Every coach takes pride in coaching and preparing his team. Most coaches spend inordinate amounts of time preparing their players for a game or a season. However, how many coaches really take the time to coach or prepare their fellow coaches?
Some famous coaches have reputations for being extremely difficult to work with. On the other hand, some coaches have reputations for being excellent teachers to both their players and fellow coaches. These coaches make other coaches want to readily work with them.
The main challenges when teaching young coaches
It is much easier to teach younger coaches than it is to teach older coaches. Most young coaches are eager and willing to learn. Most young coaches are also naive enough to believe that the harder that they work, they more success that the team will have in the win/loss column.
Quite often, you will have coaches who work harder than your team does. That's nice to have, but the players are the ones who actually decide who wins or loses — not the coaches.
As an older coach, you remember what it was like to have to "do everything" by yourself. Pass along or share work duties with your younger coaches. They may not yet be able to do it as well as you can, but any less work that you can pass along to another coach makes your job easier.
Don't just assume that the young coach knows ...
- your expectations
- all the rules of the sport as well as you do
- how you want things coached
- how to maintain his composure in a tight game
- that, just like in any good marriage, there are times to shut up and listen.
As an older coach, it is your duty to not assume or take anything for granted. Take the time to teach your younger coaches. Teach and train your coaches just as you would your team. Prepare them to prepare your team.
Just like coaching or teaching students, you have to learn how to best communicate with them. You have to learn how they best learn and respond to you. Remember that today's young players are much different from yesterday's young players. Likewise, today's young coaches are different from yesterday's young coaches. If you take pride in your team being prepared for a game or season, make sure that all of your coaches are also prepared, too.
Don't speak down to them or berate them. Always remember they want to coach — that's why they, and you, got into this crazy profession in the first place. Patiently explain things to them as one professional colleague to another. Yes, he may be a "wet-behind-the-ears" tenderfoot, but he is a fellow coach who, like you, is doing this because he love it, too.
Always show respect to the young coach at practice and at games. As an older coach, always call him by his chosen title, "Coach Such and Such," while talking with him or about him in front of the team and the community. In private you can call him by his first name, but in public, use the title "Coach."
Many older coaches don't remember just how important that title really is. It is a badge of honor, especially for a younger coach. Just like rank in the military, the rank of
"Coach" is one that deserves respect. As an older coach, it is your responsibility to show and teach this to younger coaches. Be classy and lead by example.
The main challenges for teaching old coaches
Teaching or training older coaches is different from teaching young coaches.
"You can't teach on old dog new tricks; A leopard can't change his spots." Yeah, yeah, yeah — we get it. Old people don’t like to change their ways — especially old coaches who hang on words like “tradition” and “old-fashioned.”
Maybe to make it easier for older coaches to grasp, we should just state that almost every offense and every defense ever run over the last 60 years is some type of variation of an older philosophy — the Wing-T, the Single Wing, Notre Dame Box, Wishbone, Power I, Run-and-Shoot, West Coast, etc. It's just that somebody thought of a different way of getting the same results with new formations, terminology, techniques, etc.
As an older coach, one must learn to swallow his pride. Most young coaches haven't seen the older offenses and defenses, so they don't realize that this "new" offense and defense that they are so fired up about is a version of one run in the 1940s. So what? Use the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new. Young coaches can help you adopt or adapt to that.
Use the young coaches' enthusiasm to your team's advantage. Old coaches have learned to dial back the enthusiasm over the years — it can become too tiring to be wired all the time. Older coaches have also learned that saying something louder doesn't necessarily mean that it is absorbed and learned. Older coaches don't seem to "get their knickers in a bunch" as often as younger, less experienced coaches. Enthusiasm is good in all sports, but this also applies to all occupations.
Enthusiasm is and always should be there, but old coaches have learned to tone down the emotions. That's why in football, most coaches in the booth (away from the emotion of the field) are older/wiser coaches who can analytically observe a game. A young coach's enthusiasm can be infectious to the team on the sideline, but it can be a detriment in the confined space of a booth.
Just like with your players or students, explain your philosophy and your reasoning techniques to your other coaches, too. The best coaches or teachers explain why things are done. Just like teaching your players or students, teach your other coaches, too.
I know that after a number of years it seems extremely monotonous to explain a common-sense fact that you have accepted for years or decades. But each season is a new season, and philosophies, situations, players and coaches change. Some people don't know; some people forget. Teach them or remind them.
Listen to young coaches — especially during a game or contest. This will be difficult as they sometimes just won't shut up. However, good coaches learn how to tune out voices/noise.
Remember how we older coaches were when we first started coaching? We knew everything. It took us a few years of experience to realize that we didn't really know everything. In fact, after coaching long enough, most of us understood that we didn't really know much of anything.
Sometimes the young coaches suggest a play or option that you might have overlooked or forgotten. This is also good training for the young coaches as they will eventually learn when/how to make suggestions "during the heat of battle."
As an old coach, it is hard to accept, but we can always still learn more — old coaches, old teachers, old any occupation. And one of the hardest things to learn is accepting that we have to learn how to change.
Remember that one day you will probably have to face these same young coaches who will have moved on to bigger and better jobs and will take with them everything you taught them. Don't give them added incentive to badly beat you because you never listened to them.
The football gods believe in karma and are fickle like that.
