There isn't a polo shirt, a certification, or a hat with a badge that make someone into a good coach. Whether you're trying your hand at coaching yourself or you're a parent looking to find a good coach for your child to follow, here are 10 things that separate good coaches from bad ones.
Safety is a Coach's Primary Job
Before we get into any of the more nuanced or sophisticated things that make up a good coach, we have to acknowledge a youth coach's primary role. All other things can be mastered, but if we fail to provide a safe environment, we fail.
The safety envelope includes safety from sexual predation, safety from bullying, safety from environmental factors like weather or metal stakes poking up from the ground, emotional safety, and even safety from negligence. A soccer coach, for example, has a responsibility to get educated about header rules, ball sizes, concussion awareness and protocol, youth protection, first aid, and age appropriate activities. Coaches need to come prepared with parent phone numbers in their clipboard and an ability to activate emergency medial services and authorize care if a player gets hurt. Clubs should have medical treatment waivers signed and on file. Coaches should carry these in their clipboards or otherwise have them handy (like in the car).
At no time should a coach knowingly expose a child to risk. This means not leaving them at the field alone when mom or dad is late for pickup. It means ensuring two adults are around for youth protection purposes and kids don't wander off to porta-potties or off the filed without a buddy or responsible adult who remains within visual range.
Coaches should be required to have background investigations on file, and a minimal education in coaching fundamentals, concussions, and youth protection. And they should be expected to keep their training up to date on an annual basis.
Clubs should be enforcing safety rules and parents should be paying attention to club policies, helping out where necessary (as in when two adults should be present) and holding coaches accountable for keeping safety at the top of their priorities.
Care About Your Players
This one may seem obvious, but unfortunately, it's not always. First, when someone is new to coaching, there is a lot to think about. Session planning, work/life balance, how and when to use the various pieces of equipment, etc. It can be overwhelming. Coaches must remind themselves often - especially in the beginning - that they are there to support and develop players and their families.
Caring about players means remembering to say hello when they come on the field and say goodbye when they leave. It means asking how they are doing and getting to know a little about the off-field lives they lead. It means making an effort to get to know the parents and understanding the dynamic that forged each young player's spirit. It means taking an interest in their lives.
Caring about players means doing everything possible to make yourself the best coach you can be.It means embracing the idea that they deserve the best version of yourself. In pursuing the best version of yourself, you're giving them a powerful example to follow - so they will pursue the best version of themselves as well. I'll talk more about this later, but I can't emphasize it enough.
Learn and Develop Faster Than Your Players
"A river rises only to the level of the lake that feeds it."
- Author Unknown
Kids are growing and evolving - usually pretty quickly. If you're with a team for a while, you need to be growing along with them. That means reading, taking courses, attending live training, finding a mentor, watching other games - generally, it means making an effort to understand the coaching craft and to become the best coach you can be.
Kids are watching. They pay attention to the actions of the adults around them. These adults provide blueprints for living that kids try on for size. They absorb pieces from all adults around them. As they get older, they start absorbing more from their peers than from their adults, but a coach will always hold a special place. Not a parent, they are free from the natural struggle for freedom. Being focused on player success on and off the pitch, they are respected and trusted as a source for advice and wisdom.
The skill of coaching is never mastered. It must be pursued every season and between seasons. Coaches must reflect on each performance and ask themselves how it could have gone better. What did they do well? What could they do better? Who do I need to be or become in order to do better? This, by the way, is exactly the model we want our athletes to follow. Show them how it's done!
When coaches stop learning and developing, players will quickly catch up and pass them. When this eventually does happen, it may be time to hand them off to another coach who can continue their journey.
I pick up at least one book or one course between each season. Its a habit I started when I first got into coaching (though I consumed a lot more than one book or course at a time), and it's something I continue and believe all coaches should continue to this day. Whatever I've done to improve myself between seasons is typically part of my season opening talk with my players. I ask them to go around and tell me what they did to improve as well. The idea is: we're all improving together.
Get Out of The Way
Young father teaching son to ride bicycle in summer park.
Coaching is not about you. It's not about your record or how many game you won or lost. It's about the kids. It's about skills transfer and empowerment. Kids can lose a game and grow tremendously as an athlete.
It might be safe to say that the job of a youth coach is to work themselves out of a job. Coaches are in the business of empowering and developing youth into the best versions of themselves. At some point, all kids move on. A good coach prepares him or herself for this inevitability, embraces it as a sign of success, and practices the art of letting go often.
Getting out of the way often means getting out of the way of our own egos. Ego has crippled more coaches than any of us would like to admit. Getting too caught up in game outcomes. Taking scoreboard results personally. I even know a coach who would not let other coaches coach her kids because she was afraid that her kids would like the other coach better. That particular coach lost not just games, but literally all of her players - who either went off to other teams on their own or left the sport all together.
Game times are great times to practice. Someone who has studied how to be a good coach will eventually internalize the lessons we are talking about here. They will have come prepared to training. They would have transferred skills and empowered kids the best way they know how. On game day, it's time to let them put what they learned to work. Sure, gentle reminders or code words that bring back lessons from the practice sessions might be useful as training wheels, but the sooner a coach can take his or her hand off the seat and let kids balance and ride on their own, the better.
Be a Good Example
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
James Baldwin
Author and Activist
We've already talked about the example we set in developing ourselves as coaches, but to take it one step deeper, the way we handle criticism, success, and failure are equally important.
How do we manage when our team wins or loses?
How do we manage when our practice doesn't go as we envisioned?
How do we manage when our kids do well, or when they fail to do as well as we know they can?
Coaches that use the cattle prod technique - jabbing their players to get into position, wake up out there, or follow the herd; coaches that use the joystick technique and imagine their players as little bits of computer code they can direct around the field like characters in a video game; or coaches that sit back, scan their email on their mobile phone while kids practice or play are all sending loud and clear examples of what we value in adults. It takes intention to be a good coach - with care given to tone, being on time, being prepared, being flexible, and managing victory, defeat, frustrations, and communication.
Be Flexible
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Chief of the German General Staff
, 1871 - 1888
"No plan survives first contact with the enemy."
Flexibility begins with a level of comfort in one's own core abilities. If we're focused on the right objectives, there are a lot of routes we can take to get there.
If we get dropped in the mountains with a map and a compass, it's our map and compass skills combined with our fitness level and the environmental conditions that will dictate the route we use to get to our objective. Our plans change if our bodies are weak. They change if storms or mud slides stand in our way. They change if the weight we are carrying is light or heavy. There are many reasons why they change, but our navigation skills come into play in every case.
Coaches rarely know the players they will have to work with before a season starts. They may not know the competition they're up against. They don't know what kind of issues each player is dealing with, if there will e injuries, if they themselves might get sick, or if the rules will change and a former centerpiece of a strategy is no longer viable.
There are as many reasons for us to be flexible as there are moving parts on an 8-22 person squad with 8 - 44 parents, in a multi-team age bracket, in a rule system that changes, and in a game that has thousands of tactics, 800+ first touches per game, and unpredictable weather. As a coach, adapting to what's in front of you is not only an important skill to have, but also an important lesson to telegraph to players. We adapt and overcome in the game of soccer as we do in the game of life.
