Setting Goals and Using Inspiration – Part II the Process of Learning to Coach Life Lessons within the Game

In part I of this series, I discussed how and why the first step in coaching a member of a team should be to see the team member as a person and then as an athlete before thinking of them as a player. A coach’s success in developing the player has a direct correlation to that coach’s success in understanding and being successful at improving the person and the athlete.

Once a coach can look at a player and first see a person and then an athlete, the coach must begin planning how they are going to develop the person and the athlete. This planning is done well in advance of the season and then continues each week and each practice once the season begins.

Developing the person using the sport as a vehicle to teach life lessons is done proactively by design, not just by inference from experience.

When goal setting for the season, a coach should use the same process-oriented methodology to teach life lessons as they would use to teach the mechanics of their sport. For example, if the ultimate goal is to mentor the person to be a better son or daughter, a coach should not just tell the person they should be respectful and appreciative of the parents.

The coach should require actions such as having the player thank their parents for bringing them to practices and supporting them in their athletic endeavors. They could require the player to volunteer to do at least one thing to help the parent prepare dinner for the family each night. The player could also be required to do such things as read with or help a younger sibling do homework for ½ hour each night. The coach should notify the parents that these are requirements imposed by the coach and the coach should follow up on whether the player is doing them. The list is endless, but you get the idea.

In my experience, words are very powerful. I have always included discussions of inspirational quotes as a part of each practice or training session with my athletes. I even wrote a book for coaches to use for this purpose – Takeaway Quotes for Coaching Champions for Life. During each practice or training session, I always use quotes relating to the sport. The team discusses these quotes to help raise the Sport IQ of the players. I also assign homework to assist in this process. For example, in baseball, I assign each player to research a current All-Star in the MLB or a Hall of Fame player that plays their position and ask them to learn what made them a great player and what did or did not make them a great person.

The commitment to teach life lessons must constantly be at the top of a coach’s mind. Every coach in the program must always look for opportunities to relate what is happening in the sport to something occurring in the players’ lives. Remember, always see the players as people first with lives you are preparing to be successful for beyond your program. This mindset of teaching life lessons will become second nature over time.

At the end of practice, I always discuss a quote that is a life lesson to aid in mentoring the player(s) on how to be a better son, daughter, student, employee, and a person of high moral character and integrity. However, some of these life lessons need to be role-played during practice occasionally, e.g., weekly, so the players learn how to handle these issues in a real-world way.

The sport and life lessons that can be taught and role-played are not a mystery – they have been the same from the beginning of time. They include:

• Sport: Injuries, bad weather, poor playing conditions, bad calls by officials, disputes about playing time, ineligibility of players by grades or conduct, inappropriate language, bad attitudes, “helicopter” or unruly parents, disrespect from other teams, etc.
• Self: Attitude, work ethic, leadership, adversity, self-confidence, self-pity, self-esteem, self-advocacy, self-awareness, self-image, self-control 
• Relationships: Peer pressure, bullying, envy, the media, filling E-Tanks
• Temptations: Smoking, drugs, alcohol, and sex

At the start of your season, a coach should anonymously survey the team, coaches, and players, to learn what they feel are the positives, negatives, securities, and insecurities in their lives. Never assume self-contentment from athletic ability! These responses will be a guide as to what are the timeliest issues to be discussed.

When it comes to role-playing, the methodology should be the same as it is for mentoring the person, athlete, and player in all three parts of holistic development. Specifically, you should coach preparation, then reaction, and then action. This methodology for coaching the sport is too detailed for an exhaustive discussion here and will be the subject of a future post of mine. However, I will explain how it relates to mentoring a player to learn life lessons.

In baseball, one consistent issue is when batting is dealing with a bad call by an umpire. So how can we use the preparation, reaction, and action methodology to mentor the players not only to handle it properly in a game but to handle a similar situation as a student, e.g., being given an unfair test by a teacher?

Stay tuned for the final article in this series where I will explain how to do this!