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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


The 10 Commandments of Coaching Leadership

by: Larry Wilson
by: Troy Malone
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Coaching and leadership have always been intertwined. So much so that Duke Basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski says “I don't look at myself as a basketball coach. I look at myself as a leader who happens to coach basketball.” If leadership is, as Yuki suggests, “the application of intentional influence in order to achieve a desired result,” then coaching is actually leadership in practice. However, before we move forward on what actions coaches should and should not take, it’s important to define the terms appropriately.

It has been said that there are as many definitions of leadership as there are those that write about it. Like Yukl, most learned people agree that leadership deals with influencing relationships amongst people. As such, we’ll use Maccoby’s (2000) characterization that leadership is an individual’s amalgamation of certain influence skills: decision making, motivating, coaching, and building trust while part of a team. At the end of the day, leadership serves as the over-arching concept for the influencing of people and organizations. Mentorship, on the other hand, is an action leaders take as part of exercising leadership. Buell (2004) defines mentorship as “the looking after, advising, protecting, and taking special interest in another’s development.” As one might expect, a mentor practices mentorship. Akin to mentorship, coaching is one of the actions a leader may take to influence the individual or team. In defining coaching, I will use a definition drawn from the Cerna Corporation: “Coaching is the art of directing, instructing and training a person (or group of people) to unleash their potential to reach meaningful, measurable goals.” Given this definition, coaching is also a leadership activity. In effect, mentoring and coaching are leadership tools; that is, a means to the end of influencing.

It should readily follow then, that the common tenets that apply to effective leadership also apply to effective coaching. Coaching, however, does have some contextual differences from other forms of leadership found in the military or business world. That is, it primarily focuses on the younger segments of society. However, the universal principals that apply to effective leadership also apply to successful coaching and can be articulated as the 10 Commandments of Coaching Leadership.

Commandment #1: Thou shall not blame thy players when thou loses
Coach Hiller wasn’t angry. Why should she get angry? It wasn’t her fault the team lost. Heck, she hadn’t missed any shots or turned the ball over. Her team had just gotten blown out by 35 points. She had repeatedly tried new line-ups throughout the game to find one that could compete. Regardless of what she tried, her team still failed to break the full court press effectively, turning the ball over repeatedly. She felt like she had had done her best. After the game she was approached by a local news reporter who asked her how she felt about the game. Undaunted, she quipped “I guess our players just weren’t good enough tonight.”

This commandment goes hand in hand with its converse: Thou shall credit the players when thou wins. Urban Gavelin adroitly surmises that “accepting responsibility is really a proof of maturity.” Unfortunately, there are still far too many coaches that blame players when things go awry; or using the new term in vogue “throwing players under the bus.” A good general rule to live by is that it’s the coach’s fault when the team loses and the players’ fault when they win. Good leaders have understood for years that they accept responsibility when the organizations they lead fail, but defer credit when achieving success.

Gavelin points out that when in charge of an organization, the coach is responsible for the results of the whole group. His advice is for leaders to allow the players to take credit for achievements when things go well, but for the coach to step up when things go awry. He goes on to say “give praise where praise is due. At the same time be a man and accept responsibility for their mistakes. You are in charge. If they failed, you failed.”

Commandment #2: Thou shall communicate with thy players
Scenario: Kerrie Johnson was a junior at her new school. She had played both junior varsity and varsity volleyball at her old school. Now that she had transferred to a new school, her new coach, Coach Hiller, had relegated her without a word to the JV squad. Kerrie was upset and hurt. There were freshmen that were playing varsity volleyball, and here she was, the only junior on the JV team, riding the pine in a JV game. To make matters worse, the kids in school were really trashing her because of it. They mocked her for her role on the team and made sure to point out her status at every turn. Kerrie was at a loss to explain her role, primarily because the coach considered it “beneath her station” to explain it to Kerrie. Off to a terrible start at her new school, Kerrie contemplated what her life would become if she just dropped out….

In the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman said it best, “What we got here is a failure to communicate.” Coaches regularly take an egotistical approach and view themselves as being in an elevated position vis-à-vis the player. Given that they were selected by team management or school leadership, coaches frequently act as though they have been anointed to a position of infallibility or unquestioned authority by some higher power. These coaches fear that open communication with players will lead to a questioning of the coaching decisions and that by not talking to the players, they can limit a players’ input through restricting communications. This viewpoint often leads to a practice of “purposeful aloofness’ characterized by the presence of professional distance. By distancing players and creating professional distance, coaches feel they can better make decisions in a detached manner, while simultaneously limiting unwanted influences such as parental intrusion and the questioning of coaching decisions.

Leah White, a 15-year coach at the University of Minnesota State University at Mankato sums up this position: “The advantage to this approach is that a coach may establish trust in the relationship without risking a loss of respect from the player. A coach is the leader of the team and frequently will make unpopular decisions. Maintaining an element of professional distance between yourself and students will preserve your authority” (White, 2005, p 89). Armed with this overblown sense of self, this type of coach supposes no obligation to explain their reasoning, as seen in the above example.

This immature view often has detrimental effects to the player and team. In all reality, this need for professional distance is the manifestation of a crucial personality flaw: an absence of moral courage. Too often coaches lack the moral fiber to look into a kid’s face and tell them what is taking place and why it is so. Accordingly, professional distance serves to alienate players and parents and is an abuse of the power conferred in the coach through the denial of information. If a coach’s charge is to develop the young men and women that play for them, it is impossible for them to appropriately perform this task without talking to the player. This denial of information through the lack of communication with players also manifests itself in things like not telling kids the lineup in advance of the game, ambiguous player roles, and unannounced school lettering standards.

Commandment #3: Thou shall not belittle thy players.
Don Smith was a great coach. He knew he was. After all, he had been All-State in three sports in high school and had played basketball in college. Watching his team lose a 20-point first-half lead in the regional game was driving him nuts. How could his players lose that big of a lead with all these fans watching? He could envision what the parents, fans, and school administrators thought of him from the way his team was performing. He’d show them, he’d get a piece of the players’ behind. Calling his fifth timeout of the half, he stated yelling at the players as they exited the floor for the team huddle. “How the hell could you do that?” he screamed at one player; “Stop making stupid mistakes!” he roared at another. “You boys need to man up and start acting like men!” he bellowed. Following the timeout, the team rallied to win the game on a last second shot. Don smiled to himself. Yep, he’d showed them how good a coach he was.

Anyone with kids in sports has witnessed it up close or from afar. The coach who berates, denigrates, or pours scorn on his players. Words used as weapons and employed with a fierce and dishonorable intensity. These are actions of coaches who fail their players on both a competitive and personal level. As Ed Ratledge, a longtime coach, official and volleyball player (2008) points out, “The short term gain associated with this type of action is off-set by the long term impact of players with shattered self-confidence who fail in the clutch because they haven’t had proper support and motivation during challenging times” (2008).

Coaches are seemingly caught in a paradox. They need to create and maintain good lines of communications with players and parents, while simultaneously performing “course corrections” on player’s performance (Paris, 2004). In other words, they need to evaluate but to do so without alienating. This paradox is only apparent, not real. Skillfully delivered critical evaluations and performance counseling enhance both the relationship and the targeted performance. The following are some tips when it comes to evaluating players (Paris, 2004):

• Evaluate without comparison. Broad, unfavorable comparisons between the sorry team, and the exemplary team you led last year is more a comment about your leadership than your team's performance. Individuals told they don't measure up end up finding fault with you rather than dealing with the ambiguous criticism levied at them.

• Evaluate with specificity, not labels. Specificity means to directly point out what is lacking. This deals with addressing the presence, absence, or indicators of behaviors such as tardiness, failure to communicate, mental alertness, missed assignment, teammate complaints, etc. Feedback that cites specific examples requires no interpretation of meaning. A missed commitment is a missed commitment. These concrete descriptions focus on quantifiable problems and achievable improvements. Non-specific evaluation feedback invites ugliness. Realistically, the player can only guess what you mean by such criticism as careless, inattentive, unmotivated, selfishness, etc.

• Do not use labels. The use of labels amounts to an attack on the person. An attack calls for a defense. "I am not careless!" "I am not unmotivated!" Eventually, the coach and player reach an impasse about whether the player is careless or unmotivated without pinpointing the actual problem behavior and ways to improve it.

• Think it through before you say something. Don't just shoot from the lip. Reactionary responses to unwanted player behaviors subvert the working relationship you need to solve problems. A problem worth solving demands the coaches’ concentrated attention and focus to gain desired outcomes. This may mean not saying anything at all until you have mentally rehearsed your delivery and envisioned the player's response.

• Criticize in private, and praise in public. Public criticism offends not only the player receiving the criticism, but onlookers as well. No one wants to see another person called out by someone too cowardly to address the problem face to face. If a problem arises during a team meeting, acknowledge it and say that this is something that needs to be addressed “later” or "between Matt and I" or "without taking up everyone's time."

Commandment #4: Thou shall think and coach innovatively.
Scenario: All Mr. Johnson could do was shake his head. Dumbfounded, he sat at his daughter’s basketball banquet, listening to the coach explain how his 5’5” daughter had been forced to play one of the two post positions on the team. The coach, a mid-20’s something woman who had played college basketball, was hired due to her success as a player under the assumption that her abilities on the court made her qualified to be a coach off it. The coach went on to explain that her team, just coming of their third consecutive 20 loss season, was sorely constrained by a lack of players to fit into the “system” she employed. Hopeless, Mr. Johnson got up and walked out of the banquet, knowing his daughter’s team was in for a lot more 20-loss seasons with this coach at the helm.

Drawing on Hooper’s axiom that “teachers teach the way they were taught” (Hooper, 1991) it’s probably safe to surmise that “coaches coach the way they were coached.” Given that most of our high school coaches are also teachers, the fit is only too obvious. It’s not uncommon to see coaches try to “shoehorn” players into a pre-determined system, which is normally the same system they learned as a player. This is routinely done without regard for the player’s physical attributes or skill level. This error is even more egregious at the college level than at the high-school level where coaches’ can recruit specific players to fit their “system.’

This statement should beg the question of what a coach requires to be an innovative thinker. In order to be innovative, the first quality people must possess is an innate information foundation. This innate comprehension is often referred to as “tacit knowledge.” Michael Polanyi, who has studied tacit knowledge for more than a quarter century, describes it as knowledge that people carry in their minds, which lies below the surface. Polanyi hypothesizes that a wide range of experiences are required to expand a person’s tacit knowledge reservoir; hence the reason that the aged seem wiser than their younger counterparts. Polanyi suggests a larger tacit knowledge reservoir better prepares the person or institution to invent. He sees tacit knowledge as instinctive "know-how" involving learning and skill but not in a way that can be written down. He views it as a crucial starting point to advancement, with individual ability to innovate being directly proportional to the size of its tacit knowledge reservoir.

Too often, coaches fail to attend coaching clinics, develop professional improvement plans, or take steps to increase their knowledge base. As a result, players are asked to do things for which they are an ill fit, simply because the coach lacks the ability or innate knowledge required to change plans. This evolves to their current knowledge holdings and mental schemata, which consists of “the way they were coached.’ As the great adult educator Jack Mezirow points out, “it is only through the disorienting dilemma that our way of thinking changes” (Mezirow, 1978, pp 100-102).

Unfortunately, coaches may not experience a disorienting dilemma that forces perspective change in the course of a half-dozen seasons This makes it very unlikely they will change their determination of a player’s capabilities during the normal four year college or high school career.

Included in this is the coach that early on determines a player’s role and is incapable of making the mental adjustment to reevaluate the player over the course of time. Too often players are pigeonholed as having particular talents and misgivings, never to be seen in any different light by their coaches, regardless of the improvements they make. I can’t begin to count the number of times I have heard a coach lament, “Johnny will never be a shooter”, or “David does not have the talent to be a quarterback and lead this team.’

Commandment #5: Thou shall not be a self-centered coach.
Mitch had been the assistant baseball coach for a couple of years. Unfortunately, the players had stopped listening to him. As every coach knows, when the players stop listening, it’s time to change the message. Lacking both the professional and personal maturity to see himself critically, Mitch could not understand why the players rolled their eyes at him every time he tried to make a teaching point. Finally, at the end of practice, during the team huddle, the head coach asked Mitch if he had anything to say. Without missing a beat, Mitch said, “When I was in High School, we never lost to this team. Let’s make sure we go out and win this next one to keep my perfect record intact.” Much to his perplexed chagrin, Mitch heard an exasperated sigh come from half the team.

Look coach, it’s not about you; it’s about the players. The only way some coaches can relate to players is by invoking personal history. Coaches should use the words “I” and “Me” about as often as they desire to see their mother-in-law drop in unannounced. Too often, coaches try to relive their own personal glory. If sports are indeed about building character in players, then they cannot be about validating a coaches’ life choice. This inability to comprehend outside of self is a developmental issue and an instantaneous indicator of self-centeredness. Reb Bradley (2002) explains that these coaches are actually self-absorbed people, ruled by self-centeredness. Consequently, they coach as if the game can only be related through their knowledge with the sport interpreted by how it affects or affected them. (Bradley, 2002, P. 22).

To take this one step further, Dr. Robert Kegan (often referred to as the academic ambassador of human development) claims that this inability to let go of previous experiences signals a stalling in the individual’s personal development. Kegan is best known for championing the idea that there is life after adolescence; that adult mental growth must continue throughout adulthood. He goes on to explain that the requirement to self-reference events indicates a stalling of maturational development (Daloz, 1986, p 68). Coaches should remember that the reason they coach is to develop young people, not to satisfy their own personal ego or to prove their mettle as a coach.

Commandment #6: Thou shall not cheat
Coach Morgan had always wanted to coach. The competitive desire had burned in him ever since he could remember. Furthermore, he always wanted to win, whatever the endeavor. In this, his reputation preceded him. He was known by those he competed against as a player, as one who would do anything to win. On his high school football team, he had been awarded a construction worker’s helmet for his selection as the player with the most competitive drive. He took pride in his standing as a “winner.” Coaching youth league basketball, he had been accused of bending the rules with kids ages to win games. He didn’t care. He had won half-dozen championships, proving his expertise as a coach. He knew those making the accusations were just jealous of his “talents” as a winner. After being hired as the varsity soccer coach, he had immediately promised to turn the traditional losing program into a winner. Now was his chance. He had found some foreign born kids who were from a different school district that he wanted on the team. Working behind the scenes, he “bent” the rules about which school they were to attend. He had established and paid for a PO Box in town so the foreign kids could claim it as their home address and now attend his school. He’d show these people how to win. After all he was known as a man who could deliver wins and he was not about to have his reputation sullied by this school.

Kids play sports for two primary purposes: to develop character and enjoy playing the game. As part of this, coaches have an obligation to their players, one that does not focus on the misguided notion that victories are paramount. A coach has the obligation to serve and help make their players better as citizens. To this end, part of a coaches’ charge is to develop each player’s character. At the end of the day, a coach should leave his players in a better state. Recognizing and embracing this aspect of coaching, USA Hockey includes life skills and character development among its coaching tasks. These character-building tasks include:

1. Realizing the importance of honesty and integrity in and away from the arena.
2. Learning to accept responsibility for your actions and athletic performance.
3. Learning coping strategies to deal with peer pressure.
4. Ability to balance school, social activity, sports and family.
5. Developing a sense of team commitment.
6. Not abusing controlled substances and participate in anti-drug programs.
7. Appreciating the benefits received and be willing to give back to the sport.
8. Learning the meaning of adversity.
9. Learning to cope with adversity and to meet challenges head on.

Simply put, cheating is the anti-Christ of character development. Coaches’ routinely face principled decisions as part of their sport experience and must decide how to react. Often, those decisions revolve around whether to engage in nefarious behaviors in order to gain an advantage. (Dodge & Robertson, 2004). Driven by an aspiration to prove themselves a winner, a coaches’ personal validation needs frequently takes priority over making character-based decisions. Anyone who has coached for any length of time knows there are unscrupulous coaches taking virtually every shortcut to win. Unfortunately, a coach cheating to win is a negative practice readily transferred to players. A recently completed study by an American ethics center says that children involved in sports are more likely to cheat in school. The sad news is these kids are learning from their coaches how to best cut corners (Laidlaw, 2007).

Often cheating in sports is rationalized with “Well all the other coaches are doing it.” In reality, coaches of character are not. Cheating is saying “I’m not as good, so I have to do this in order to win” (Laidlaw, 2007). Like it or not, coaches are role models to kids and should promote positive habit transfer while eliminating negative habit transfer. Sports are a vehicle for doing this. Jean Côté,, director of the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University, accurately claims that "participation in sports will encourage positive behaviors. Cheating begs the question of what kind of role models coaches are being when they cheat.”

Cheating also includes decision-making that compromises one’s character. These are decisions a coach has made in regret or wish they could re-take. This includes making no decision, which in reality is making a decision. It is not uncommon for a coach to be faced with a dilemma in which they know that not making a decision will personally benefit themselves or the team, while violating both explicit and tacit rules.

A great example for coaches winning while following the rules is Bob Knight, the winningest basketball coach in NCAA men’s college basketball. Knight was a profound stickler for NCAA rules, no matter how disdainful he found them. One of Knight's prized possessions is a letter from Walter Byers, the pioneering former NCAA executive director from 1951 to 1988. Byers was a no-nonsense guy who ruled the NCAA with an iron fist. It is of little surprise he and Knight were friends. One line in particular is Knight’s favorite: "Every game has its rules," wrote Byers, "and over time you've played the game on the important points as cleanly and openly as anyone I've known." Responded Knight: “I don’t think there is anything I have received I appreciated more." (Wentzel, 2006)

The letter serves as proof that someone competent, with principle, and who clearly knows how to coach, can attain the highest levels without compromising their ethical standards. When pressured to cheat, coaches’ should remember that jobs are easier to find than one’s dignity, once lost.

Commandment #7: Thou shall not gossip.
Standing on the side of the field, Coach Morgan talked to the father of his star quarterback, Mr. Johnson. Thinking aloud, Coach Morgan intimated “I wish I could get Smith to block better at running back. If he had spent the summer lifting weights, he’d be ready to play by now.” Returning home for dinner that evening, Mr. Johnson told his wife of the conversation he had had with the coach at practice. Relaying what she had learned to Mrs. Smith at the weekly get together for the neighborhood ladies, Mrs. Johnson had inadvertently made it sound as though Coach Morgan did not like the young running back. Charged with fury, the Smith’s called the school principal to discuss why their son was being run off the football team.

Unfortunately, coaches are sometimes their own worst enemy and create problems internal to their programs simply by gossiping. For example, coaches should never talk about players to other players or other parents. I have witnessed first hand coaches discussing other players in an evaluative manner with other players. Some coaches’ see this as a means of achieving “buy in” from other players. However, most young people are neither prepared for, nor want, the repercussions that come with influencing a coaches’ evaluation of a peer. At the end of the day, this is a discipline issue. Coaches must refrain from any type of evaluative discussion about players with those outside the program.

Fujimoto (2003) defines evaluative gossip as “episodes in which there was a positive or negative evaluation of someone (a player) who was not present.” Too often, coaches spend valuable energy and effort dealing with fallout of evaluative gossip. It also seems that this problem is exponentially worse depending on the size of the school. Generally speaking, the smaller the school, the worse the problem.

Furthermore, it’s not uncommon for parents to have wildly dissimilar, emotionally activated evaluations of their own children. Too often, parents seek to transpose poor parenting blame to the coach. For example, a player who is overweight and in poor physical shape will be viewed by the parents in a completely different light than the coach who demands physical readiness as a condition of playing. When viewed through the understandably rose-colored parenting glasses, family members responsible for the player’s developmental shortcomings may view the coaches’ actions as biased or prejudiced. As such, coaches’ must tread very carefully when having an evaluative discussion about players. A coach’s gossiping only gives wing to parent’s’ imagined boogey-men.

Commandment #8: Thou shall mentor thy players.
James was in a bad way. Coming from a broken family, he was about to flunk out of school. About the only thing he had to look forward to was track. He was fast and knew he could excel in the sport. However, his grades were keeping him from participating on the school track team. Not knowing where to turn, he approached his track coach, Mr. Ogilvy. Mr. Ogilvy was new to the school and had signed on to be the track coach because it paid an extra $1500 in salary. When James approached him for life advice and about getting set up with a tutor, Mr. Ogilvy quickly pushed him off on the guidance counselor. Three weeks later, James dropped out of school.

A significant amount of a successful coaches’ time should be spent encouraging students to succeed at life, not just the sport they are playing. Frequently new coaches are unprepared for the time commitments spent as a “life” coach in addition to their sports coaching duties. Engelhorn (2001) claims that “coaches have an ethical responsibility for developing youth into productive citizens and to develop their abilities and attitudes for further learning and success in life.” As such, mentoring is part of a coaches’ charge and their job description includes not only making better ballplayers, but making them better people. Mentoring is a “time investment” in the player. The coach invests time in the player with the hope that the venture will create interpersonal growth. Often however, coaches’ are unwilling or unable to make this investment.

Dodge and Robertson (2004) take a coaches’ impact on youth one step further, reporting that coaches are more influential than parents or teachers in a child’s life and second only to friends. A coaches’ mentoring impact separates the good ones from the average ones. Los Angeles Lakers’ coach Phil Jackson has employed varying holistic mentorship techniques for years challenging his players to become better, more learned people while simultaneously improving their sports skill. His efforts have resulted in 11 NBA championships: 2 as a player and 9 as a coach.

Finally, as Ed Ratledge points out in his ‘7 Sins of Coaching’ article in the June 2008 edition of Volleyball Magazine, it’s not just the starting players who deserve to be developed. All players deserve mentoring. “The gluttonous coach doesn’t try to build confidence, skills and trust in players beyond his starting six. And like so many of the other sins, this is a short-sighted strategy” (2008).

Commandment #9: Thou shall not punish thy players for the parent’s transgressions

Coach Hiller had had enough. She was tired of the “help” she was getting from Kerrie’s Dad. Upset that Kerrie hadn’t been playing more and wondering why she was constantly on the bench, Kerrie’s dad had engaged the coach over the player’s role. Mr. Johnson, Kerrie’s Dad, had been a volleyball coach for a number of years. Coach Hiller, on the other hand was in her first season at the helm. Mr. Johnson had engaged Coach Hiller on prior occasions to no avail. Now he had enlisted the club director’s help in finding out why Kerrie was only one of two girls who regularly were taken out of the game. Mr. Johnson rationalized that this was a developmental league and that his daughter was being denied equal opportunity to develop due to the coaches’ decision. Undaunted, Coach Hiller had continued to use the same player rotation throughout the season, despite Kerrie’s obvious improvement. Coach Hiller, though, was mad at the father for questioning her coaching ability and decision-making skills. Thinking to herself “I’ll show him whose boss on this team,” she vowed to keep Kerrie’s role unchanged for the remainder of the season to prove she was right.

When it comes to successful coaching, family matters. Winning coaches create that special “family” feeling among the players; one in which players willingly sacrifice to be part of the program. In doing this, one of the toughest things a coach must due is not to punish the player for the parent’s transgressions. Deciding not to punish the player for the parent’s transgressions is not only contradictory to human nature, but requires a significant level of maturity. For some unexplained reason, coaches are sometimes shocked when a parent engages them about their child’s playing time or role on the team.

First, a coach should never go into the profession believing they will be above parental scrutiny. A coach that believes parents will not scrutinize their performance is severely naïve. As a general rule, coaches should expect all parents to be frustrated coaches and view the game from an emotional perspective. This is especially true in club sports where parents are paying customers. Nothing is more frustrating for a parent to watch their child sit on the sidelines and not know why. Allowed to fester, this frustration will progress through discontent to outright mutiny. A way to counter this emotion is to engage the parents early and often to manage their expectations.

Second, a coach who benches a player out of spite toward a parent needs to find a new line of work. Benching a player for the parent’s actions is an emotional response, not a rational one. If a coach’s decision-making is emotionally driven, their chances of long-term success are very limited. Furthermore, if the coaches’ charge is to develop the player, it’s dubious the player will develop sitting on the bench in an attempt to punish the parents. Most mature coaches have a practiced and lucid response for a parent if disruption persists and becomes untenable for the coach. A metered response often works very nicely. Something akin to “Sir, I realize that you are unhappy. As such, I think it would be best if you and your child found another team to play on. However, should you decide that this team is best for your son/daughter, he/she is welcome to return.” Coaches should seek the high ground in these exchanges. Unfortunately, most coaches (either consciously or sub-consciously) take the tact of making the player pay for the parent’s sin.

Commandment #10: Thou shall be a role model for thy players
Coach Morgan was having problems. Out drinking with some college friends about a month ago, he had gotten arrested for Driving Under the Influence. Having had his driver’s license suspended and awaiting a court date, his wife was driving him back and forth to school so he could teach and coach. To make matters worse, one of his players, Steve, had been caught drinking underage by the local police over the weekend. When he brought Steve in to tell him that he was going to be kicked off the team, the player hit the roof. “What!!! How can you kick me off the team?” he asked. “Look at what you did. It was way worse than my crime. Yet here you are still in charge of the program.”

Compromising actions by coaches are a non-starter. Part of a coach’s job description is to be a role model for the players they coach. David Jonassen, a longtime professor of education, maintains that student’s modeling behavior focuses on imitation of the performance of an expert; in this case the coach of the team (Jonassen, 1998). In short, if they see the coach do something out-of-kilter, they assume it’s appropriate for them to do so. Unfortunately, many leaders erroneously believe they can separate their personal actions from their professional dealings; experience tells us this is a faulty premise. Once a leader accepts responsibility for a team, they are on full display. Their lives become open to public consumption by players, parents, administrators, and the press. As a result, a good piece of advice is to do everything in plain sight; nothing is done in secret or out of view.

When it comes to being a role model, leadership by example is the best course of action to embrace. If a coach fails to seek self-improvement, why would the payers work to advance? If a coach boasts or is a braggart don’t expect the players to be reserved or demonstrate sportsmanship. If a coach allows a permissive environment, expect program structure and accountability to be hard to find. In short, team and players adopt the personality characteristics of their coaches. In this vein, managing expectations is something that coaches should do. Don’t promise on something you can’t deliver such as overnight success. To do so is consciously dishonest, and honesty and accountability are positive traits coaches should routinely model for student-athletes.

In summary, coaching and leadership are intricately intertwined. The leadership skills required to lead a platoon in combat are awfully similar to the skills required of coaches at the high school and college levels. Just as there are things combat leaders must do correctly, so too, are there things in which a coach must not fail. These “no fail” areas can be collectively referred to as the ‘10 Commandments of Coaching Leadership.’

References
Bass, Bernard (1990). Bass and Stogdill’s handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications. New York: Free Press.

Bradley, R. (2002) Child Training Tips: What I wish I Knew When My Children Were Young. Grand Rapids, MI: Family Ministries Publishing, p 22.

Daloz, L. (1986). Effective Teaching and Mentoring. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp 43-88.

Dodge, A. & Robertson B. (2004). Justification for Unethical Behavior in Sport: The Women in Coaching Program, May 2004. Ottawa, Canada.

Engelhorn, R. (2001). Legal and Ethical Responsibilities of a Coach. Retrieved from website https://www.iahsaa.org/RichEngelhorn.html, 16 Jun 08

Fujimoto, K (2003). Evolution of Social Networks Among American Female Adolescents. University of Pittsburgh. P 54.

Gavelin, U. (Unk). Accept Responsibility. Retrieved from website https://www.focusonleadershipandlife.com/home/articles/show_article.php?article_id=56, 16 Jun 08.

Hooper T. (1991) PE Teachers Teach the Way They Were Taught: Asset or Handicap? Retrieved from website: https://www.educ.uvic.ca/Faculty/thopper/Cupr/Archived%5Cwaytaught.htm, 10 Jun 08.

Jonassen, D. H. (1998). Designing Constructivist Learning Environments. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional Theories and Models (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Krzyzewski, M. (2006). The official website of coach Mike Krzyzewski. Retrieved from website https://www.coachk.com/quotes.php, 17 Jun 08

Laidlaw, S (2007). Kids in Organized Sports More Likely to Cheat. Retrieved from website https://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/188128, June 13, 2008.

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Merriam-Webster (2008). Retriedved from website https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/typification, 11 Jun 08

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Wetzel, D. (2006). Doing It His Way. Retrieved from website https://sports.yahoo.com/ncaab/news?slug=dw-bobknightrecord122106&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

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Lt. Colonel Larry Wilson has served in the United States Army for more than a quarter century. He holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership from Kansas State and has coached at both the youth and high school level over the past 20 years.

For the past 15 years, Troy Malone ha coached at a variety of levels, from youth programs through high school. He is a graduate of Northwest Missouri State.






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