Episode 6-Philosophy 101

This episode of the Gotcha Coach podcast discusses the importance of having a coaching philosophy. The host emphasizes the need for coaches to have a clear set of beliefs, attitudes, and ethics in order to be successful. The age group being coached should also be taken into consideration when developing a coaching style. The host shares personal experiences and offers guidelines for developing a coaching philosophy, including having a plan for practices, being flexible and open-minded, and establishing rules for middle and high school athletes. Overall, the episode highlights the importance of having a well-defined coaching philosophy for coaches working with youth sports. Hey, welcome back coaches to Gotcha Coach, the podcast about coaching for coaches and presented by a coach. I'm your host, Coach Rick, and you're listening to episode six, entitled Philosophy 101. Now the simple definition of philosophy is anything but simple. Webster's Dictionary gives one definition as the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group, and also defines it in one simple word, ethics. So you may ask yourself, why in the world is Coach Rick going into a serious subject matter like this? Simple. If you are serious about getting into coaching youth sports, it is, in my humble opinion, imperative that you have a philosophy about what your coaching style is going to be. What are your beliefs? What is your attitude? What kind of ethics do you possess? These are all important qualities that go into making a coach, and if you stay true to and commit to these qualities, then the chances of you becoming a successful coach are greatly enhanced. Remember what I said in episode five, know your audience. You really need to know the group that you're coaching, and before you can fully commit to any kind of coaching philosophy, coaching six- and seven-year-old athletes is very much different than coaching 15- and 16-year-olds, or is it? Think about it. If you have adopted a philosophy of win at all costs, would you change your coaching style depending on the age of the athlete, or would your philosophy be the same for girls as it is for boys? You've already heard in a previous episode about how my initial win-win-win philosophy that I had when I was a newbie coach changed or was at least toned down because of an embarrassing event that made me reconsider, and I must say that over the 50 years of doing this, there were tweaks to my methods or philosophy along the way, but the basic concept remained the same. So how do you go about figuring out your philosophy? Well, first let me remind you that none of what I'm going to share with you is anything except what I have done, and does not mean that I am willing or that I am telling you that you need to do the same exact things that I did. Think about these as guidelines and not the gospel. I know that I wish I had some of these guidelines like this when I first started, and I hope that you will get some positive ideas from what I am going to share. Before we get into developing your philosophy, I wanted to share with you something from my past. I had a huge problem when I first started coaching, and in fact, it followed me for way more than I hoped it would. I suffered from an inward fear that people, namely parents and other coaches, would look at me as playing favorites with my siblings and my own kids when I was their coach. So I took an opposite approach and was overly hard on them so that nobody could question it. This was so detrimental and hurtful to them that it strained our relationship, and it's not something that I am proud of and wish with all my heart I could take back. Here's the point. If you make a conscious decision and effort to treat everyone the same, nobody, nobody can question your motives. There's naturally going to be times when your family members are going to be treated differently. It's just how life happens, but keeping it as close to professional as you can will help to keep you on an even keel. So here's the first step to making or taking, establishing your philosophy. If you are developing a philosophy that you are going to teach and instruct, then have a plan. By this I mean always have a plan ready for what you are going to do when you go to a practice. Don't try to come up with something on the fly. The kids will see right through you and begin to question your commitment. So what do I mean by a plan? First of all, you need to be aware of a few things. Are you coaching a youth sport like AYSO soccer and have many days a week that you are going to be practicing? Or you are coaching at a middle and high school where you'll be with your athletes every day? It's a good question. Also, establish the length of your practices. Will you practice for an hour, 90 minutes, or what? Break up whatever sport you're coaching into segments and concentrate on the segment at practice. For example, if you're coaching AYSO soccer and you're practicing for, say, 60 minutes, don't try to jam too much into that hour. Remember, you should also know your age group. I mean, after all, the attention span of a 7-year-old isn't going to be as long as it is for a 16-year-old. Although there are some 16-year-olds that actually have the attention span of a 7-year-old. And that adage that less is better is actually a good practice to follow. So break up your practice into three times 15-minute sessions and concentrate on one skill every 15 minutes. And then tie the three skills together for that last 15 minutes of practice and view how well they understood what they had just learned. After seeing how they did in the last 15 minutes, you may need to reinforce those skills at the next practice. Once you start your soccer competitions, pay attention to things that occur inside the game and work on those in your next practice as things that need to improve. Now, if you're dealing with middle and high school-aged athletes, the process is much the same except you will have more time together every week. And every day you'll be together for probably 90 to 120 minutes. So keep the same format as far as breaking your sessions into segments. Now one of my other shortcomings as a coach was while I was coaching high school track and field. I used to think that I needed to devise practice sessions that were so hard that the kids were throwing up. I used to brag about making three kids puke today and said, that was a good day. Now how barbaric was that? But as time went on and I attended coaching clinics two to three times a year, I found that I was doing more harm to the athlete than I was doing good. Lesson here, never be afraid to stop learning. There's always something that's new out there and you can incorporate into your routine. Next, be flexible and have an open mind. Don't be so tight that you can't change. You're not going to be perfect and you will make mistakes. So don't be afraid to own up to those mistakes and adjust going forward. I mean, think about it. You can go into a season with a plan for each day's practice. But if you don't have a way to be flexible with that plan, it can blow up in your face. Here's how. You're coaching a track and field team and you're responsible for training the sprinters on the team. You're in the early part of your season and your workout for the day calls for running repeat 300 meters and you have established that each 300 is to be run in 35 seconds for the boys and 40 seconds for the girls. And the runners would do a slow jog to the start line between each run. Now this is a workout that I use to have my sprinters do. But what could possibly go wrong? Well, let's say you live in an area where strong gusty winds are prevalent in the afternoon or you don't have the luxury of an all-weather track and it started raining three hours prior to practice and now your track is now mud. What do you do? Well, both situations would make it virtually impossible for those times to be hit by your runners. So be flexible, change the parameters, adjust to the conditions and still get some benefit from what you wanted to achieve. One day is not going to make or break your season's objective. Now as far as having an open mind, this is what I mean. When you get a new group of athletes, ones that you've never had before and you don't know their background, don't just shoo them away and act like you're not interested in them or they're bothering you. This happened to me about 20 years ago when a scrawny little freshman came up to me and said, coach, I want to try out for track, but I'm also trying out for the baseball team. Well, I was busy and to me, I didn't know this kid and I didn't appreciate someone that was trying out for two sports at the same time. So I basically dismissed him and what he said in kind of a, get away from me, kid, you're bothering me. As luck would have it, he didn't make the baseball team, came out for track because this was in South Lake Tahoe. We were still running in the gym because of the snow. And so we went to the first meet of the season and this kid was entered in the frosh soft 100 meters and to make matters worse, didn't have any track shoes and was competing in, get this, basketball shoes. What? Here's the kicker and the lesson. He not only won his race, but ran a time that would have won the varsity race as well in basketball shoes. As we got in track spikes, all he did was win the league championship as a ninth, 10th and 11th grader and missed out on it being a clean sweep all four years due to misjudging the finish line in 12th grade. So don't just pay attention to those kids that you may already know, keep an open mind and remember anybody can wind up establishing you, excuse me, anybody can wind up surprising you. Now, establish rules. What? Athletic teams need rules? Yeah. We're concentrating now more on coaching at a middle or high school level and not so much as the Little League, AYSO or other youth related sports. So don't think that this part pertains to you if you are only involved with these age groups, although some abbreviated rules can still have their place at that level. I have had the unique opportunity to be hired at a high school level to take over track teams that were reeling from previous coaching staffs for no other reason than they didn't or weren't enforcing any rules. Example, when I was hired as the head coach at South Tahoe High School, I was taking over a team that was in turmoil. South Tahoe High School, even though it was located in California, competed in the NIAA, the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, and the state championships alternated years between northern and southern Nevada, which meant that every other year it was held in Vegas, baby! Sorry, that was the battle cry of the members of the South Tahoe High School team that I had just been hired to coach. You see, the team and the coach that went to Las Vegas during that ill-fated season had no rules, no boundaries, and several of the kids left their motel rooms and were roaming the Vegas strip without any adult supervision while the coaches were out enjoying themselves on the strip as well. Enter Coach Rick. Year one was, to say the least, difficult. I put some basic rules into play, the first being that these were student-athletes and that the student part came first. My first confrontation with administration came when I informed the school's fastest female that she was not allowed at practice until her grades improved. She had a less-than-desirable 1.6 GPA, and the school and league rules dictated that she couldn't compete unless she was at least a 2.0. Now this girl was fast and was destined to erase my own sister's school records, but I felt that it was more important for this girl to graduate from high school instead of experiencing temporary notoriety. I felt that her practice time would be better spent studying instead of training. Guess what? I lost. This was not the last time I would come up against school administration, but I never changed my philosophy that grades came first. About halfway through that season, I felt there was a disconnect between me and the team. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it really bothered me. So I pulled aside one of my team captains and asked him about it. He told me, don't worry, coach, you're just different from what we've had, and it's just going to take some time getting used to. Well, that made perfect sense, and I just had to hear it. Things got better from there, and I grew the team from 25 athletes that first year to over 100 by the time I moved on, and we never had another problem when we went to Vegas. Integrity, communication, and growing. Now these are three areas that are extremely important in formulating how you're going to coach. No matter what level you choose to get involved in. So it has been said that integrity is doing what you know is right, even when nobody is looking. If you have developed a plan and established rules, it does no good if you don't adhere to them, even if you think nobody's watching. It's like, and this is one of my pet peeves, when a driver pulls up to a stop sign, and because there's nobody else around, they run the stop sign. Oh, that just kicked me off so much. Anyway, I had a senior male triple jumper that was ranked number one in Nevada going into the state meet. However, he didn't perform as he should have, and when he was presented with his third place medal at the meet, he threw it down on the ground in front of the crowd of about 2,500 people. Needless to say, I was not very happy, and I let him know it. Not in front of anybody, but he had already embarrassed himself, me, and his school, and we didn't need any more negative publicity. That Monday, I was at the school at 8 a.m. to meet with the athletic director about what happened. Now, this athlete was in line for a very prestigious school award due to his accomplishments, but we decided that his actions at the state meet would make him ineligible for that award. The communication piece to establishing a philosophy is equally important as everything else we've discussed. You have to remember that you're dealing with people just like you. They have lives and schedules, and by giving them sufficient enough notice about what's going on, they will have more respect for you. It's important to have respect for the families of the athletes and their schedules. In my humble opinion, you cannot over-communicate. This communication thing can be difficult if you haven't identified what the best method is for you, the parents, and the team. Remember, some of these high schoolers, and we're only dealing with high school right now, as non-high school athletes are, in my opinion, easier to get that information to the parents, and there's usually less of it, too. I have, over the years, progressed from handouts that never seemed to get home to using communication apps that the school already had in place for parents and students. I also formed a parent email group and just blasted parents with as much information that I felt was necessary. In order to get this email group, I would have two pre-season interest meetings for athletes and their parents who wish to join the high school track and field team. These meetings would usually occur in late October or early November, and then again in January after the Christmas break and before the first day of practice in February. All that I'm saying here is to follow the golden rule. Treat others the way that you want others to treat you. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you want to get information about the season or rules or a competition schedule or transportation if you were the parent of a member of your team? So we've already discussed about having a plan, being flexible, and communicating, but what happens when after you put all these together and your philosophy has been in place for many, many years, and then it all falls apart in the blink of an eye? Now there's a Christmas movie on Apple TV that came out last year. I think it was. It's called Spirited with Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell, and it's a play on the Dickens novella, A Christmas Carol. Now my wife and I are Christmas movie junkies and could watch them all year, but that's not my point. Anyway, there's a line in the movie that hit me very hard, and I had to write it down and incorporate it into this episode. The line is, quote, your choices make you who you are, end of quote. If you think about it, everything that I've spoken about in this episode is actually a choice, a choice that all coaches need to make. Make the right choice and you succeed. Make the wrong choice and all kinds of bad things can happen. Now I'm no longer an active coach, and my career ended earlier this past spring, and it was not the way that I envisioned retiring. You see, I made some very ill-advised choices, choices that were costly and made me doubt myself and my abilities to still be able to relate to the high school-aged athletes and their parents that I had enjoyed for so many years prior and made me make the toughest decision of my life and step away from the career that I loved doing so for 50 plus years. So hopefully if you listened to the different ways that you should or could go about establishing your philosophy as to what kind of coach you want to be, and you've heard how your host had his long career come to an abrupt halt and can and will still come back to listen to future episodes. Until then, take care, be safe, laugh a lot, and tell someone you love them. And please don't forget to share this podcast on just about anywhere you get your podcasts from. And if you have any questions or comments, you can reach me at coachrickb53 at gmail.com. I'll talk to you soon.