Principles of Coaching #12 - Coaching is about the player performing independently of our influence in the moment (Bot9 #334)
If you want a way to gauge the potential of a young athlete, watch how often he or she looks to the coach or stands while in the middle of playing a game. As I would observe my younger players when they came into my program, I’d pay close attention to how often they looked to me or their parents in the stands. If they were locked into the moment, I knew we had something we could work with immediately. If they were constantly peeking into the stands or needing an overwhelming amount of affirmation from me or the coaching staff, I knew we had a longer road to walk together. The kid who looks to the dugout or stands immediately after every play is one not yet prepared to stand up and succeed on their own.
This coaching and leadership rule doesn’t come from a bad place most of the time. There are coaches who speak constantly out of a desire to show how smart they are, but I think they’re the exception. They’re not the rule. Most of the time, coaches who fill the space with too much instruction lack the understanding of the most important cues to share. They haven’t gone on the journey to discover the few pieces of wisdom necessary to share for the most significant growth in their players. They’re also likely trying to win that game on that day and doing all they can to push their players to victory. They crazy thing is that this principle allows one’s team to succeed more often. Learning how to surrender control for the sake of learning makes your team or program incredibly powerful.
The first time I experienced success with this principle was as an offensive coordinator for a high school football program back in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I was a couple of years in and I found a limitation in any coordinator’s play-calling ability - the ability of a defense to adjust and move before the snap. This meant that anything I sent in could be stymied by the defense and we were stuck running a play with little chance of success. So, in collaboration with the players, we developed a set of checks where the quarterback had the ability to choose the direction of a run or change a play altogether. This sounds so obvious today, but this was newer in that timeframe of football. It was one of the most exciting things to experience as a coach as I would send in a check concept and the leader on the field would make the decision. I was encouraging leadership and decision-making as much as I was coaching football.
With that experience behind me, I wanted to figure out how to bring that to the baseball field. There are actually plenty of opportunities in baseball as well. Whether it was defensive positioning, pickoffs or pitch calling, we poked around and tried to find ways to develop systems where the players could make decisions in the moment. We didn’t want to develop robots, but leaders and independent decision-makers. Our guys probably experienced the most success in the base running system we developed by trying to see the signs from the catcher and the runner would communicate what they saw with a simple set of hand/arm signals. It wasn’t to tell the hitter what pitch was coming, but rather tell us whether or not he was running on the play. It was fun and the guys set program records for steals for the years we implemented the system.
Timothy Gallwey, one of the pioneers of the mental game of sport and author of The Inner Game of Tennis, gives us a simple equation to measure performance. It is Performance = Potential - Interference. What this equation has led me to consider is the amount of interference our coaching might present. I see a game like a test in a classroom. Can you imagine filling a classroom space with a ton of coaching cues and noise as a set of students tries to complete a test? It’s exactly what we do in a game, and the crazy thing is that it’s expected behavior from a coach! We actually learn so much more about what our players know by observing and coaching in moments after a game or even the next day. We’ll learn even more if those sessions include asking questions of the athletes and listen to their responses.
Isn’t the same true of our faith as well? How do we know the faith of the next generation is their own if we just program the answers? Of course we want to lay a foundation for truth, but we also need to give space for questions and nuance. This is present in the so-called “Wisdom Books” of the scriptures - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. Proverbs provide a framework for probability of a life well lived. Ecclesiastes explains all of the things one might try to pursue in the midst of life. Job presents the story of a man who did everything right but experienced turmoil. The challenge I see is that we only take a Proverbs approach with our young people. Here’s the right answer, most of the time it will work. But what about the other times? The human mind wants to know those things. They’re answered in the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Not easily, but in the wrestling and creative tension represented by most of life. To me, the best leaders and coaches provide their people with ideas and rabbit holes to follow so they discover truth for themselves.