Coaching For The Brave

Seven Deadly Sins of Coaching Coaching is a noble pursuit. Everyone who takes up the role is offering help. That offer should be welcomed, recognised and celebrated. Yet everyone who ends up with the role of Coach is doing it for different reasons. They may want to help their sons and daughters progress in a sport they love, they may want to give back to a sport that offered them so much or they simply be generous and want to volunteer for a great cause. Some, we have seen, do it for themselves. It's about rewarding themselves or being seen in a certain light or emulating people they believe are role models. So as we all come to the role of coach for different reasons, we can all fall for the obvious traps when circumstances allow. We can't avoid them altogether, we're only human. However, we can be more aware of them and try to swerve them when possible. Mainly as a prompt for myself but also for anyone else reading, here are the Seven Dead

These words were inspired by a recent touchline conversation I had with an opposition coach. It was so weird it started me thinking, has the pernicious "win at all costs" approach been replaced by a "develop at all costs" approach? Let me try and set the scene: Its a blustery Saturday morning about 10:30 am at my home pitch on the Fylde coast. The under 9's are engaged in a very competitive, close encounter and the score is 2:2. Stood 3 metres away is the opposition coach bellowing out commandments to his team. Few, if any are responding and he seems to be getting more and more frustrated. He asks if he can leave his area and stand level with his back line and coach them mechanically. "Matt, two yards back. Joe, five to your left and watch their number 7" Matt and Joe, start to follow his every word. Until, one of my team breaks through directly on goal with just Matt and Joe in the way. He bears down on goal and both d