The Assistant Coach's Guide to Coaching: Coaching Mastery

By Scott Rosberg

Assistant coaches are the unsung heroes of any team. All too often, their impact and importance go unnoticed. While head coaches receive the majority of the attention, assistant coaches are right there—side by side with their head coaches—helping to guide their teams to the success they seek. Most head coaches fully understand how fortunate they are to have great assistants on their staffs. They also understand that how well they and their assistant coaches navigate their relationships and deal with one another has a major impact on their programs.

 

Unfortunately, not much has been written about these relationships—until now. The Assistant Coach's Guide to Coaching is Scott Rosberg's companion book to his book, A Head Coach's Guide for Working with Assistants. In that book, Rosberg discussed how head coaches must work with their assistant coaches to develop the success they seek for their teams and programs.

In this book, he shifts his attention to the assistant coaches and the impact that they have on that success. He focuses on such things as:

Why Coach?

Roles of Assistant Coaches

Characteristics of Good Assistant Coaches

Responsibilities of Assistant Coaches

Assistant Coaches Becoming Head Coaches

 

While both books are filled with important information for each group of coaches, The Assistant Coach's Guide to Coaching is written to help assistant coaches do all that they must do to help their teams and programs become the best they are capable of becoming. If you are an assistant coach—or considering becoming one—this book will help guide you in this important role on your coaching journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Rosberg
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781960054012

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

Introduction

This book has been written as a companion to A Head Coach’s Guide for Working with Assistants. While it would be helpful for head coaches to read this book and assistant coaches to read the head coach’s guide, neither is a prerequisite for the other.  You will find some overlapping information in each, and you will find some information unique to each.

As I stated in the introduction to the head coach’s guide, I have seen numerous books on coaching throughout my career, but I rarely see things written on the head coach/assistant coach relationship. So, I decided that it was time to write a book on it. As I was writing the head coach’s guide, my focus was on helping the head coach make the most of the good fortune of having assistant coaches.

While head coaches were my original intended audience, I found that a lot of what I was writing was also written for the assistant, as well. I then decided that I should write a companion book with the assistant coaches as the intended audience. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your title is. If you are a coach of any kind, these books can help you. Coaching can be a fun, exciting, rewarding, but sometimes extremely frustrating profession. Hopefully, these books will help you have a little more fun, excitement, and rewards along the way, while limiting the amount of frustration that you experience.

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 for which they need an outlet, 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 been hired as a teacher, and the school needs someone to fill a coaching position. And there are also some who coach because they can make a little extra money doing it.

Maybe you coach for an even different reason. No matter the reason, all of you have ended up with the same title before your 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.

Love of the Game

The #1 reason why most people coach is that they have a love of the game that they coach, whatever that 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. Any coach who has been around the game for a while knows that just because you played a game 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 physically gifted, successful athletes have not done well as coaches because they can’t understand how players without great physical gifts can be struggling so much. They then struggle to explain to players how to do something because they never really had to figure it out and study it themselves. 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.

If you