Building Your Coaching Staff Chemistry

By Scott Rosberg

If you're a coach, you know the value of a great staff to work with. You know that the bond that you build with your staff is critical to the success you and your team will have. If you're an athletic director, you know that the ability of all of your coaches in all of your programs to get along with one another helps make the entire athletic department a cohesive unit that works well together.

For any of you who have ever been on a staff that didn't get along or work well together, you know all too well the problems that can cause. Without that unity and togetherness on your staff, your team will struggle to have their unity and togetherness, and they will struggle to succeed.

"Building Your Coaching Staff Chemistry" is all about building the kind of coaching staff that coaches, athletic directors, and teams all want to be a part of. With chapters devoted to characteristics of good head and assistant coaches, developing the head coach/assistant coach relationship, responsibilities that coaches have to one another and the program, and coaches from different programs working together, this book is THE manual for coaches, athletic directors, and league directors to create the best coaching staff culture possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Rosberg
• Release date: May 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386846451

Scott Rosberg

Scott Rosberg has been a coach (basketball, soccer, & football) at the high school level for 30+ years, an English teacher for 18 years, and an athletic director for 12 years. He has published seven books on coaching and youth/school athletics, two books of inspirational messages and quotes for senior athletes and graduates, and a newsletter for athletic directors and coaches. He also speaks to schools, teams, and businesses on a variety of team-building, leadership, and coaching topics. Scott has a blog and a variety of other materials about coaching and athletic topics on his website – www.greatresourcesforcoaches.com.  Scott is also a member of the Proactive Coaching speaking team. Proactive Coaching is dedicated to helping organizations create character and education-based team cultures, while providing a blueprint for team leadership. They help develop confident, tough-minded, fearless competitors and train coaches and leaders for excellence and significance. Proactive Coaching can be found on the web at www.proactivecoaching.info. Scott can be reached by email at [e-mail] or [e-mail].

Book preview

Dedication

TO ALL THE COACHES with whom I have developed a positive relationship through the years, thank you for being part of this journey. Coaching has been one of the great highlights of my life, and I have so many of you to thank for the role you have played in it. You have been with me in high points and low points, in victories and defeats, and in the good and the bad (and the ugly!). Coaching with a team of coaches produces a bond unlike most others I have found. I thank all of you for sharing so much of yourself and your lives with me and with our team experiences together. It has been so fun, so gratifying, and so impactful on my life. I look forward to many more times like these with many of you and with many others I have yet to meet.

Of course, I also need to thank all the players who I have been fortunate enough to coach through the years. Without you there would be no coaching. As I say in the book, this is a relationship business. While this book is devoted to developing a relationship between coaches, the most important relationship of all for coaches are the ones they establish with their players.  For me, that has been the single greatest thing I have experienced in coaching and teaching. Without you, coaching and teaching would be a lot less fun and a lot less meaningful. While many of you have expressed your gratitude to me through the years for some kind of impact you said I had on you, it truly is the other way around. Your impact on me has been far greater than any impact I could have ever hoped to have on you. It is this synergy that the relationship produced that has made all the difference in the world to me.  Thanks for all that you have contributed to this journey in my life.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. Of course, family can mean a lot of people, and all of my family members have had an impact on my life in coaching and teaching. However, the most important family relationships that have impacted my coaching life have been the ones with my wife, Lisa; my step-daughter, Maggie; and my son, Morgan. You have put up with countless hours away from you, hours when I was with you but our time together revolved around athletics, and hours of supporting me in my coaching endeavors. You have also helped teach me how to navigate the extremely tricky world of coaching and parenting, sometimes at the same time! While I write and speak often about this topic to try to help others deal with it, it is a constant effort to be good in this endeavor. I hope I have not disappointed you too much in this regard. I could never say thanks enough to do justice to all that you have put up with and all you have given me, but I will try with a simple Thank You and I love you.

Preface

THIS BOOK COMES FROM a few different resources that I have created in the past. In 2006, while I was in my third year as a high school athletic director, I had a couple of different scenarios on my staff where head coaches and assistant coaches were struggling to get along and to work together cohesively. As I prepared to work with them on some of their differences, I took notes. I also researched the internet, my coaching library of books, magazines, articles, DVDs, and the public library in my community. What I found was that there was not much out there in any format on the head coach/assistant coach relationship.

The more I researched and found nothing, the more I wrote down my own thoughts on the topic in preparation for helping our coaches with their relationships. After about a week of writing, I realized I had the makings for some kind of document. After another week, I had a rough draft of my first booklet for coaches called, A Head Coach’s Guide for Working with Assistants. While I was in the middle of writing that booklet, I realized that I would need to write one for the assistant coaches, too. As soon as I finished the head coach’s booklet, I started writing the assistant coach’s booklet. While there was quite a bit of overlap between the two, my focus in the assistant coach’s booklet was more on how to be the best assistant coach one could be. A week later I completed The Assistant Coach’s Guide to Coaching.

By this time, Bruce Brown, the director of Proactive Coaching, had become a friend and mentor to me in this realm of coaching and leading teams. I had seen Bruce speak at numerous coaching clinics, and I had him come speak to our coaches, athletes and parents a couple of times. I sent him the two booklets to see if he would read them and offer any critique, edits, or suggestions on them. He said he thought they were really good as they were written and that I should put together a presentation based on them that I could give at coaching clinics and schools. He said he would let some of the clinics he spoke at know about me once I had a presentation put together. That suggestion sparked a presentation that I have done numerous times over the years. The title of this book takes part of its name directly from that presentation’s name – The Head Coach/Assistant Coach Relationship: Learning to Work Together.

So this book is basically a melding together of all three of those resources. If you happen to pick up the booklets, you will see a lot of the same information in here that you see in them, but I have added a lot more to this book than was in either booklet previously. I basically decided that I wanted one place for coaches to be able to read the information presented in both booklets. Also, after doing the presentation through the years, there are some things that I cover in the presentation that I wanted to make sure that I included in the book, too, so I have sprinkled many of those things in here as well.

Finally, I have also expanded the hour-long presentation into a 3-hour workshop. It is geared for coaching staffs of a particular sport, as well as the overall coaching staff in an entire athletic department or league. I am also creating an online class based on this book and the workshop. That should be coming to fruition by the end of 2017. Stay tuned to my website – www.greatresourcesforcoaches.com – for updates on its release.

Introduction

THERE ARE NUMEROUS books in the world to help you be a better coach. However, there is little written about the head coach/assistant coach relationship or the relationship between coaches in an entire athletic department. It is almost as if people don’t consider that there is anything to know or deal with in terms of these coaching relationships. However, there is a dynamic in the head coach/assistant coach relationship unlike any other in sports. There is also an important dynamic that exists with regards to all of the coaches in an entire athletic department or league.

While there are many teams in our world that have just one coach coaching them, this book has been written for those in the coaching world who are fortunate enough to be in a sport program with multiple coaches - head coaches, assistant coaches, grad assistants, and volunteer assistant coaches. For the purpose of ease and clarity, we will use the term assistant coach for paid assistants, grad assistants, and volunteers, unless otherwise delineated.

Sometimes, head coaches take their assistants for granted, and they forget how truly fortunate they are to have another set of eyes and ears and ideas to help them. All it takes is being a coach of a program without an assistant to remind you of the help that your assistants provide. So for you head coaches, enjoy your good fortune, and the head coach/assistant coach relationship will be one that provides many rewards for you and your program. For you assistant coaches, enjoy the experience of being on a staff with other coaches and learn all that you can from them, while at the same time offering as much to the program as you can.

When considering the variety of sports and the many coaches coaching those sports at a school or within a league, it’s no wonder why it is so important for coaches to learn to get along with and be able to work with the other coaches on the staff. Yet, much like the head coach/assistant coach relationship, there is not very much out there that is being written or discussed on this topic. But the relationship between members in an athletic department who do not coach the same sport is an important relationship to develop into one that is positive and working for the good of all parties involved. This book will offer you insights into the whys, hows, and whats of establishing and developing good working relationships with other coaches.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your title is, what sport you coach, or what level you coach.  If you are a coach, this book can help you.  Coaching can be a fun, exciting, rewarding, but sometimes extremely frustrating profession.  Hopefully, this book will help you and your staff work well together, while having a little more fun, excitement, and rewards along the way, and limiting the amount of frustration that you experience.

Chapter 1 - Why Coach?

THERE ARE MANY REASONS why people become coaches.  For many it is a love of the game.  For some, it is a feeling that they have some knowledge of how to play the sport, and they want to impart that knowledge on others.  Many people who get into coaching have a strong competitiveness that they need an outlet for, and coaching is one way to release the beast.  Others start coaching because they have kids who play a sport, and they end up coaching to help their own kids.  Then there are those people who coach because they have just been hired as a teacher, and the school needs someone to fill a coaching position.  Finally, there are those who coach because they can make a little extra money doing it.  Or some do it for an even different reason.  No matter the reason, all of these people have ended up with the same title before their name – Coach.  Let’s take a moment to look a little more closely at the different scenarios mentioned above.  I think it is very important for coaches to keep in mind why they do what they do. Knowing your why will impact so many of your hows and whats, so make sure you know your own why when it comes to coaching.

Love of the Game

THE #1 REASON WHY MOST people coach is that they have a love of the game, whatever the game may be.  Somewhere in their youth, these coaches started playing a game or got into a certain activity that just hit them like nothing else.  The more they did it, the more they loved it.  Often, these people started to have some success and reap some rewards from the activity.  Maybe they tried out for their high school team and made it.  Maybe they became All-Conference or set some type of records.  They may even have been able to go to college because of their activity, or the ultimate level of all, being paid to play a game that they would have played for nothing.  No matter what level these people attained, they all had one thing in common – a love of the game.  You will find more people in coaching who are here for the sheer enjoyment of the sport than anyone else.

Impart Your Knowledge

SOME OF THESE PEOPLE who fell in love with a game fall into the next category.  They got so into their game that they studied it and picked up all kinds of knowledge on how to play it.  The more they played, the more they learned.  The more they learned, the more they played.  It got to a point where the fun was not just in going out and playing it.  The fun was in thinking it.  Outplaying an opponent wasn’t the only way to have success; you could also outthink an opponent.  As these people grew up, they found that one way to continue to stay in the game and continue to enjoy it was to coach it. 

This knowledge can be a real plus for someone who is hired to coach a sport.  However, it can sometimes be more of a problem than a plus.  Some of these people believe they have all kinds of knowledge on how to coach their sport simply because they played the sport and may have been quite good at it.  However, as any coach who has been around the game for a while knows, just because you played it well, doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to coach it.  Great physical talent is of little use when it comes to trying to help others become the best they can be. 

In fact, many very physically gifted, successful athletes have not been very good coaches because they can’t understand how average players struggle so much.  These coaches then struggle to explain to players how to do something because they themselves never really had to figure it out and study it.  It came so naturally to them that they never really had to break it down.  Now, they have no way of explaining how to do what needs to be done.

Sometimes these talented, successful players who became coaches struggled to coach for another reason. They could not handle the fact that so often players just didn’t have the same passion for the work and the grind