Sorry it has been a while since my last post. We moved back to Illinois from South Carolina and school began again (my real job). I wanted to write a quick post on some trouble shooting within developing an athlete centered coaching style.
When I began coaching the answer to any issue we were having on the team had two components, yelling and running. This was a very effective short term motivator and many times the behavior was corrected almost immediately. At the time, this was the only means I knew and I thought it was very effective because I was seeing results. What I noticed was, while I was changing the short term behavior, we were having the same issues every year. We were not making any long term change in our programs behavior. That is when I knew I needed a new approach. The teams were becoming "my" teams, not the athlete's team. I needed to make a change and take the team from my team to our team, then to the kid’s team.
Transitioning to an athlete centered team will not happen overnight. In fact, if you try to make the transition extremely quickly, it will probably fail. The players my first few years were so used to me running everything and telling them exactly how to behave in every situation that they would have fallen flat on their face had I suddenly turned it over to them. The transition needs to happen slowly (usually a couple of years). The most difficult question for me to answer as I was making this transition was “how do I discipline my athletes without yelling and conditioning?”
Below is a quick list of actions that can be taken to discipline athletes without conditioning.
1.) Communicate. If there is a problem, simply talking to athlete, listening to their side and expressing your concern over a behavior goes a long way. If the athlete knows you have their best interest in mind, a simple conversation will take care of 90% or more of the problems on a team and you will be surprised what you can learn by listening.
2.) Take a breather before making a decision. Many times discipline is dished out during an emotional time and this is when mistakes can easily be made. Do not let the problem sit too long, but make sure you are calm and collected and you have carefully thought through your actions prior to taking them.
3.) Take away a privilege. The obvious one in this realm is playing time in games, but I know coaches who take away practice time as well. We used to make kids run and do extra field work if they were late to practice, now we simply have kids sit out a portion or all of practice. Our tardies have decreased significantly (even at our before school practices in the early spring) since we switched away from conditioning as a punishment.
4.) Lean on your athletes. If there is a discipline matter that can be discussed with the entire team or with your captains, listen to them and get their take on the situation. We often think of peer pressure as a negative influence, but it can be surprisingly positive as well. If you create a feeling of family on your team, athletes will not want to let their fellow teammates down.
There are many other ways you can deal with discipline other than the traditional yelling and conditioning. I challenge you to be creative. The traditional means of discipline are easy because we are familiar with them and they do change behavior in the short term. Instead of short term behavior change, try to change the culture in your program to where certain behaviors are unacceptable because they will let the team down, not because they face the threat of conditioning or verbal reprimand.
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