Coaches

As many might know, I have coached a fair bit in my past. I started right out of high school with my old football team at Clavet Composite School where I had graduated 3 months before. After my mission to France, I picked up coaching football back in Clavet and continued there for several seasons. I spent one season with a Jr. Football team at a high school in Saskatoon and then took a couple years off from football(mostly due to the schools where I was at not having football teams). In 2001 I finally got back into coaching football in Kelliher, Saskatchewan with the Kelliher/Ituna co-op while I was teaching in Ituna.
Coaching football has long been my thing. But being a teacher seems to provide more opportunities to coach other things, especially once one has shown an interest. I also coached girls volleyball for several years both as an intern and as the head coach in Ituna for 3 seasons. I also coached track and field and several other sports like curling, badminton, and even a little basketball.
My teams have had a wide range of experiences. I have had teams that never won a game all season. I have also had several teams that achieved and maintained a very high level of success. In total I have been to 1 volleyball provincial championship tournament and been in 5 provincial final football games. My last year of coaching football in Kelliher, we won the provincial 1A championship. That team (after losing just 4 seniors) went on to repeat as provincial champions the following season.
I have also coached in several allstar games, both at a provincial level as well as in the international Can Am Bowl which pits allstar seniors from various states across the US against seniors from the province of Saskatchewan. This is a 6 man football event which is entering it's 14th installment this coming July. I coached in Can Am Bowl 9 as well as organized and head coached Can Am Bowl X. I'll also be returning to Canada as a guest coach for Can Am Bowl XIV.
Now that this is all out there, I think that I have established myself as, if nothing else, someone who has been around the coaching world for awhile. I love teams and being involved with them. It is one of the things that I miss most about my life prior to moving to the States and is something that I hope to regain in my life.
I feel like I had great teams. I always stressed that the goals of the team were important but that the goals could not be achieved without the efforts of the entire team. Most of my teams were at a competetive level. I always tried to communicate with my teams about everything. It was, in my opinion, clear who would play in most situations. I made my expectations very clear and also made it sure as to who were the starters and who were their backups. Those backups knew their role and knew that they could receive an opportunity to be called upon at any time. They knew that they needed to be involved, invested and focused in all aspects of the game as much as the starters.
I was not someone who screamed and belittled his players to try and goad them into performing better. I would challenge them but not by intimidation. I tried to encourage and get fired up on their behalf, like yelling and whooping and hollering about things that they had done like a great tackle, catch or kill.
I loved my teams and my players and they knew that I was as interested and driven (or maybe even more so) than they were. They knew that I put in the time, lost sleep, and shed tears over our teams' success and failures as much as them.
I also preached that they had to be better. Not that they were bad, but that because they were special, others would be looking to them as examples. They needed to be great athletes but also great students and members of the communities. Some of my greatest disappointments as a coach came when members of our teams let us all down by not living up to those standards. I tried to be an example as well through my actions as well.
I recognized that sport was more than just about sport. That they would learn many lessons about life that would serve them in their futures. As the NCAA TV ad talks about all of the athletes going pro in something other than athletics at some point, my athletes would move on after high school and the lessons they learned would need to serve them well.
All of this has been rolling around in my mind the past few weeks. Why? For several reasons really. One is that I really miss coaching. I miss the interaction and being with the team. Sure I have my Tuesday night softball team which serves to fill some of the void and need for a team, but it isn't enough and so I am working on getting back to coaching eventually.
The main reason for all of this is the lack of a good example in a coach that Alex has been experiencing. His main soccer coach is loud and yells alot and is not very positive. His assistant coach is the one that mostly concerns me, especially because he has been the head coach for over half the games this season. He is hypocritical, sarcastic, and demeaning to the kids. That is not true, I guess. He only demeans the kids he doesn't like. There are about 4 or 5 kids that play all the time and basically run the team. I have over heard this gentleman say such things as "I hate when people bug me about where they get to play" or "If a person talks to me or whines to me about anything, they won't play". This is followed up by multiple examples of the favored kids doing this but never once leaving the field or losing any playing time. Yet he will glare or look down on the kids that are on the sidelines waiting or hoping to get in.
I have witnessed on multiple occasions him put a player into the game and then pull them out a moment later. They may make a mistake on the field and then they get pulled. They don't get taught or have things explained, they just get pulled. But you will see the favored kids make mistake after mistake after mistake and they never get pulled. The side line looks like this. You have the 4 or 5 kids that are out off doing all number of things, from sitting in lawn chairs, to playing tag, to laying on the ground. They don't have any investment in the game or the team because they are not cared about or shown that they are important to the team even when they aren't in. They don't stand and cheer on their teammates on the field and encourage them. When they come out, they more often then not, are ignored by the coaches. They aren't pulled aside and given council or suggestions on how to improve.
It breaks my heart. I have tried to be positive to Alex about things. He hates going to soccer and we made him keep going because he had signed on for two seasons. We encouraged him to work hard, use any opportunity that he gets to play, to learn and to develop. We discouraged him being negative about his team or his coaches. We encouraged him to not look at the score (as they continued to get pummelled by double digit numbers) but at what he could learn about the game and how he was improving. I instructed him to glue himself to the hip of the coach. Don't say a word (as it was his pet peeve when people pestered him about playing) but be right there so that he knew you were ready to go in.
I admit that I was not so calm and cool. I wanted to go and pummel the guy and pass on some of my coaching councils and philosophies to him. I never did as I didn't feel it would help. But it really irks me that someone who announced to several parents yesterday at their game (before they got pummelled 20+ to zero) that he was planning on being the head coach next season, couldn't even realize that half of the team don't even want to play soccer any more. Not just for him, but at all.
I see how my kids and others hang on the coach's every word and look to them for encouragement and validation. A coach is someone that is given a great opportunity to do something for these kids.
Alex's coach failed these kids as a coach. Playing time to me is a secondary issue. The main issue for me is that these kids didn't learn anything about being part of a team. They were not being taught to strive to improve themselves and their skills. They were taught that they had zero control over their situation and that they had no value. Not just to the team but at all.
Wow, that was long, but I feel a bit better now.