Loud coaching is not the same as hard coaching

You’ll find coaches and leaders at almost every level of sportsmanship and life. As we move through our education and into our careers, we will have many opportunities to interact with both good and bad coaches and good and bad leadership styles. The key is to pay attention to what styles and skills build the strongest, most effective teams and try to emulate and improve them.

I hear head coaches and assistant coaches preach to media, players, and other coaches at clinics that they coach their players hard. I think young professionals have a misguided notion of hard coaching.

To some of the athletes, coaches, media, and aspiring future coaches, this bears the connotation of a hard-driving, profanity-laden, arrogant, mean, and callous approach to coaching. I can’t speak for all those who stand up and proclaim that they coach hard, but I’m sure for most of them that is not the impression they would want anyone to have about hard coaching.

How Great Coaches Coach

Coaches should spell out exactly what hard coaching entails in the realm of his philosophy and program. Great coaches and leaders spell this out in the process of hiring coaches and recruiting talent.

Hard coaching is also misconstrued as “loud coaching”. The loudest coach on the field wins the contest for coaching his players the hardest in some programs.

Screaming at the top of your lungs from the beginning of the session until the end is not the best way to promote progress and improvement. Raising one’s voice can be an effective technique to ensure a critical coaching point hits home.

However, when the coach has the volume turned to high at all times, it loses its intent.

• Hard coaching is demanding team members are purpose-driven in all aspects of their work: from the classroom to the field of competition.

• Hard coaching is communicating to the team members what is expected of them and what they can expect from you.

• Hard coaching is demanding that both player and coach follow through with the expectations described.

• Hard coaching is a prescribed process which demands a degree of effort beyond good. Good is not good enough if you want to be the best.

Constant criticism and little praise is also a misconstrued notion of hard coaching as the team members strive for perfection in their performance.

Great coaches can coach hard by praising the model of performance rather than criticizing the undesirable aspect of the team member’s performance.

As rec-league coaches, parents and middle managers in charge of small teams, we can apply the lessons learned from great coaches to help develop our teams, families, and divisions in to top performing units.