Wanting and Doing the Best for your Athletes

Wanting and Doing the Best for your Athletes

“The greatest success we’ll know is helping others succeed and grow.”

Coaching is not always easy, sometimes it can be extremely difficult, but as a coach it is our responsibility to do our absolute best to prepare our athletes for each at-bat, situation, pitch, game, tournament, and level of play. If we are not preparing our athletes and teaching them skills and providing them with knowledge, we are not fulfilling our purpose as a coach. It is up to us to not only want what is best for our athletes, but to do what is best for our athletes.

Each athlete is different. In the sport of softball, we have all kinds of athletes on the spectrum of strengths and weaknesses. It is up to us to use the strengths as a whole, and to work on the weaknesses purposefully and sufficiently in order for the athletes to get better as individuals and as a team. If we only focus on their strengths and ignore their weaknesses, we are not helping them, challenging them, or preparing them. If that is what you are doing as a coach, you are ignoring or covering the weaknesses, and that is disrespectful to your athlete. If you are a coach, do not push the weaknesses to the side, make sure you are including drills, knowledge, and questions that help them see, understand, and apply the new to start getting rid of the old.

We should be creating practice plans that not only keep their strengths tuned and progressing, but a plan that starts and keeps pushing their weaknesses further up the spectrum in becoming strengths. I have seen and heard a lot of negativity about coaches, practices, and games that is extremely upsetting. As a coach, we have to realize how much of a role model we are and how much of an impact we have on each athlete, parent, and fellow coaches. If you take the position of a coach, it should not be because you want to be in charge, because you want the title, or because you want your kid to play. Taking the position of a coach should be to help, teach, instruct, prepare and do everything you can to get each of your athletes to progress consistently, to compete successfully, and to reach and play at the next level sufficiently. It is and should always be about the athletes on your team.

Parents and athletes are putting trust into their coaches. Parents and athletes care about the practices, team bonding, games, and what the coach says and believes in regards to softball. Not everyone has played softball or been around sports, so parents are also learning, asking questions, and putting trust and time into their athletes sport. If you are wasting that time, you are taking away from an athletes ability to learn and progress each minute they spend on the field and with the team. If you are not coaching for the right reasons, that trust will not be present within the team, you will lose players, and you will lose respect not only as a coach, but as a person.

Be there for your athletes! Be purposeful when you are making practice plans, be their cheerleader, but also their challenger to keep them progressing, learning, and growing. Be their role model they can trust and learn from. Be their COACH. A coach who cares. supports, and does everything they possibly can to help their athletes be learners and competitors of the game.

 Are you wanting and doing the best for your athletes?

Written by Nikoli Sharp