What Players and Coaches expect of each other

The role of the coach is often discussed. It is seen to be many faceted, complex and often hard to nail down. You need to be a teacher of skills, a counselor when things go wrong, a problem solver when players cannot get along. If you work in a school environment, then you are often a tutor or academic advisor.  In many instances, you can be a parental figure, a teacher of life skills or even a best friend. Coaches can be disciplinarians, expectation setters or enforcers. They can be comforters, companions or a shoulder to cry on.  All these things do not even begin to touch on the more mundane tasks of a coach like substitution and game planning. The very diversity of the expectations that can follow with the title coach can make defining the job very difficult. As a result, some coaches will just evaluate the circumstance they are in and define the most important elements of their coaching position relative to the community or circumstance in which they currently find themselves. This is an arbitrary definition that can change easily given different players or circumstances which make one’s success in meeting their outcomes tough to define. This sort of transitory definition holds value only to the specific case and is not usable by others. It lacks universal value and therefore, is not overly beneficial for our purposes.

Others will define coaching as being whatever your players need. This not only has the poetic value of being inter-related to the players, which we are seeking, but also lacks clarity. It is not often possible to know what your players will need until you are already in a situation. It is also entirely possible, and most likely probable, that players' needs will change over time, season to season or even during the competitive year. This makes a fair evaluation of this definition very tricky. One might start with a pretty clear picture of what they believe their players need, but as the year evolves, and though you may have had initial success, by the end of the year you may not have kept up with the changing needs of your players and may not have fulfilled your role. The further complication with this model is that it is amorphous and hard to define from each player’s standpoint. Like the many faceted nature of coaching, the players likewise have many needs. Trying to figure out all of them, or clearly defining their needs, does not leave very much room for growth or a positive assessment of the player’s ability to meet their 50 percent of the effort. While these vague definitions hold some value and validity, for our purposes, I do not believe they are suitable to what we are trying to accomplish here.

If we accept that overly vague or insubstantial definitions of a coach’s or player’s role is not valuable, then we must find another way to proceed. With this in mind, I have always found it useful to look at situations to see if there is a common idea or thread that can link many different themes together. When it comes to coaching and dealing with players both on and off the floor, I have found that there is a common theme that can link all the various roles to one main idea. We want our players to be the best they can be on and off the floor. What people need to move forward in any situation is repetitions. It does not matter what you do, whether you coach, play, teach, are an accountant or a banker. Whatever your vocation, job or pursuit, in order to improve, you need repetitions. The more you get to rep something, the better you will become. Whether it is taking a free kick, shooting a free throw, filling out a crossword or executing a bank transfer, the more you can do something, the more you become acquainted with its patterns and pitfalls. The more you can see and learn to identify potential success or failure, the more you will know how to maneuver to one while avoiding the other. So it follows if we are overseeing an athlete’s development, then we must ensure that they are given sufficient reps. The acquisition of repetitions can be seen more clearly as the providing of opportunity. If a player, or person, is to grow and meet their potential, then they require opportunity. The opportunity to practice, acquire knowledge and build confidence. From this then, we can say that the central job of any coach is to provide opportunity.  

Exactly what form this opportunity takes is also an important consideration. Does providing opportunity mean that we must have no cut policies, or equal playing time for all players? I know one very successful school basketball coach who coached for 30 plus years without ever cutting a player. They were very successful in traditional measures of winning and championships. I also know many successful coaches who believe it is essential to play all their players in every game. They may often curtail the number of players they keep in order to make this belief manageable and avoid unnecessary confrontations with players. Over the course of the season, a more transitory problem, which involves a player who may have some potential but is cut early, may be easier to deal with than a protracted problem; the unhappy player who does not play. Personally, I believe that the important element is to provide the opportunity. The exact nature of the opportunity is often up to the coaches and players to agree upon. In my career, which has involved working in various forms of educational settings, I found it was important to create a good healthy atmosphere around academic success so that everyone had the opportunity to achieve in that venue. I also treated every practice as an opportunity for every player to get reps and improve. We seldom limited reps for any group whether they were dressing or not, whether they had a key role at that time, or were reserves. In practice, every player deserved the opportunity to improve and make a statement about their preparation and readiness to compete. For this reason, I have never agreed with coaches, including John Wooden, who arbitrarily decided on their top eight or nine players early in the year and gave only those players reps. This can cause you to miss people who may be capable of making a contribution and certainly limits opportunity for some players based on age or past perception. It limits growth and can demotivate people as they feel their effort is not rewarded and they lack control.  

In terms of playing time, we felt the early season, (everything that came before Christmas), was the preseason. We used different combinations, played different line-ups and gave as many players as possible a chance to perform and show what they were made of in a real game. Thus, when tougher decisions were required, we felt we had the data and information to justify those decisions. It is hard to show a player they are not ready to contribute in a given situation if they have not had an opportunity. From this standpoint, we felt justified in telling players that decisions about playing time were in their hands: they controlled whether they played or not based on their ability to make plays when given the opportunity. While you are free to decide exactly what types of opportunities you will provide for your players, it is important to the job of a coach to provide these opportunities.

Thus, we arrive at a very neat and clean definition of the job of a coach. This job is simply to provide opportunities. In one word, we can clearly articulate what it is that we are trying to do when we coach. Although this does require some self-definition in each specific case, it has universal value as well. It is fairly easy to tell whether someone is giving their players opportunity. If a coach plays only a select number of athletes in competition, does not allow all athletes to rep their system in practice, or provides no emotional or academic supports, then they are denying their athletes opportunity and in doing so, it is possible they are restricting the potential growth of these athletes. If we can follow the logic that has brought us to this place and can in some form agree with the conclusion, then what follows is how this definition of a coach’s job can form a relationship with a player’s job to create one whole picture.  

Players, like coaches, can have many jobs. Like a coach, they can be performers, tutors, students and confidants. The question then, is how to boil down these roles into one manageable definition. In order to aid us in this task, a good starting point is to consider that a player who is given repetitions and opportunity to grow and experience things through the efforts of a dedicated coaching staff then has a responsibility to that staff. That responsibility often takes the form of best effort to train and play. The hope would be that this best effort would result in positive results for the player and, by extension, the team. In other words, we expect the players to produce. In the classroom, on the practice court, as a teammate and in games, players need to take all these opportunities, treat them with the proper respect and try to grow. In that growth there should be production. Much like a coach needs to define the opportunities they will provide, similarly they will need to communicate clearly with the players to define what they expect in terms of production. Whether it is the use of analytics, traditional means of statistical analysis, or team success, when certain players or combinations are on the floor, the coach needs to be clear with the players on what they are using to measure production, so that athletes can fairly evaluate where they stand in the program. There is no room for the “eye test” or “gut decisions” in evaluating whether players are productive.

This now gives us a clear definition that is interlinked and can be used in a variety of environments. Coaches will undertake to do their best to provide their players with opportunities. Players will do their best to take these opportunities and be productive. The clarity that arises from these definitions allows both groups to hold one another accountable. In most relationships there is a better chance for success when both parties have a clear understanding of what is expected from them. Coaches who fail to provide their athletes with consistent opportunities should expect their players to be dissatisfied. Players who cannot produce when given opportunities must expect their opportunities to diminish because of this lack of production. From this, our next consideration should be how this relationship can be properly evaluated by both sides and a solid process for this evaluation.