The Coaches Role in Long-term Success

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My wife is a licensed child therapist who works with children from troubled backgrounds. Recently she was talking about a particular child that just was not responding to counseling, no matter the strategies or techniques used. Sage advice was offered to her from a highly respected therapist with whom she works.

“Our job is to give them the tools to cope with life and hope that they sink in.”

The importance of athletics extends far beyond the playing field. As coaches, we often fail to see our athletes as the people that they will be later in life. We train them today to produce for us tomorrow and during the years that they can help us win. We teach them to train hard, persevere, live a disciplined life and find a way to win against the odds. But rarely do we relate these lessons to how they can apply them to their lives outside of athletics as they unfold years from now.

Why Don’t We?
As a coach, you are judged by your success today not by the lifelong success of your former athletes. Therefore, your goals are centered around performance and achievement in the relative short-term (this season and maybe next) but rarely do we look at the long-term implications of the tools that we could be giving to them today. A failure to extrapolate the lessons learned in sports and apply them to life outside of and after sports, however, hinders your success in the present.

When you look at the lives of the most successful athletes in the world, you see that they live disciplined lives. Proper nutrition, studying opponents, strength training, good sleep habits, visualization, goal-setting and mental training are among the many activities that fill the days of the most elite athlete. These are all fundamental life skills that directly translate into a successful and fulfilling life after sports. When a coach embraces the fact that spending time and energy working with athletes on life skills will impact the team’s success today while improving the lifelong success of the athlete, then they will find the true gold that comes through coaching.

As does the therapist working with children, you too can give your athletes the tools to succeed today while knowing that these lessons will last them a lifetime.

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