they all are in a position of influence. Now let’s take my perception of a good strength and conditioning coach and transcribe it so that it fits this broader context. A good coach is knowledgeable of their specific domain and skillful in the process of coaching that domain.

It is ok…but still missing something. And for the longest time I didn’t realize it. It took a year of absolute struggle, misery, and suffering (maybe a post for another time) for me to have the realization that I wasn’t the coach I thought I was. I needed to change. Two things influenced this realization. The first was time. After having all of my time taken away from me, I now have a schedule that provides me with reasonable time to write and reflect. This is due to the second reason which was my hiring as the head baseball coach of my alma mater, South Gwinnett High School. I no longer have a 90 minute commute to work (one way), am no longer coaching a fall sport, and ultimately shouldering a load that is too much for me to bear.

I have spent some of this time reflecting on coaching. And because I am passionate about my new position, which is accommodated by responsibilities outside of just strength and conditioning, I knew I needed to revisit my definition of a good coach. It was time to reorganize my perception.

A Little Lewis Goes a Long Way

C.S Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God”. Anything can become a god if we let it be.

The journey of making your mark in this world as a human is inextricably associated with pursuing a career. I will loosely define career as finding something that you are passionate about, good at, and willing to commit your life to that work. I found strength and conditioning. I found out in high school I liked lifting weights and developing myself physically. I found out in college that there was an entire field dedicated towards my passion. This burgeoning passion developed rapidly, without any sort of regulator, and it became all I cared about. Soon I prioritized strength and conditioning above all else. It became a god. Because it became a god, inevitably it became a demon, because I filtered my entire world through one thing. I was blind.

I am not using this example as a means to provoke religious discussion. Rather, I just want to extract the essence from what C.S Lewis wrote and use it as the cornerstone for the rest of this discussion. That is, the very things you are passionate about can become problematic if they are not prioritized properly. The affinity we have for something cultivates the seed, but without the watchful eye of the gardener the plant grows so large it consumes the entire garden. The gardener in this context manifested as the highest principle(s) you can serve in the specific domain you inhabit. And by highest principle, I mean the principle(s) that have the integrity to function properly on their own (from a more systematic and pragmatic point of view, not so much a moral one). You can use it as a guiding light to aim at without fear of being led astray.

So the question we are left with is, as a coach, what is the highest principle you can serve?

What It Is and What It Is Not

As I move through each principle, know that I am not saying these things should not be pursued. They absolutely should if you want to develop as a coach. I am saying that the complete prioritization of any of these over everything else will lead to a fundamentally flawed perception of a coach.

It is not the relentless pursuit of information, especially in one area. There is a vast amount of literature available for a coach. It is also incredibly easy to access. You can purchase a book online and it arrives on your doorstep three days later or you just buy the electronic version and can immediately begin consuming its contents. A fortunate time to exist as a coach, if you want to learn more about something, there is most likely a book already written about it. But this nearly unrestricted access to information doesn’t automatically increase one’s knowledge. Indeed, there is a disconnected ratio between the amount of information one can consume and the opportunity to actually and successfully integrate it into the real world. Contextually, as a coach, your athletes are not simply numbers on a spreadsheet. They do not all fit perfectly into your meticulously devised annual training program. And soberingly enough, they do not care how many books you have read if they are not getting better. Scouring the literature first, without any experience or idea as to how to tactfully use the information, can ironically blind you. Nicholas Taleb summarizes this point perfectly in The Black Swan, “Go from problems to books and not books to problems”.

Furthermore, it is not the traditional development of the tactical and technical aspects of coaching. It should go without saying, but yes, a coach should be able to coach the skills that they are a coach of. But extending yourself to far out into this domain indelibly brands you as a guru. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that. There are countless coaches who have built massive careers based on their ability to coach the technical skills of a sport. The dynamics of skill acquisition, however, make me wonder if there is more smoke than substance in this area. In fact, coaching skills through a constraints based approach with relevance to the experience of the athlete, along with providing ample opportunity for the athlete to find out what is technically optimal for herself seems to be an unwaveringly efficient paradigm to coach skills through. I think the innate tendency for athletes to successfully develop their own technique under the umbrella of correct technique attenuates the perceived magnitude of value here.

Even still, I can’t help but think about all the times I struggled as an athlete. My coaches would immediately resort to what I was doing wrong…physically. No matter the countless amount of correct repetitions I had done beforehand. The answer must be somewhere in the technique or the strategy. A hitch in the swing. A stutter step. A mistimed jump. Maybe there was something wrong I could fix with some extra drills, but maybe at other times there wasn’t anything wrong with the skill at all. If this is the case, it is not the skill that needs to be coached, but the mind attempting to express the skill that needs coaching. No amount of physical drill work can help prepare an athlete for the psychological battlefield that inhabits each athlete’s mind beyond the simple confidence of knowing you can perform the skill. A coach must be able to offer more than just technical correction. But if this is what you primarily pursue it will be the primary tool you use to think with. Your athletes will continue to emphasize work in the wrong direction.

The correct choice must be obvious then right? It must be the program! The program is the functioning entity that contains the coaching staff and therefore contains the services a coach can provide. A coach cannot be larger than the program that he or she serves, right? Moreover, the reputation of a program is a reflection of the quality of work and effort that is put into it. People want to be a part of a good program. Parents want their kids to be involved with a good program. Good programs attract good people and good talent.

Have you ever watched Varsity Blues? It’s an important movie to watch as a coach. Sure, its nonfiction, but good stories have a unique ability to shed a different light on the truth. I think Coach Kilmer (the head coach of the high school football team in the movie) started out his career with good intentions. He probably wanted to serve his kids, do the right thing, and of course win some football games. The audience meets Coach Kilmer on the backend of his career however. The success of his program is obviously and undeniably great. We learn as the movie progresses though that the program is the priority in his eyes. Because of this, he would sacrifice anything to win a football game, including the wellbeing of his players. Because he would sacrifice anything for the program, he ends up losing everything. The god dies or becomes a demon unless it obeys God.

Perhaps it is the subconscious replacement of the program with the coach’s ego that keeps the program from being the highest principle a coach can serve. Or maybe it is the fact that a program is only as alive as ability to personify an organization allows it to be. In other words, a program does not have a heart. A real heart. The one that beats an unfathomable amount of times, sending blood and oxygen to the muscles that tirelessly labor to fulfill the dream of being an elite athlete. The same heart that feels the intense dichotomy of emotions between the high of winning a region championship, and the low of finishing last.

I would rather serve something with a real heart.

What should you serve then?

Your athletes.

The athletes are the answer. Specifically, it is the principle of prioritizing their success and development that has the integrity to claim the throne of the hierarchy of principles a coach can serve. Keep them first, and you can safely navigate all of the other aspects of coaching. They are the place you can pour everything into. Dive into strength and conditioning literature so that your athletes can become stronger, not your intellectual ego. Study film and technique knowing it is your athletes who will improve their effectiveness on the field, not your identity as a guru. Build a quality program knowing your athletes will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the opportunities that a quality program provides.

The principle of serving your athletes above all else functions as the fundamental bedrock that holds everything together. This orientation will protect you from being blinded by the parochial pursuit of any other principle, and so protects you from ideology. It allows you to integrate all of the knowledge and skills you have acquired as a coach into a dynamic environment, the way the world really is. It forces you to be open-minded and adaptable, always growing and ever more prepared.

Frederick Nietzsche mentions in Beyond Good and Evil how any virtue extended far enough becomes a vice. He mentions how a bird that flies ever higher becomes unaware of how high he really is, and becomes out of touch with the world. So, virtues like generosity or philanthropy can be participated in in such a way that their virtuousness is masked by a vice like extensive pride. They become badges of honor for all to see thereby diminishing the purity of the virtue itself. A bird that flies ever higher is like a person who donates a resource to a cause for a personal gain, not so that someone else’s life can be improved. There is no understanding of the way things really are.

I conclude with this because in my estimation it is the most probable counter argument to this orientation as a coach. That is, doing all things for your athletes is too far of an extension of the principle it represents and the coach who does so is overly prideful, aloof, and or unaware of actually how to help his athletes. This could be the case, if a coach didn’t pursue all of these other principles as well. Remember, my point was not that you should eliminate growth in these other principles. That would be foolish. My point was there needs to be a structured hierarchy so that you do not become blinded by these principles that should be subordinate.

So, if a coach primarily aims at serving their athletes, and then works diligently at improving every other aspect of coaching then this virtue remains a virtue. You are not made more aloof. You are brought closer to reality, face to face with the problems your athletes will inevitably have. Because you have more knowledge and more ability, you are able to see things more clearly as well as things other coaches might not be able to see at all. You become a bird that is able to fly high and see the world from a grand scale, but also able to swoop down and observe things from a specific and intimate point of view.

What is my perception of a coach now? Someone who works tirelessly at developing a holistic repertoire of coaching skills so that the athletes they serve have an increased opportunity of maximizing their potential.

Athletes first.