They are far more important than any amount of “knowledge of scheme” will ever be.
“Not taking into account and prioritizing the psychological & emotional aspects of athlete development is not only lazy, it’s immature ‘coaching’.
You don’t get to ‘coach them hard’ if you haven’t showed them how much you care about them and that you’d be willing to go to war for them.”
-Ray Zingler
“Human beings are emotional creatures driven by emotional motivators like love, recognition, pride, values, & etc. To ignore the role emotion plays in performance is to disregard the power of the fire that burns within a person’s soul.
The real distinction between amateur leaders and pros is that amateurs motivate through logic and the great ones motivate through emotion.”
-Steve Siebold
As important as my background is in Exercise Science, if I could go back, I’d have studied psychology.
The reason is not because Exercise science is unimportant, obviously it is, but once you “know enough” you can be adequately dangerous to serve most populations of people well, from an exercise prescription standpoint.
But in my opinion, the real art of coaching is not found in exercise, football, or swimming knowledge, but knowing how to communicate and reach the ever-evolving human beings performing whatever activity it is that you are coaching.
Coaches everywhere every day have extraordinarily high sport IQ. They may or may not have played it at a high level (doesn’t matter), they’ve been around the game for many years. They’ve been to all the clinics and seminars, but they can’t coach their way out of a wet paper bag.
It’s because they suck at the most important aspect of coaching, which is the human/emotional side.
Not only do you only need to “know enough” about zone defense, at the youth levels and even the higher levels, because as we all know (or should know) the basics are always king.
Coaches think trying to complicate scheme will impress their colleagues (it won’t), it only confuses athletes.
Would time not be better spent focusing on understanding the basics so that you can reserve most of your bandwidth and theirs on what actually drives performance?
Instead of trying to Billy Badass your way through them, maybe you could spend time developing a relationship built on trust, expressing to them how much they are valued? Maybe learning a bit more about them and their emotional levers so that you can tactfully gear your coaching style to convey your messaging in a way that best resonates with them?
We often skip over all this and justify poor, lazy “coaching” by cheaply branding devolving coaches, “Tough Coaches”.
