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#6 I am a Teacher: Balancing Needs & Wants

This article marks the sixth installment for the A Coach's Dozen: 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches.  This post looks at the belief that to be a good coach you must be a great teacher.

With the tip-off of the college basketball season, the march to madness has begun again.  What that means for me, and countless other hoop fans, is the daily digestion of newspaper and magazine articles all breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of every one of the 347 Division I university teams.  I am sure this is a similar pre-season ritual for many of you with your favorite sport.  During my current obsession of scouting reports and team breakdowns, something struck me.  It seems the favorite cliché used by every sports reporter when describing college basketball coaches is… player’s coach.   

By no means is the term player’s coach new to athletics.  In fact, I can’t recall ever meeting a coach at any level of competition that either didn’t describe themselves as, or wish they were more of, a “player’s coach”.  Nevertheless, what does it really mean to be a player’s coach?  As Timothy Bracy writes in his 2010 piece for The L Magazine, a player’s coach is affable and easygoing, is approachable and well liked by not only their athletes but also the media, front office, parents, and other coaches.  On the other end of the spectrum Bracy describes, “The Disciplinarian is typically despised by his players. He has a fetish for sadistically long practices, and bizarre team rules like always having to style your hair in the manner of a National Socialist. The Disciplinarian has a habit of cutting problem players and wearing teams out with injury over the course of a full season. Their relationship to the media is usually astonishingly bland and monosyllabic, and on the rare occasion that they crack a smile or joke it is treated as a geo-hemispheric shock.”  Who wants to be THAT guy!

The way I have come to recognize a player’s coach is quite simple.  Player’s coaches are always great teachers.  These coaches understand teaching involves balancing the needs of a sport with the wants of their athletes.  It is like the old coaching adage, “it is not just about the X’s and O’s; it’s also about the Jimmy’s and Joe’s”.  A player’s coach works to know their players, and tailors the team’s strategy to take advantage of their player’s strengths.  Every sport has skills and techniques that athletes must learn; those skills are what I refer to as needs.  At the same time, every athlete has particular mannerisms and ways they prefer to do thing; let’s call those wants.  Great teachers find a way to combine the needs and wants into objective results.  A player’s coach can get their athletes wanting to execute what needs to be done.

Like I said, every coach hopes to be a player’s coach.  However, as many of you know from your personal experiences, not all coaches are great teachers.  The research, examples here and here, points to the fact that Wayward coaches (coaches who fail to adequately balance needs and wants) miss the boat when it comes to addressing the true desires of their athletes.  Said simply, they don’t get to know their athlete’s wants.  According to Gordon Bloom and colleagues, it takes effort and a sense of humbleness for a coach to take the time and energy to really find out what their players want both from a physical standpoint, but also mentally and socially.  To help, I have provided five questions I have repeatedly heard great player’s coaches ask their athletes:

  • Who is your mom?  All athletes love to talk about their mothers.  Getting them to open up about the important people in their lives is very revealing.
  • What are you thinking right now?  This isn’t asked in a confrontational manner.  Rather, player’s coaches ask this in an authentic and timely way.
  • When did you go to bed last night?  It is important and revealing to find out about your athletes typical behaviors and habits.
  • Where do you want to be in 3 years?  Athletes, especially younger ones, often think too far into the future.  It is important to help them figure out what they want in the present.
  • Why haven’t you come see me?  It is great to say you have an open-door policy; it is better to give an invitation.

What questions do you ask your athletes to gain insight into their wants and desires?  Better yet, how do you combine the often-opposing forces of needs and wants?  Please share your coaching wisdom with the rest of us.  After all… we all hope to be a PLAYER’S COACH.


Baker, J., Yardley, J., Côté, J. (2003). Coach Behaviors and Athlete Satisfaction in Team and Individual Sports. International Journal of Sport Psychology, Vol 34(3), 226-239.

Bloom, G. A., Crumpton, R., & Anderson, J. E. (1999). A systematic observation study of the teaching behaviors of an expert basketball coach. Sport Psychologist13, 157-170.

Pankhurst, A., Collins, D., & Macnamara, Á. (2012). Talent development: linking the stakeholders to the process. Journal of Sports Sciences, 30(15).

Comments

  1. Hi,

    You mention in the article about asking athletes to talk about their mother. However, what would you ask of athletes who may not have a mother, or does not associate with their parents? Would you change the questioning? and if so, how would you connect with those athletes? Many athletes do not have the same parental support, many grow up in poverty and without one or both students. I work with students who are athletes and do not have parents in their life, they are unaccompanied homeless youth. Does your coaching of students such as these change?

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    1. Great question. I am assuming when I talk to an athlete I wouldn't know the details of their life. That said, what better way to discover about their background (both positive and negative) than to ask about their mother. I could see this becoming a wonderful way to connect with a young person going through a tough situation. I understand your valid concern about not wanting to make an athlete feel uncomfortable. However, I imagine the potential awkwardness wouldn't come from the initial question but rather the coaches response to the athlete's answer to the question.

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