The Paradox of Coaching

This article marks the 13th, and final, installment for this series investigating the 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . To conclude, I hope to highlight the personal nature of coaching, and discuss how the difficulties of the job often stem from our desire to emulate those individuals that coached us. “I was born to coach”. That was the first sentence I wrote for my doctoral dissertation , the culmination of a 9-month field study into the mechanics of the coaching process. My academic advisor almost spit coffee across the room when I handed her the first draft with those words as the opening line. Her insistence to the inappropriateness of beginning a scientific paper as weighty as a dissertation with such a personal statement let me know I was on the right track. Making such an audacious and bold declaration let everyone know where I was coming from. For me, coaching is one of the most personal things you can do. Coaching has shaped who I am, coaching will forever be a part of what I ...

Recently, I posted a list of 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . Now I’m following up by digging deeper into each of them. This post is about the twelfth belief: I am powerful, I have power over others; I can abuse that power and act like an ass. Who is John Douglas? I’m going to guess that some of my UK followers will recognize the name John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry . Nevertheless, every sports fan should be required to know his story. His is a story of fighting, fair-play, and the power of words. John Douglas is credited with what is currently known as The Queensberry Rules . Although originally written by another SportGent named John Graham Chambers in 1865, The Queensberry Rules (which was only publicly endorsed by Douglas) is a code of conduct and accepted rules for the sport of boxing. It is these rules that set the stage for how professional boxing matches are held today. What does The Queensberry Rules have to do with you? When it comes to understanding groups, ...

The following post is the eleventh installment for the 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . Despite the essential need to set goals, good sport coaches are aware of the paradoxical quality of goal-setting. How many of you have one of those in-car navigation systems? I recently, as the caring and helpful husband I am, bought my wife one for her vehicle. Knowing how busy my wife is, running errands all over town as well as her sub-par sense of direction, I thought I was going to earn Husband of the Year honors with my gift. After hooking up the system, programing it to be as user friendly as possible, I sat back and waited for the praise to start coming my way. Well, two days later my wife informed me that it was either her or the navigation system… one of the two was going to go bye-bye. She hated it and demanded I remove it from her car immediately. Both stunned and a little hurt I decided to drive her car to a meeting I had across town to see for myself why this thing was so horrib...

This article marks the tenth installment for the 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . This post looks at how good sports coaches believe they must be demanding. I argue that it is more important to help your athletes eliminate negative habits than it is to accentuate the positive ones. Not too long ago I had the opportunity to watch the practice of a very successful basketball coach. One thing that struck me was her relentless emphasis on the negative. It seemed that every other time she spoke it was to point out what her players were doing wrong. After the practice I asked why she felt this approach, stressing the negatives, was the right way to get her players to reach their potential. Her response, “It works.” Coach Bobby Knight was a famous (some would say infamous) college basketball coach that seemed to take this same “eliminate the negative” approach to teaching his athletes. I have to admit, I am a big Coach Knight fan and have been since first reading John Feinstein's...

This article marks the ninth installment for the 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . This post investigates the belief that thinking out of the box is important for any coach. Encouraging your players, staff, and yourself to be innovative is vital. BUT, it is also your job to stop all bad ideas and most of the good ones too. Far and away one of my favorite sports movies of all time is Moneyball . Moneyball is the story of how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, transformed the game of baseball by taking a sophisticated sabermetric approach to scouting and analyzing players. The reason I loved the movie was because it portrayed an aspect of coaching that is often overlooked by the media. Sure, there are a ton of great movies, books, and documentaries about a coach that inspires his team to greatness (my all-time favorite of these is Hoosiers ). There are also wonderful stories about a coach who makes a personal connection with their athletes and helps ...

I thought it might be appropriate during this joyous holiday season to pause and take a moment to do some reflection. This post marks a temporary suspension of the A Coach's Dozen: 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches that series will resume next week. I have always tried to add a personal touch to everything I do. I think it is just part of my nature of wanting to bring a unique twist to whatever I am doing. This has been true in my family life, my approach to education, even how I would cut the grass on my baseball field, and especially how I have attempted to approach my work as a coaching scientist. For that reason, I have made a point of asking the coaches I work with a simple but very personal question: “What do you want other coaches to say about you?” Not too long ago I asked that question to a man I have always considered one of my coaching mentors. His response was equally personal and simple, “I want coaches to say my team is well coached.” Those words, well coached, haunt...

This article marks the eighth installment for the 13 Beliefs of Good Coaches . This post investigates the success paradox--the belief that the best test of any coach is to see what happens after someone makes a mistake. As a researcher who investigates the paradoxical forces involved in athletics, and as an educator who attempts to help coaches learn to be better coaches, I have been asks (too many time to count) what is the one idea that makes the biggest difference between great coaches and wayward coaches. My simple answer is this: For every positive, there is a negative. Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to learn to be good at learning from your mistakes. The ability to capitalize on experience is the hallmark of great coaches, and the nemesis of the wayward coach. One of my research heroes Dr. Robert Sutton of Stanford University once said, “Failure sucks but instructs”. The paradox of success holds true for everyone, including those who deal with very dangerous...