Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Alex Ferguson in soccer – Steve Hansen, Warren Gatland, Eddie Jones in rugby – these are all top-class sports coaches who play a massive part in their team’s successes. Without them in position, the teams would struggle. Put another way, if a team is struggling, they remove the coach, not the players. The coach is an important and integral part of a team as he enables players to learn new skills through new drills, as he introduces new tactics through great tact. More importantly, the coach has a massive responsibility in bringing on his players as individuals and as part of the whole team.
The coach is important but more important than that is that a player must be coachable. He can have the greatest coach in the history of sport but if a player is not coachable then it is wasted. For success to come, a player must be coachable. He must be willing to learn and to be taught; as John Wooden, the great basketball coach once said, “It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.” Another coach highlights another crucial aspect of being coachable: “Good players want to be coached; great players want to be told the truth.” Being coachable is being open to feedback and especially criticism, and that does not come naturally to children – we have to help them to understand that feedback is not personal but is vital. Being coachable means being willing not just to learn but also to try again, to try something new, to try something different. It is to look for any and every way to improve, to develop, to progress.
This is important to grasp because this is one of the most important things a parent can, and must, do if their child is going to develop as a player. In a recent article we considered the point that “Your child’s success or lack of success in sports does not indicate what kind of parent you are”. The writer went on to say that the first sign of successful parenting is producing a child that is coachable. Our child’s success (or indeed lack of it) will be a by-product of our efforts in that regard. We do not make them sporting superstars; the coach will do that. We make sure they can be coached.
In that regard therefore we must as parents recognise and respect that we are not the coach, even if we happen to be a great sportsman in our own right. We are not the coach and so we must not coach. We are not trained to be such and we are not appointed as such. All too often we complicate things for our child because we offer conflicting or confusing comments as to what our child should do and as a result the child is left in a quandary: does he obey his coach or his parent? No, our role as a parent is not to coach but to ensure our child is coachable.
The best way that we can make our child coachable is to be coachable ourselves. We also must be open and willing to be coached, to learn, to receive fresh insights. We must understand, learn and accept what our child’s coach is seeking to do with his team. One of the hardest things we face as
parents is that education, be it academic or sporting, has changed since we were at school. Maths is taught differently in schools now compared to when we learned it; sports have changed in that time as well. If we are coachable we need to learn how sport is done today.
So we need to ask our child what the coach is trying to coach, then underline, emphasise and reinforce the coach’s message. We need to highlight the coach’s role, responsibility and authority. We need to encourage our child to learn and try again. Above all, we need to help him understand how constructive criticism is not only helpful but also necessary. We need to ensure we do not criticise, condemn or undermine our child’s coach in front of our child – if we do believe that we have the right and authority to offer constructive criticism, then we should have the maturity to do it in the right manner (quietly, graciously, positively) at the right time (not straight after a match) in the right place (in private).
An athlete on his own will never be enough; he needs to be coached. Enter the coach. Ability on its own will never be enough; a youngster needs to be coachable. Enter the parent. We do not need Jurgen Klopp or Steve Hansen to tell us that, though it might help coming from their parents. Parents who try to coach are no better than cockroaches – pests and a danger to health and safety.
