The Coach’s Role: To Teach or to Win?
The title of this article implies that you have to choose one over the other. Ideally, you don’t. Ideally, the coach can teach much to his athletes, and they can win often. One could argue that unless the coach teaches well, the athletes won’t win very often at all.
But I have often found myself in situations where I had to choose between short-term success vs. long-term fulfillment. Back in the day, there was pressure to perform well in the big meets at the end of the year that athletes trained to peak for. Nowadays, though, it seems that every meet is the biggest meet of the season, and that the push for success does, in fact, get in the way of the ability to teach, to provide instruction, to plant seeds and watch them grow.
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I guess that’s why I’m kind of glad, in a backwards sort of way, that I’m at a school now that doesn’t emphasize track and field much at all. We don’t even have a track. In the spring, our team practices at a nearby middle school track that is pretty much a slab of concrete with a paper thin layer of rubber over it. We had about ten kids come out for the track team last year. The athletic director couldn’t justify adding me to the payroll, so I only helped out occasionally on a volunteer basis.
We had one hurdler on the team last spring. An 8th grade girl. I helped her to qualify for the independent schools state meet, but she turned her ankle playing basketball the week of the meet, so she couldn’t compete.
This year, now that I am more grounded in my surroundings, I have sought to put together a hurdling crew. Right now I have six kids. Four girls, two boys. Two freshman, an 8th grader, and three seniors. We had practice at the middle school this past Saturday. A Pop Warner style rugby tournament was taking place on the field while we practiced. Fans were walking across the track, and rugby balls were being kicked and tossed our way. All the kids I was working with, except the one girl I had coached last spring, were new to hurdling. For most of them, this was their first or second practice ever going over hurdles.
Every kid showed up on time. Every kid listened to my instructions and tried their best to follow them. I had four training hurdles that I had brought with me out of the trunk of my car. Three were in good shape, the fourth one was taped up. I couldn’t use it for the girls because the tape covered the holes for the girls’ heights.
I was teaching them how to dorsi-flex the ankle and how to keep it dorsi-flex throughout the entire cycle of a stride. I was teaching them to land on the ball of the foot, not the toe, not the heel. I was teaching them how to do A-marches properly, then A-skips. Those are a work in progress.
I set up one hurdle and instructed them to start from behind the starting line and run full speed. After a few successful attempts, I added a second hurdle. I kept my instructions simple. Keep the arms close to the body. Don’t allow the elbows to lock. Drive at the hurdle with your knee, not your foot. Don’t stomp on the last step; stay on the balls of your feet. When in doubt, be fast. Don’t forget to be fast. Don’t spend time critiquing each hurdle clearance. Keep sprinting to the next one.
It was really, really fun. Two hours went by without me hardly noticing.
When I got home later that afternoon, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw a post about an indoor meet that I would’ve been attending had I still been at my old school. Only when I saw that post did I realize that, yes, indoor season had already begun. As a coach, I should’ve been at the meet, getting someone ready to make an opening meet statement on the way to an indoor meet state championship.
I’ve been there before, and though I miss it, I don’t.
Let me tell you what I don’t miss. I don’t miss living vicariously through my athletes. To me, that’s one of the fundamental flaws in a coach’s life, and it is one that I have still yet to come to grips with. For a coach, my success is based on the success of my athletes. When they succeed, I have succeeded. When they fall short, I have fallen short. When I list my accomplishments, I’m not listing my own accomplishments, but those of the athletes I have coached. The evidence that I am good at my craft lies not in my own achievements, but in those of my athletes.
Such a scenario makes for ego issues. Coaches fight over athletes. Club coaches, school coaches, private coaches. Head coaches, assistant coaches. College coaches, professional coaches. Everyone wants a star to add to their resume.
That’s what I don’t miss.
And working with my crew of six nobodies from nowhere reminded me of how much I enjoy the simple life, of how much I enjoy teaching. With all the athletes I’ve coached over the years, that’s always been the most thrilling part for me – watching the athletes grow, watching them develop a passion for the hurdles, watching them learn how to think the event, watching them grow the confidence to explore on their own.
Thing about it is, I’m as competitive as anyone. I hate to lose. I do have an arrogance about me. I do believe that my hurdlers can out-hurdle your hurdlers on any day of the week simply because we know how to hurdle better than you, even if y’all are bigger faster stronger. I take pride in my athletes’ ability to come up big in big races.
But at the end of the day, it’s the teaching that I love. I do believe that my first obligation as a coach is to teach, not to win. To me, winning is a consequence that will happen often enough if the instruction I am providing is valid. I remember reading once where Michael Jordan said that he loved practice much more than games, which sounds like an odd thing to say, especially coming from such a competitive warrior and conqueror like MJ. But the reason he liked practice better was because practice was purer. No referees, nobody keeping score. Just the game in its purest form.
For me, that’s what the practice track is like, especially on a Saturday afternoon in mid-December when the first meet is still months away, and the kids I’m working with know next to nothing about my past as a coach of national champions. But even when I was coaching national champions, the joy was in the teaching and the learning, in the mutual experimenting.
I feel confident that this new crew of mine will have success and that each one of them will grow as individuals through their participation in the hurdles. And one of the male seniors seems to have the potential to be a monster if I can get him right quickly enough. But no matter how things turn out in that regard, I will continue to teach, because the lessons learned on the track last a lifetime, whether one’s personal best is 13.0 or 20.0.
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