Many school sports coaches have clearly been brought up watching soccer matches on television where the highly-paid coaches stand on the side of the field shouting instructions constantly to their even more highly-paid players, so they feel they must do the same. Do none of the coaches think there is something profoundly wrong that a player who is being paid over $200,000 a week has to be told what to do all the time? Either the coach should be quiet or pay the ‘star’ players less!
Furthermore, many of today’s school sports coaches were not trained as teachers, so they coach in a very different way to how teachers teach. A school sports fixture is an examination, a test to find out what the players have learned during the week in their practices, in the same way that pupils are tested in examinations on what they have learned in class. Here is the thing, though: teachers do not stand at the side of the school Hall during an examination and shout to the pupils seated at their desks: “The answer to number three is seven – write it down!” That would be utterly ridiculous and totally wrong! The same applies for those coaches who shout instructions to their players.
It may be that many of today’s school sports coaches were brought up playing sport on their Play Station consoles, which might explain why they coach as they do. When people play their Play Station games, they move the players on the screen around from their seat by pressing the knobs on the machine – the players on the screen are being moved by their coach. That is precisely what is happening when players on a real sports field are playing a fixture and the coach is on the sidelines telling the players what to do and how to play. The coach is playing the game, not the players.
Such school sports coaches have clearly failed to grasp a number of very obvious points. Firstly, in telling their own players what to do they are at the same time letting the opposition know what their players are going to do! Would they go into the opponents’ changing room before the match and advise them what they are going to do during the match? Of course not! Then why do they shout instructions from the sidelines during the match? It is the same thing!
Secondly, coaches must have failed to register the fact that in all the noise of a match (from spectators, players, referees and the surroundings, such as water polo players having their heads under water most of the time and also wearing caps to protect their ears) the players cannot actually hear what the coach is saying! The words are totally wasted!
Thirdly, if a coach is expecting his players to listen to his instructions he is not helping them to concentrate on the game. It even happens that a player looks across to the coach to find out what to do next at that very moment the ball comes towards him and he misses it! What makes it worse is that the coach then shouts at the player for missing the ball!
Fourthly, what a coach who is shouting instructions from the touch lines is inadvertently saying is that he has done a bad job – he clearly has not prepared his team well enough for the match if he has to tell them what to do!
Apart from these various clangers there are a number of more serious and crucial reasons why coaches should not shout instructions from the dugout throughout a match. The first one is that a school sports fixture is not for the entertainment of the crowd or the extended contract of the coach but for the education of the children. Secondly the coach has missed entirely that his players must learn to win and to lose; parents will be deeply angered if a teacher tells them that he has only covered half of the curriculum. The sporting curriculum must cover both winning and losing.
The third crucial point that the coach is missing, which has a massive impact on the child’s future, is that the child is not learning the key learning skills of critical thinking and problem solving. When the coach is telling the players what to do or what they are doing wrong, he is not helping them to learn; he is not helping them to avoid the mistakes in the future, when the coach will not be there to help them. Players must learn to think for themselves, must learn to take responsibility for their actions and must solve problems themselves. You do not need to earn $200,000 a week to realise that!
