In my mind’s eye I’ve been a head college coach for a long time. I’ve been making practice plans, learning/designing offenses, putting together preseason and post season workouts all long before there was even a hint of me reaching this pinnacle. I’ve envisioned the intensity, the sweat, the blood, the late nights, early mornings, the burden of despair, and the emotions of victory all without ever having put the whistle on my neck. The common misconception of any of life’s grand dreams or simple schemes is that things actually work out the way we plan them to. I envisioned a practice equitable only to war. I wanted a program where only the strong survived, where the environment we competed in everyday was cutthroat, intense, blood and sweat driven, where friendship was built through being soldiers in battle, where there was a price for perfection that was willing to be paid. That’s the place I wanted to create, that was the place I was going to create. Then I realized that not only am I coaching 18 year old girls, but more importantly, I’m not that coach. Every coach has their own style, and it’s a reflection of their personality. There’s something innate inside of me, an uncontrollable passion that burns and can’t be stopped. My heart is driven to win, driven to teach, and driven to help people grow. On the opposite it’s not in my innate nature to be totalitarian type of coach. As silly as it might sound, I can’t help but have fun. Not to discredit those who coach as dictators, for many have and many have been exceptionally successful; it’s simply not who I am. You really can’t coach like anyone but yourself. As many books as you may read or seminars you may attend, you are always going to be you (a novel concept I know). While philosophies and strategies can be taken from other coaches, and styles replicated to some extent, it still won’t change the person employing those philosophies and styles. In a well penned article ESPN’s Dana O’Neil writes of the stoic personality of Syracuse’s head coach Jim Boeheim who was quoted saying, "I have never had fun coaching…I hope that a doctor who operates on me in the operating room, if it's a serious operation, isn't there to have fun."
"I don't want to make light of what a doctor does, but what we do to us is very serious," he said. "It's what we do and we want to do it right, be able to get it right. If I want to have fun, I play golf. This is not fun. If I wasn't getting paid, I wouldn't be doing this. You get satisfaction out of doing something right, just like everybody else does, and I get a lot of satisfaction when we do things right and play right. I think that's the way it should be."
I had an exceptionally stimulating conversation with the women’s soccer coaches as we ate dinner a few weeks ago. While the discussion initially came about regarding one of their athletes who is an intense competitor, but is often shunned by the team as she pushes them towards perfection and tells them how to become better athletes, an action which some of the other athletes view as insulting. I was able to sympathize with their situation as I am dealing with a similar one, but as the conversation turned we entered into a philosophical exchange about female athletes, their competitive nature vs. their sensitivity, as well as how that can and should be stimulated to create a competitive environment and killer instincts within them all without trouncing the emotions of the athletes and keeping them from standing against each other because of it.
Jim Beoheim is a future hall of famer. You cannot argue that he produces results at a rate the majority of coaches only dare dream about. But with our soccer team, the coaches hold athlete emotion in high regard. Our women’s soccer team is undefeated and sits at #8 in the country. As much as I feel that creating the Beoheim mentality in me would transition into a consistent winning program, I physically and mentally can’t do it. My coaching style and personality, as intense as it is, still laughs when I hear one of my athletes murmur, “that’s what she said” while I’m describing a lift in the weightroom. It keeps me from running a kid after she passes gas during our ab routine. It lets me tell a professor, without hesitation, to not let a kid use basketball as an excuse for academics and to do whatever it takes to get her grades handled. It lets me joke and laugh at the ridiculous colloquialisms that I learn from my young girls; “Coach, you outta pocket!” (I used it once and they laughed so I guess I still haven’t figured out what it means). It compels me to let kids cry in my office about family problems and boy problems and try to give them words of wisdom. Those examples aren’t to say that I can’t drive discipline into the hearts of my athletes when their performance is unacceptable, or words aren’t spoken to push them beyond their limits, they are to say that there exists the ability to work and love, to have passion and compassion, to invest in people and invest in winning.
Having Fun
The question now must be asked if my style can lead to results at this level. While at Hastings I was in charge of working with the post players and after one workout my head coach told me that while my style was good for high school it wasn’t hard enough for college. Sometimes I want to change my coaching style, I still can’t. I believe with every ounce of me that my style will equate to winning, but evidence proving or disproving that can only be produced in time.
We sit four days away from our first scrimmage; the first opportunity to play someone besides ourselves. After we travel Tuesday to Colby Community College we will trek to Frisco, TX to Fieldhouse USA to play in one of the largest Junior College Jamboree’s in the country. Hundreds of coaches from four year schools will be in attendance looking at recruits. Initially I was focused on simply beating some of the top JUCO teams in the country while giving the girls an opportunity to get noticed, but now I just want to play. I want to know where we stand compared to the country. As much as I want to travel the 12 hours down, win three games by 30+, and drive home, I just want to know if we are on the right track. The teams we will be playing in Texas will be upper echelon competition and it may result in an eye opening situation. After which we will only have a week before we turn around to play three teams in Garden City the following Saturday, Adams State University the next weekend, and then take a quick breath before the regular season starts. The days go tick, tick, tick as November 2, the date of our first regular season game, no longer looms in the distance but is chasing us down at Olympic speed.
In the coming weeks we will witness together if the evidence that is produced will prove me style or not.
Till Next time,
- Coach Kyle
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