The Coach: One Person, Many Persons
At the school where I teach, the new Head of School gave a short speech to the faculty on the first day of faculty meetings. In it, he talked about the difference between a career and a vocation. A career, he said, is something you go out and find, whereas a vocation is something that finds you. You make a choice regarding a career, but with a vocation, there is no choice. You hear the call, and you have no choice but to follow it.
Teaching, he said, is more than a career. It’s a vocation. And he’s right. People don’t get into teaching for the money. They get into it because they want to make a difference in young people’s lives.
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The same can be said for coaching. Perhaps even more so. While it’s true that there are plenty more famous and/or rich coaches than there are famous and/or rich teachers, the majority of coaches are well-known only amongst the athletes they coach and the community they serve. Most coaching positions, even at the collegiate level, don’t pay enough to be a primary source of income. At the high school level, here in North Carolina, we get a stipend of $1,000 – $2,000 for the spring season. We coach in the fall and winter for free. I’ve done my share of private coaching, and that usually provides gas money and maybe grocery money. But for the most part, coaching is a labor of love, quite literally. Through coaching, I’ve probably lost more money than I’ve made.
But there is no bitterness, no regret. This is what coaches do. We give. Because we love what we do, and we know that no amount of money can be more fulfilling than making a difference.
I’ve only recently come to embrace the importance of my role in the lives of the kids I coach. Although I’ve been coaching for twenty-plus years now, it wasn’t until one of my former athletes, Cameron Akers, committed suicide, that I realized how special a person I was, how much I meant to him, and how much I must therefore mean to all the athletes I coach and have coached. I wrote about Cameron’s death and our relationship in the very first issue of The Hurdle Magazine in September of 2013. So I won’t go into all of those details. Suffice it to say here that he made it a point to get on a plane and visit me the week before he passed. And in one of our conversations that weekend he said to me that I was the reason he loved track, loved the hurdles, and that me not being there was the reason he didn’t enjoy track in college.
While his death shattered me, it also woke me up to my own greatness. I learned that calling myself “great” is not arrogant, and that it doesn’t imply a comparison to other coaches. It’s just a way of acknowledging that I cannot take for granted the impact my presence has on the lives of all the Camerons I coach, have coached, and will coach.
In a sport like track and field, where there is so much pressure on the individual athlete to perform at a high level, the athlete’s relationship with his or her coach is arguably the most important relationship in that athlete’s life. The coach plays so many roles, most of which are directly related to the sport, but many of which are not.
The coach is the person through whom the athlete experiences the sport. Whether or not the athlete even likes the sport depends upon his or her relationship with the coach.
The coach is also the (wo)man with the plan. One of my favorite things I like to remind my athletes of is the fact that “there are no miracles in track and field.” In other words, whatever you train to do, that’s what you’re capable of doing. There is not going to be a “transcendent” moment, no “out of body” experience. Your body will do what you train it to do. And the coach is the person who decides on the training plan. The athlete must trust the coach to guide him or her to success.
When it comes to dealing with the pressure of big meets, facing imposing rivals, and making last-minute preparations the day of a meet, the coach becomes a psychologist – the person who listens, who offers simple but practical guidance, who stays calm regardless of external circumstances and passes that calm confidence onto the athlete.
Often, the trust that develops extends beyond the track. Athletes will often come to their coach to talk about family matters, personal matters, to ask for advice regarding big life decisions, etc. For kids who have only one parent or fractured relationships with one or more of their parents, the coach can become the most important person in their life. Even with a stable household, the coach often becomes the most trusted figure in an athlete’s life for the simple reason that the coach is the one who constantly helps them to bring out the best in themselves, who constantly pushes them to discover things within themselves they didn’t know were there.
About six years ago, when I was teaching and coaching at my previous school, the athletic director told me that, due to the wear on the track, he would no longer allow me to coach kids from other schools on our track. I decided that fall that I would therefore only coach on a volunteer basis so that I could coach some of my kids from other schools by driving to their schools when time allowed. When I informed one of my athletes (a senior) of this news after English class one day, a tear trickled from her eye, and about two minutes later she was straight-up bawling. That one conversation, in which barely any words were said, changed my mind.
When it comes to making a name for myself, to being respected as someone who is knowledgeable and credible, you need to have stars on your resume. The fact that I can say I coached Wayne Davis II, Johnny Dutch, Keni Harrison, and others means I have a reputation as an expert hurdles coach. But what makes being a coach fulfilling is the fact that I still keep in touch with these people. Some of the most fulfilling relationships I’ve had in the sport have been with athletes no one has ever heard of. Athletes who never won state championships, who never set any records.
This summer, Garrison Rountree, currently about to enter his junior year at North Carolina State University, drove three hours from Raleigh to my home outside of Charlotte just to talk and catch up. Two times.
Allie Johnson, a 5-2 who trained under me with Keni for two years before going on to compete four years at Wake Forest University, could never grab the spotlight because of Keni. I had been coaching Allie for two years before Keni even showed up, and Allie was distraught to find that someone brand new at the event could be that good. But she didn’t quit. She fought. And the two of them became the best of friends. I used to always sing to Allie, who often expressed doubt in her own abilities due to being so short and due to being white in an event where most of her competitors were tall and black, my rewording of the Michael Jackson lyric, “When it comes to being my hurdler, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.” She would laugh and I would laugh, and her confidence would be restored.
This summer a group of three high school hurdlers – two girls and one boy – have traveled down with their parents to NC from Ohio three times to train with me. Each time, I gave them tough workouts, flooded them with drills, and shoved a whole lot of instructions into their brains. They progressed remarkably with each weekend visit. I didn’t really think that much of it, honestly, I was just doing what I do, and I was pleased that they were pleased.
But after the last session, as we were walking back to our cars, one of the parents came up to me with a gift bag. She said it was “from the kids,” because they really appreciated all I’d done for them. I didn’t open the bag until I got home. In it was a water bottle, some chocolate, and a card. The card read, “Thanks Coach. You have a real gift for leading, teaching, and inspiring others to do their best.”
I was so touched that I had to hold back a sniff-sniff. I’d only met with these kids three times. Yet they’d been able to point to me what I do best – inspire others to do their best.
This morning I received a Facebook message from Sarah Giles, one of my former athletes who recently graduated college and is now working as a field biologist in her original home state of Louisiana. I hadn’t heard from year in years. In the message, Sarah said that she had recently gone out to the track and done some hurdle drills just for fun, so of course, she thought of me. She also said she had started coaching a few kids, passing on to them the things I had taught to her. “Crazy,” she wrote, “how the love for [hurdles] never really goes away, isn’t it?”
Yes it is. But that’s what happens when the relationship between the coach and the athlete is a genuine one. And for me, that’s my litmus test: it’s not me I want them to love, but the hurdles. Because if they love the hurdles, yes, they will become coaches. Besides Sarah, there’s my man Hector Cotto, the owner/operator of the sprinthurdles.com website. And I can think of three other former athletes off the top of my head who are coaching in some capacity.
To me, that’s what why coaching is fulfilling. That’s what keeps me coming back. Building the relationships. Spreading the love.
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