In our “crazed with winning society” all of us have a bit of a tendency to get too caught up with defining our success and personal excellence in terms of winning and the outcome. In pro sports, as a coach, you get to keep your job as long as you put up enough W’s. If you don’t win enough what you can be sure of is that sooner rather than later you’ll be joining the out-of-work on a quest for a new job! Similarly, a professional athlete will lose his/her starting position and job if he/she doesn’t win enough. This same standard of measurement holds true at many colleges and high schools. In this model, if you win as a coach, then you are considered to be “good,” and most likely “better” than your colleague with the losing record.
A simple example. ASCA (American Swim Coaches Association) awards 5 levels of coaching certification. The major requirement to get to become the highest or level 5 rated coach? You have to “produce” (or be lucky enough to have such an athlete on your team) a senior national swimmer. The assumption in this case is that only the best coaches “create” the very best swimmers.
This seems to be a rather simplistic, narrow and generally inaccurate way of measuring coaching excellence. Sure it takes a certain degree of skill as a coach to train athletes and teams to be great. However, sometimes with the luck of the draw and blessed with a group of tremendously skilled athletes, even a chimpanzee could coach them to a winning record. Unfortunately, far too many sports measure the success of their coaches by how “good” their teams and individual athletes are and by how much they win.
When I first started this article in March, I was working with the University of Connecticut Huskies men’s basketball team as they went through March Madness in hopes of qualifying for their first ever Final-Four berth under 13th year coach Jim Calhoun. There were many “experts” out there who were putting up the argument that coach Calhoun wasn’t that “good” because he hadn’t yet gotten his team to a Final-Four. These critics forget the fact that Jim Calhoun had built an incredibly successful and consistently excellent basketball dynasty from absolutely nothing. In addition, a fair number of Calhoun’s players have ended up in the NBA, not to mention the minor fact that his athletes respect the man and love playing for him.
Of course since UConn made it to the Final Four and shocked the world by beating Duke, this point is now moot. However, it’s a trap to get into the collective nuttiness of defining your success and failure as a coach by your won-lost record. If you happen to coach a winning team this does not automatically make you a good coach. Just as if you coach a team with a losing record doesn’t automatically make you a less effective coach. I know too many coaches with winning records who regularly use fear, and physical & emotional abuse as their primary teaching tools. They play head games with their athletes, are disrespectful to them and frequently leave them feeling badly about themselves. In my mind these kinds of coaches aren’t winners. A narrow focus on winning at any cost means that you are missing your primary job as a coach. It’s not just how well your team plays that is a judge of your success. It is far more complicated than that.
Good coaches build significant relationships with their athletes. They treat them with respect. They build, rather than tear down self-esteem…(make a player feel crummy about him/herself and that player will consistently under-perform for you.) Good coaches have winning and losing in perspective. (It’s a known fact that the more emphasis you place on the outcome of the game or match, the less chance your athletes have of reaching that outcome.) They understand that their primary job is to teach athletes how to be good people as well as skilled performers. If you build a trusting, caring relationship with your players they’ll go to the “max” for you. You’ll get to winning far faster by teaching your players “silly” concepts like commitment, honesty, caring, mutual respect, teamwork, sportsmanship, etc. And the primary way you teach these things? By who you are and the relationship that you build with each and every one of your athletes. Do you want to be an incredible motivator? Then build solid relationships with your athletes.
Let me leave you with this one question to ponder. How many “coach-of-the-year” awards are given to the coach with a mediocre record who is adored by his athletes because he is honest, respectful and teaches his players how to feel good about themselves, how to be better people, how to play well together as a team, how to effectively handle success and failure, the importance of having character, a positive attitude and good sportsmanship? I know, these seem like such “minor” lessons when compared to winning and losing…
I’m not naive and I don’t live in a vacuum. I understand the big business involved in big time college (and sometimes high school) sports. I know full well what kind of intense pressure that a D-I coach is under to produce a winning team. I know this pressure is clearly evident at almost every level of college and high school sports. However, your challenge as a coach is to not get yourself so caught up in this “winning is everything” mentality that you lose sight of what’s really important and what a truly successful coach is. And the funny thing about this is that the less your ego is caught up with winning, the more you’ll end up winning!
Dr. Alan Goldberg, 226 Strong Street, Amherst MA 01002, Phone (413) 549-1085, Fax (413) 549-4196
