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AFM Magazine


As a Coach, How Do You Want to be Remembered?

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by Derek Schlieve, Head Football Coach    

Mayville State University

Football is time consuming. It can become all-consuming if you let it. High School football takes a lot of time. College Football requires even more time. I cannot even begin to imagine what the time commitment is like at the professional level. Every now and then, you read a story about how much time coaches put in and what they are missing out on and it makes a person think twice but it does not seem to evoke any real changes, at least not anything long term. Coaches may spend some more time with their families for a day or two but then it usually goes back to the way it was before. After all they have to keep up with the coaches if they are going to be successful.

Tony Dungy said “We have more information, more technology, and we spend more time at the office. But are we coaching better? I am not sure.” If we are not getting better why are we spending so much time at the office? A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say, “No one is going to write on your tombstone……..and he spent a ton of time at the office”. I am not sure why, but for some reason, that comment stuck with me. It hit me that people are not going to remember how much time you worked (or in most cases even how successful you were – how many hall of fame coaches can you name off the top of your head), but your family will remember how much time (especially quality time) you spent (or didn’t spend) with them.

Why do we try to put some many hours in? Why are we so obsessed with the quantity of work that we do instead of the quality of the work we do? Why do we think that if we just stay at work longer we will be more successful? Brian Billick (former Head Coach of the Baltimore Ravens) said, “This profession glorifies the workaholic”. He is also quoted as saying “I get to work a half hour before Jon Gruden lies about getting to the office”. As a group, coaches think that if a lot of hours at the office is good, then more hours will be better. No one wants to be the coach that says we don’t do something (insert anything in here) because that may make you seem lazy. 

Nobody wants to be the one to stand up and say we don’t this or we don’t do that. We think that more is better and this not always the case. We also tend to be overly proud when we talk about the insane hours we work and wear them like a badge of honor. When a story gets out about a coach sleeping in his office people read it and they think that is the way it should be. Coaches think if he is doing this then I better be doing it too. Otherwise I will get behind. Maybe we should put more of an emphasis on efficiency and productivity than on the quantity of the hours logged. Instead of wearing the hours we work as a badge of honor we should try wear the title of good husband or good father as a badge of honor. Would we be better men (and role models) if we valued the time we put into being good husbands and fathers over the amount of time we put into being good coaches? We talk about being a man and what that means with our players all the time, but are we walking the walk? Or, are we just talking the talk and repeating the cycle of what is widely accepted as common practice if you are a football coach?

As a coach we get used to the grind, but that does not make it any easier (on us or our families).  This past summer my wife left me, it was out of the blue and she did not have much of an explanation except to say that she wanted a simpler life (one that is out of the public eye and far removed from the insane hours that are common during a football season). To say the least, I was shocked. You think about what your typical week consists of as a coach and how much you are around to help be a parent. Once she left I was forced into the role of full time parent. This meant that I was doing all the work with football and all the work of being a parent. I was thrown in the deep end, and had to figure out how to be the man we tell our players they should be. 

After a summer of doing everything with my boys, my eyes were opened. I had the (already stressful) 10 weeks leading up to the start of football season as a head coach. And I had 10 weeks with my boys, all day, and every day. They were with me for all the tasks I had to do, all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the laundry, literally everything, all day, every day. They also came to work with me each day. It was a pretty intense 10 weeks. 

We are told that mans greatest ability, is his ability to adapt. I definitely had to adapt. But I also got to see that maybe I wasn’t the best dad that I could have been, maybe I wasn’t around enough. Maybe I was putting too much of an emphasis on being at the office (being a good coach) and not enough of an emphasis on being at home. I know that my boys and I have a much tighter bond (and I probably have more credibility with players when talking about adversity) because of how this whole situation went. That got me thinking, why it wasn’t like this (or at least closer to this) before the boys’ mom left?

We talk about football being a microcosm for life telling our players this all the time. We tell them the lessons we learn from football are supposed to be able to be applied to real life. Well I got a chance to experience this first hand. I knew that a lot of eyes were going to be on me to see how I responded to the adversity I was facing. Talk about it being time to pull on your big boy boots. It was time to show people that everything we talk about is real and how it can be applied to your personal life. Tough times don’t last, tough people do.

You see this when young people get head coaching jobs and feel they have to prove themselves.  Being a young coach doesn’t mean that you have to prove yourself by working insane hours (but that is what most young coaches do) but it usually means that you inherited a bad program (the good programs tend to hire older, more established coaches). The other thing about inheriting a bad program is that you will usually struggle no matter what you do that first year. I was a head high school football coach at the age of 25 (the team was 1- 9 the year prior) and a head college coach at the age of 32 (the team was 2- 8 the year prior). Just working hard does not mean you will have success. If that were the case, manual laborers would be the most successful people in the world. You have to work hard in life, but you also have to work smart.

Part of working smart, is maintaining a balance in your life. When talking about another young coach in the NFL, Hall of Famer Tom Landry told people that if he had to stay up until 3 am to formulate a game plan, that he would be too embarrassed to tell anyone. Maybe more people should put an emphasis on being efficient instead of putting an emphasis on how many hours they spend in the office.

In an attempt to be more efficient we moved our practices at Mayville State University to the morning. We were losing players in the afternoon to classes. You go to college to get your degree so as a coaching staff we understood they needed to be at class. We also understood that our practices would not be very effective if we were missing a lot of players. We could not find a time in the afternoon that worked, but they all had the morning free so we made the move to morning practices. Both coaches and players were nervous that we would be at the school early in the morning and late at night when we switched to morning practices. I quickly remedied that by sending everyone home at 2:30 pm. They were instructed to spend time with family (you have to go to bed early when you get up at 4:00 am) and be the best husband / father / boyfriend they could be. It was different at first as people were not sure about seeing coaches leaving at 2:30 pm for the day but you have to draw lines somewhere if you are working that early in the morning. 

Now I know that some people will say, that is why you don’t win. First off, I would point out that you cannot please everyone. Secondly, I would point out our record is 10 – 12 over the last two years (the time this staff has been together). That is not where we want to be, but when you compare it to where we used to be (the overall record was 13 – 87 in the previous 100 games) we like the progress that has been made within the program. We also use the rule, ‘No Sundays.’ Every coach takes the full day off to be with family. You need to recharge the battery and you need to be a family man (whether that meant boyfriend / husband / father / etc.). Taking Sundays off was outside of the box but it seemed to work. Again, look at where we are compared to where we were.

As long as I am a head coach I will work hard to make sure that none of my coaches ever lose their family (do to working too many hours) while they are working for me. I want to be the coach who is not afraid to make a decision that helps us to be efficient (without being lazy), even if it is unorthodox. I want to be a coach that finds a way to balance being a hard worker with being a good dad. I want my boys to be able to say I have a great dad who happens to coach football, but I want them to remember me in that order. I also want my coaches to constantly think about the following, “How do you want to be remembered?”






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