The Emotions of Coaching: Part 1

This piece will appear in a future ASCA Publication. Enjoy

“Emotion runs the show in sports” – James Loehr “The New Toughness Training for Sports”

The more years I coach, the more I take this to heart. As a coach I am no less “run” by my emotions than the athletes. And my coaching effectiveness is determined as much by my emotions as it is by my knowledge. Many coaches are overdeveloped in one area and underdeveloped in the other. Some are amazing people who get kids to respond to them in almost magical ways. Others are the big brains in the sport, meticulous planners, technicians, relentless task masters who nail down the physical progression. But I think the greatest coaches have both, perhaps not in equal parts, but neither part is greatly deficient.

My goal is in this article is get each of you to reflect on your emotional state at practice, at meets, or any time you are working with the athletes. If you are like I am, you already spend a considerable amount of time reviewing your workouts, learning about training, technique and everything swimming related. I challenge you to put some of that energy and time into emotional evaluation. How do I act around the athletes? What puts me in a good mood? What puts me in a bad mood? What makes me tense? What makes me angry? If I were looking at me each day, as the swimmers do, what would I see? And is that what I want them to see? I think for most of us changing a workout, or teaching a stroke technique differently, is far easier than facing up to your emotional states and then working to overcome them. It’s time to do the hard-work of coaching . . . improving ourselves.

I have used the Eight-Fold Path from Buddhism to illustrate the process of making changes for athletes, but I think it applies equally well to evaluating ourselves emotionally as coaches. Each step on the path can apply to many different things (which is its beauty), so my interpretation is not meant to be complete, but rather illustrative of the emotional side of coaching:

1. Right views (understanding): Become aware of how you feel on deck, dig deep into the real feelings
2. Right purpose (aspiration): Decide what you aspire toward – what needs changing?
3. Right speech: Mind your speech, make sure it is in line with what message you want to send
4. Right conduct: Act in a way that helps you reach your goals
5. Right vocation: Live and work in such a way as to grow emotionally
6. Right effort: Your effort must be sustainable and effective
7. Right awareness (mind control): Learn to be less reactive and more thoughtful during the hard times
8. Right concentration (meditation): Learn how to think and feel deeply.


Ever read parenting books? Or even watch some of the parenting shows like “Supernanny?” I find watching Supernanny fascinating because it always appears that the most out of control kids can be subdued by simple, straightforward rule setting and enforcement. Nothing draconian, nothing severe, but clear and consistent expectations and consequences. But enforcing the rules is very hard for these parents, that’s why they are on the show in the first place – don’t mistake “simple” for “easy.” These parents are unable to do the right thing because of their own emotional shortcomings. The rule enforcement, the consequences, the patience, the self-examination, that is more difficult emotionally than letting them be bad, or just yelling at them when you get fed up. Good parenting is a lot about becoming a better person. I submit that good coaching is the same.

I quote here from a well-known article by Anson Dorrance, soccer coach at the University of North Carolina, titled “Coaching Women: Going Against the Instincts of My Gender”: “And while we, as coaches, never want to cease learning about our sport, ultimately, coaching development ceases to be about finding newer ways to organize practice. In other words, you soon stop collecting drills. Your coaching development shifts to observing how to support and motivate your players, and how to lead them to perform at higher and higher levels.” Technical learning needs to be ongoing, but it’s only a piece of the coaching puzzle. I’m at a place where I need to dig into myself to become a better coach.

So how did your season go? Great? Poor? Or, as usual, a mixed bag? How will you do better next season? Instead of chasing the next thing, or the magic set, or the newest piece of equipment, look at how you connected (or failed to connect) emotionally with your athletes. Are the ones doing well the ones you get along with best? Are they the ones you like being around the most? Or the ones that react most positively to your personality? The answer is likely yes to those questions and that’s natural. But which is the cart and which is the horse here? Are they getting the extra positive attention because they are doing the right things, or are they doing the right things because they are getting extra positive attention?

The challenge of coaching is investing the time and energy into the kids who you don’t connect with as well. Sometimes they are just the more quiet ones, or those who don’t seem to want to be there, or are difficult, or annoying. This next quote is from a recent article on espn.com by Bill Simmons about the Lakers coach Phil Jackson after his retirement. Phil is known for his 11 championship rings, and having coached Jordan and Kobe, but I think this is a majorly overlooked part of why he is one of the great coaches of all time: "Steve Kerr told me once that what made Jackson special -- and Popovich too -- was that he cared about his twelfth guy as much as his best guy. He spent time with his players, bought them gifts, thought about what made them tick. He connected with them, sold them on the concept of a team, stuck up for them when they needed him. His actual coaching -- calling plays, working refs, figuring out lineups and everything else that we see -- was a smaller piece of a much bigger picture. His players competed for him for many reasons, but mainly because they truly believed Jackson cared about them. Which he definitely did." Are you prepared to care about all of your athletes like that? What stops you from doing so now? What can you do to change that?

At the club level we have the unique problem of coaching boys and girls together in the same group. Not many sports coach boys and girls together. Some run practices congruently, or practice together up a point, but not many do the same workout day in and day out for both boys and girls outside of a recreation level. I think of diving, gymnastics, track, not a long list for sure. Why do we train together in swimming? Out of necessity in one respect (what other sport dares to put 90+ kids in 25y by 50m area?), but also because in swimming girls can keep up with boys, or at least close enough to do the same workouts. But having them together has created some unusual social dynamics that do not occur in sports where the genders train separately.

We sometimes talk about the girls being more comfortable competing against the boys than each other in practice. Would women basketball players do better competing against men? Or in soccer? Doubtful, but maybe if they had grown up practicing with the boys they would. Do the women swimmers have better or worse leadership skills, competitiveness, practice habits, or confidence than women in other sports who practice same gendered? Sounds like a good sports-psych study to me. Or how about the men. Do male swimmers have better or worse abilities in all those areas for having trained with women? We often view the boys as immune to some degree, that they would “do fine” in any environment, but that is hard to believe. Compare the male culture at a military academy sports team to that of your mixed gendered club team, it’s hard to say those differences amount to nothing. And getting your butt kicked by another guy is one thing, but by younger girls is quite another.

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but from a coaching perspective I don’t think we would coach a same gendered group in exactly the way we currently coach a mixed gendered group. And because of that fact, a higher demand is placed on us as coaches because we have to be aware of whether our style works better for one gender or another. And if you intend on switching styles i.e. working with female athletes fundamentally different then male athletes (which most of us do either by design or instinct) that is yet another challenge. Yes, my claim is we have it harder than if we were coaching a single gendered group (sorry college coaches).

Ok, so, what emotional challenges does that reality present? I don’t want to get into the literature about the differences between men and women too deeply, as others have done a fine job of this before me. Here is a straight-forward illustration of how men and women often have different goals in conversation. Deborah Tannen in “You Just Don’t Understand” asserts that women have “rapport-talk” and men have “report-talk.” The idea is that women tend to use language to establish an emotional relation with the other person, a connection, being in-sync, demonstrating a sameness, an understanding. She also calls this “affiliative talk.” While men tend to convey information about impersonal topics, report about a situation. For women the act of talking itself, even if it is sharing information that seems inconsequential or irrelevant, matters a great deal, while with men not-so. Some arm-chair evolutionary sociology will claim that historically women needed rapport talk to establish connections and safety back at home, while men needed report talk to do the hunting and fighting. Ever try to have a “report” conversation with a female athlete that from your end is about changes she needs to make to her swimming, and she walks away thinking “Why does he always yell at me and hate me?”

Figure out where you sit on the spectrum of report v. rapport talk yourself. And that’s not as simple as being male makes you a report talker, as I venture to guess many of the great male women’s coaches have a sense of rapport talk. Go further though and notice how you respond when women have a successful performance in practice or a meet and how you respond when men do. Then do the reverse, how you respond to poor meet or practice performance in a male swimmer and female swimmer. Do you get more excited for one over the other? More disappointed or angry? Not sure? Ask a coach you work with, someone you trust, to assess you in this way.

It’s such a delicate balance, coaching both genders well at the same time, and that’s why so few teams are consistently equal in boy and girl performance. One of my pet peeves is how coaches unintentionally emasculate the boys. As if wearing a Speedo in front of girls (especially if you are skinny and small for your age) isn’t enough, you sometimes get beat by girls (and sometimes younger girls!). So given that, why do coaches often put down the boys for getting beat by the girls? You don’t have to say so directly to create that effect, just get more excited about the girls’ performance and act disappointed in your guys and you’ve done it. Another way to emasculate is taking the girls attention. If all the girls spend their time talking to the male coach and each other (and not the boys) that will make them feel less than. If you are a boy in that situation you’ve got to be thinking, “Screw swimming. How about I go play baseball or lacrosse with all guys and feel like a man instead of getting my butt kicked here and feeling like a wimp.”

Sometimes you hear coaches complaining about how their boys aren’t tough, or they aren’t staying on the team, or they are small and weak, as if they just happened to be in a town that has a genetically poor crop of boys. Try letting your guys be guys a little, let them stand around a bit and talk about how fast they are, trying to look tough, crack some jokes with them and help make them into men. If you don’t do that, and you are in a girl-dominated culture, with all their attention going to you and all your attention going to them, the only boys who last on the team are ones that are frankly like the girls. You want big, tough, aggressive, fast boys? Then make them! Let them race, talk a little trash, act tough, lift a few dumbbells, now and then even goof-off a bit (heaven forbid!) and you’ll find they start doing better.

In the 2nd part of this series, I intend on exploring the challenges new coaches face building trust with the athletes, and what it takes emotionally to work effectively with teenagers.