The Complete Coach: How to Develop Players Who Will Be Successful When They Leave Your Program!

By Ryan Wiggs

The purpose of The Complete Coach is to help coaches organize their programs in a way that helps them be more successful during the season, but will also develop high character individuals outside of athletics. The book is broken into 3 parts- Your Culture, The Meaningful Practice, and Competitions. All three parts offer ideas and suggestions about how to smoothly run your team and set them up for success in addition to ideas for positive character building. The hope is that you find one or two ideas that really resonate with you and you can begin implementing them in your program right away. Although this book is written here in 2022, I believe the ideas included will prove to be timeless. No matter what sport you coach, or what level you coach, if you want to improve your coaching style, this book is for you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667864532

Book preview

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The Complete Coach

©2022, Ryan Wiggs

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66786-452-5

ISBN eBook: 978-1-66786-453-2

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Your Culture

1. The Team Read

2. Community Involvement

3. Parent Relations

4. Team Get Togethers

Part 2: The Meaningful Practice

5. Finances

6. The Blank Page

7. Team Feedback

8. The Practice Plan Breakdown

Part 3: Competition

9. Amount of Competitions

10. Focus Areas During Competitions

Conclusion

Introduction

Compared to many of you veteran men and women out there, I have been coaching for a relatively short amount of time. My first baseball coaching job came in 2010 in a small school district in central Illinois. At Delavan Junior High / High School, I was the junior high head coach and the high school assistant coach. After moving back to my home town of Belleville, Illinois, I became the JV baseball coach for 3 seasons at Belleville East High School before taking over as the head coach of the program in the fall of 2015. So, I have been a head high school baseball coach for 7 seasons (one of which was lost due to COVID). At this point you may be thinking, Why is a guy who has been a head coach for only 7 years writing a book to guide other head coaches? That is an excellent question!

When I first took over as the head coach, I scoured the internet for resources on how to run an effective program. What I found was a plethora of articles, books, and videos about the most cutting edge technology and drills. The amount of information about how to increase exit velocity (the velocity at which a batter can hit a baseball) and spin rate (a measurement of how quickly a ball spins out of a pitcher’s hand) was unbelievable. There is a drill for everything in baseball. And drills are great. There is a real need for good drills to improve play on the field.

In addition, I found thousands of coaching clinic speeches and books written about ways to improve your team’s culture. Everything from team gatherings, to mental toughness exercises, to yoga…there are all kinds of things coaches are using to increase