Lessons from Mentors.

I have a stated goal of learning something new each and every day.  My coaching mentors have been great aides in this pursuit.  One lasting lesson that resonates with me is to focus on those things you can control and do not waste time on those things you cannot control. Taking this advice to heart has allowed me to exercise great patience which has been of benefit to me personally and also to the teams I coach.

Properly preparing for whatever task is at had is another lasting. I can recall as a young coach preparing meticulously for practices.  I chose activities carefully and with purpose. Planned specifically. Truth be told, I do this in almost all facets of my life. For example, I rarely have gone into a meeting unprepared. Preparation is the foundation of confidence and in turn confidence is the key to success.

Sometimes learned lessons can seemingly come into conflict with one another. Usually, this eventually proves not to be the case. As a young coach it drove me crazy to diligently prepare for practice including a specific number of players expected to be in attendance only to have players not show up for one reason or another.  All that diligent effort on my part blown all to hell! How dare they just not come to practice?!?

And so I learned the importance of flexibility. My first coaching mentor planned practice sessions with adaptability being a key component. A theme was constant but activities had an element of fluidity to them and could be changed or adapted to fit the number of players available. You see, he could not control whether any given player would attend practice or not.  For some, indeed a vast majority of players, missing a practice was simply not an option.  Attendance was expected. There always seems to be an exception to the rule though.

It took awhile for me to understand this. While my expectation remains every player will attend every practice, if numbers for practice are not what I expected then to be I simply adjust the activities.  Now, experience has made this a much easier task to take on and achieve with acceptable results.

I have wondered on occasion if I knew then what I know now, would I have been so upset as a young coach when players failed to show for practice?  The experience factor plays a large role in this process. I'm not sure I would have had the mental catalog of soccer activities I now possess that allows me to easily adapt on the fly.

Dealing with difference of opinions with referees ...  Yeah, this is an area I am much improved in. In all the thousands of games I have participated in as a player, coach, referee or even as a fan, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I have witnessed an official change a call. Just something I cannot control so I don't waste time arguing with officials.

Difficult parents?  When a parent believes they are acting in the best interests of their child there is no other opinion that matters. A coach certainly is not going to control a parent. I have had mothers flirt with me in an attempt to gain favor with me for this child. I have had confrontational parents attempt to bully me in order to have their child play a preferred position, start or play more. Helicopter parents who hover over their child in order to protect them from ... well, whatever perceived threat they imagine in the way of their child's athletic success.  In any of these instances and countess more not mentioned here, a coach cannot control the parents. I have learned to not waste my time worrying about parents. I cannot control them so why worry about them?

Another lesson learned is a coach really needs to limit social interaction with parents and families. As a young adult league coach I often found myself coaching friends. Not really a good idea.  It can be done successfully and I was able to navigate those potentially treacherous waters fairly successfully. And as a parent coach I often found myself coaching sons and daughters of our friends and neighbors.  Again, not something I would recommend for inexperienced coaches. Sports have a strange super power that can cause the most sane of individuals to become stark raving mad lunatic parents out of their minds.

I tried to attend team social functions where the player families were present. Disaster. I took my cue from ultra successful coaching mentors who were cordial with parents but never socialized with them. Communications were limited strictly to "business" in the sense of interacting with a single team parent to coordinate travel, pre and post game meals, parents night, senior night and the end of season banquet.  And these communications consisted of the parents doing all the work and informing the coach of need to know details only. I take my cue from Dick Hagen, Bob Seggerson, Larry Lewis and others.

As a parent I was often involved in selecting coaches who we would allow our son's to play for, but beyond that I did not intrude on the coaches space. I didn't always agree with a coaches strategies or tactics. I sometimes questioned starting lineups or distribution of minutes, but only to myself. I supported our sons coaches.  The only time I recall being upset enough to confront a coach was when one played my son almost an entire game after he had two days before been carried off the field with severe cramps. We had gone to an alternative medical specialist to deal with the cramps and she had performed miracles to relieve the cramping.  He could not walk into to the office but two hours later walked out under his own power.  Genesen Acutouch,  Un-freaking-believable!

I continue to learn on a daily basis. Many times lessons learned long ago are revisited.  The world is constantly changing and this affords endless opportunities to continue learning. And even when the status quo seems to remain the same, there still exists opportunities to learn anew.  For example, today I learned about Donatello's David and other art and artists of the quattracento era, Who knew?!?  Right?

Go forth to gain knowledge, control what you can control and don't sweat the rest.

Soccer Memories - Grant

I have been fortunate enough to spend 20 years around a game that I love as a player, referee, and coach and I thank God for the opportunity, my parents for their support, and all of the friends I’ve made along the way.  These are a few of my favorite soccer memories from those experiences.

I was fortunate enough to play on a club team where we would travel to Dayton to play about half of our games. We used walkie talkies to stay in contact while traveling since this was before cell phones. Being a group of 14 year old boys we joked around a lot on our trips. One time we passed a police cruiser on the highway. One of my teammates parent’s was speeding and got pulled over. My teammate Nick who had a walkie talkie comes over the air “Mayday Mayday I got a bogie on me!” The entire team was laughing. To this day I still joke with my family about it.

During my sophomore year of high school I took most of our free kicks in the attacking half of the field. At an away game against one of our rivals there was a free kick about 35 yards out that I took. I took the kick and my intention was to put it about the 6 yard box so it could be headed on goal. I miss hit the ball and it went farther than I intended but with where the kick was on the field it drifted over the keeper’s hands into the upper left corner for the goal. It’s really the only goal that I remember scoring mainly because it seemed like the ball just hung in the air forever and at the last moment dipped perfectly.

From the referee side there are too many to list here. I was privileged to referee regional and national finals , multiple USL Pro games and an MLS scrimmage.  Many of these memories are so great because they were with great people. I would like to mention Dan Fennema in particular because we traveled together a lot and he was a great mentor to me. On the field my favorite memories actually came before a game. I was refereeing an adult amateur game between two Hispanic teams who had gotten into a fight the last time they played. As we were getting ready for the coin toss the captains were speaking Spanish to each other. I unfortunately do not know Spanish so my response was to start speaking German to them and do the coin toss through hand motions. At the end the captains said good luck to each other, they shook my hand and said good luck to which I just smiled and replied good luck back to them, all of this in clear English. The rest of the game we communicated to each other in English and the game was almost perfect.

My coaching career has been rather short thus far but my favorite memory so far came at the end of the year soccer tournament with my U9 team in the Spring of 2014. The boys had been playing well and improving in the weeks leading up to the tournament but couldn’t get over the hump to win. Then everything clicked in their first game. They went on to win the tournament and were so happy with that after a season of being so close. The winning is not what I remember however. I remember that the boys played great defense and only allowed 3 goals in 4 games, had multiple bangoo goals, and the least athletic player on the team who had been working so hard on his skills did a double scissors move that left the defender wondering what had happened.

Some other things that stand out to me as I reflect are getting up at 4:00 AM to watch the Korea/Japan World Cup. Spending summer afternoons with Graham Ramsey and my father watching coaching videos and talking about the game, hearing an entire complex erupt with cheers when Donovan scored the World Cup goal. These are just a few of my favorite memories however what I enjoy the most about the beautiful game is all of the wonderful people I have met and shared stories and laughs with.

Soccer Coach Support Groups

I just completed an article titled The Circle of Soccer Life and it occurs to me the necessity of having coaching resources never diminishes until you stop coaching.  I have previously mentioned participating in a couple of coaching email lists with colleagues from all over the world.  The groups are comprised of high school, college and professional coaches. They have been a huge benefit to me. We share ideas, discuss various topics and exchange information. When I need a sounding board or simply to vent about soccer related matters, these are the people I turn to. If I get things right, they pat me on the back and maybe help me understand how I could have done it even better.  If I get it wrong, they set me straight, do so quickly and in a very direct manner!

The culture of a program is a consistently constant topic of discussion within one of these groups. There has been some truly fascinating insight shared over the years.  I have implemented many of the ideas shared with the teams I coach.  Last night one of the members of this list asked a couple questions of another list member that really struck a chord with me. I want to share those questions and some of my own observations with you today.

First, I want to acknowledge I have not formally made members of this email group aware of the CBA Soccer Blog.  I know some members are aware of it. I am not sure all are. No particular reason behind this.  I write as much for myself as I do for our many faithful readers from around the globe. It is both a cathartic and educational experience for me.

The Question:

How much bearing do you think the success of your program has on how your players react to leadership?

Paraphrasing the Follow Up Question:

If the current coaching staff leaves and is replaced by inexperienced coaches, would the leadership lessons the players learned under the tutelage of the former staff continue for any decent amount of time after their departure or is such a culture tied to the success the former staff brought to the program?

My mind immediately went to the local high school program that my son participates in.  A long tenured coach resigned last fall and a new staff consisting of former players of his were hired.  One would think the successful and winning cultures would remain fairly entrenched with former players from the program taking over as the new coaches.  My observations suggest that has not been the case.

The previous coach had accumulated 330 wins when he retired. The program had peaked in the early 2000's, but had been in steady decline over the last handful of seasons.  One could truthfully proclaim the energy had gone from the program. The new staff most definitely returned some of the missing energy, but the slippage in culture has continued.

Under the leadership of the former coach success on the field continued even as energy obviously ebbed from the program. If that coaching staff had remained, I believe this years team may have won 10 games with the aid of continued tradition and mystique. The actual on-field results this season saw a meager 4 victories and the change in leadership has undoubtedly been responsible to some degree.

We are talking about leadership backed by a proven track record versus leadership with no track record.  Trust is a word that comes to mind. Even with growing discontent, the former staff had the trust of enough players. The new staff has made and continues to make significant changes to formation and systems of play instead of maintaining a link through continuity to the previous coaching regime.  By doing so, they also made a clean break with the culture the former staff had built into the program. 

The questions posed to the coaches of the email list last night are essentially about how change might impact a program.  The thing about change is some people are resistant to it while others will openly embrace change. In the end change is accepted or you get left behind in a manner of speaking. The real significance found in these questions and in using our local program as an illustration is the importance of how change is managed.

Thanks once and-again to the invaluable resource of our coaching email lists.  I wouldn't be near the coach I am without them.  And I would never ascend to the coach I will yet become without their continued guidance and support.