Coaching and Playing Lessons from Michael Lewis' New Book
I just read the new offering by Micheal Lewis (who also wrote Moneyball, and Liar's Poker) called simply Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life. I am glad that I did not get it for a plane trip, because at 93 small pages including several that are nothing but odd choices of photos, I read it in a shorter amount of time than it takes to taxi at the Indianapolis Airport. While short, the book is thick with both nostalgia (much of Lewis' memories conicide with the time line of my own high school days) and insight into how coaches have an impact on players. You can read other reviews of the book at Barnes & Noble or Amazon. I can't recommend it as a MUST read, but since the investment in both money and time is minimal, I do rated it as very worthwhile.
My take aways (the Lessons from the Lessons so to speak) are (1) it provides a stark case study in when parents and coaches (or teachers for that matter) do not work together to bring out the best in a child. While I have never been accused of being a screamer, I do know who those parents are that run to the Principal, Head Master, or A.D. everytime their child is upset. When I publish my memoirs (don't hold your breath), one of the center piece stories will be of the mother of the one and only kid I ever kicked off a team that I coached, who told me that it was because I didn't understand the psychology of teenage boys and I would benefit with a chat with her husband who was the Psychologist for a School District. Passing on the opportunity to remind her that I had a graduate degree sport psychology, I did ask her how many teenage boys she had. "Two," was her reply. The reason this story came back to me while reading Coach is that while parents may know their children well, they forget that experienced coaches have seen it all before. They forget that the answer to the "how many teenage boys do you have?" for a high school or college coach is in the dozens, EVERY year. There is also a sentence in the book about there being "an invisible line from the parents' desire to minimize their children's discomfort to the choices the children make in their lives." The next line is that these same kids, whose parent were complaining about Coach Fitz, were caught drinking and the number of mandatory suspensions resulted in the team having to forfeit games because they couldn't field nine players.
The real life protagonist of Coach, Billy Fitzgerald, "Coach Fitz" is protrayed as INTENSE. Actually, I didn't think his persona was really all that unusual for a coach who began his career in the mid-1970s. Coaches who yelled and had a penchant for menatally and physically testing their athletes (the book tells the story of Lewis and teammates being made to slide head first on concrete hard dirt, in the dark, after a loss) were actually pretty common back then. It sports this was an era of training excess. Remember that this was just far enough removed from "The Junction Boys" era for coaches to use that leap of abstraction that says "This is what Bear Bryant does and Bobby Knight does and they win championships, so if I want to win championships, then I should do it too." What did strike me, especially just coming off of writing about Tony Dungy (see Jan. 9th post), is how many times what Lewis was really saying about Coach Fitz is that he was deathly afraid, not of Fitz physically, although he was (is) very imposing, but that he was afraid of letting Fitz down. Pretty much the same thing that current and former players for Dungy had said, even though Coach Dungy isn't known to yell, break things, or respond to loses with excess amounts of running. So to finish point one, great coaches get young athletes to stretch themselves, to get over the fear of being uncomfortable, by getting their athletes to care about what the coach thinks. In the 1970s and 1980s many coaches did it with intimidation. We survived and many still thrived. Now, however, most parents do not want to see their children uncomfortable and thus make it much tougher for the coaches who do use intimidation to get the athletes to care about what the coach thinks. I will probably need to write more on that later.
(2) So what's a coach to do? The bad news is that most players do not respond to "negative" coaching they way they used to. There are a lot of reasons for this, but for now let's just say times have changed. The good news is it is possible to get players to care what you think, to be loathe to let you down, by being a positive coach. I don't want to stray too far for the book, but I did want to make the point that being positive with the athletes gives you a chance to establish the relationship with the parents that does allow you to work together so that all of your athletes (or at least a majority of them) have the chance to experience what Lewis did on that hot, humid night in New Orleans, when one adult convinced him that he was "about to show the world, and myself, what I could do." Read more!
posted by R. A. King @ 6:52 PM
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