Growing Future Leaders
It’s our responsibility to grow future coaches as well as developing your own coaching abilities. You cannot do one without doing the other. It is vitally important to bring out the best in the people you work with. In our internship program, my mission is to develop the interns, graduate assistants, and coaches I work with into position-ready candidates. With their loyalty to our program and the missions we plan to accomplish, I return the loyalty in kind.
In the movie, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Billionaire Bretton James portrayed by the actor Josh Brolin was a backstabbing business man – but had some great words of wisdom. He says
“I think every man should have a mentor and a protege at least one time in their life.”
I completely agree with this statement.
It’s your responsibility to give back to this profession.
Developing Coaches Is The Job, Not Extra Credit
It is our responsibility to grow future coaches as well as develop our own coaching abilities. You cannot do one without doing the other. Teaching forces clarity. When you have to explain the why behind a program to a twenty-year-old intern, you find out fast whether you actually understand it yourself.
At Wichita State I ran our internship program: eight professional interns a semester, day-to-day education, curriculum, and in-the-trenches teaching. That experience shaped my coaching as much as any team I trained. Young coaches ask the best questions because they have not learned which ones are supposedly naive yet. Do not waste that. Build a system that develops them on purpose, not by accident.
What I Ask Of The Coaches I Mentor
1. Be A Sponge And A Filter. Absorb everything, then decide what survives contact with your athletes. Do not become a clone of any coach, including me. The goal is a thinking practitioner, not a parrot.
2. Take Ownership Early. Own a warm-up. Own a group. Own the weight room setup. Responsibility is the fastest teacher I know. I would rather you make a safe mistake with real stakes than execute my perfect plan flawlessly and learn nothing.
3. Bring Questions, Not Just Answers. The interns who grew fastest were the ones who challenged my thinking. Do not work in a vacuum, and do not let your mentor work in one either. Openness and challenging each other's thinking are incredibly powerful and liberating.
Find A Mentor. Be A Mentor.
Every coach should have a mentor and a protege at least once in their life. The mentor shortens your learning curve by years. The protege forces you to articulate what you actually believe, which is the purest form of professional development there is.
Remember the smaller details of the people you lead. Ask for their feedback. Invest in their growth more than their output, and the output takes care of itself. Young coaches are more enthused by the opportunity to grow educationally than financially. Give them that growth, and they will carry your program's standards long after they leave your weight room.
It is your responsibility to give back to this profession. Someone once did it for you. Return the favor.