“What If My Coach Makes Me Worse?” | Part 1 (The Stakes & Myths)
At least one of you will be sidelined by a noncontact injury in the next month or two. Read that sentence as many times as you need for it to sink in.
Now, look at your body. See your Achilles, elbow, or knee intact, and without swelling or surgical sutures. Notice that your calendar is still chock full of practices, weights, and games. Feel what’s missing: pain. All that could change, soon.
If you’re shifting in your seat or feeling your stomach in knots, good. You feel what you have to lose, why you need to act, and what this three-part post is about. You or your coaches could prevent some of these injuries if either of you learned the warning signs. Others will have been caused by someone who was paid to keep you in one piece.
A pro athlete I know went to dinner with several other veteran players. He talked about his recent noncontact injury and how the team’s medical staff made choices that caused it. Every single guy sitting at that table went on to share a similar story. Every single one!
Numerous other athletes of various levels have told me their frustrations. They don’t know how to identify better from worse sports coaches, strength coaches, or physical therapists. The athletes who have been wronged before have become hesitant to trust anyone with their backs, stats, shoulders, and contracts, and rightfully so. Based on how many bad coaches I see with booming businesses, you should hesitate too. Don’t wait for a coach to fail you atrociously to be more judicious with your trust.
It’s an unfair ask, but you need to be armed with information to protect your body, mind, and career. You shouldn’t need to become an armchair expert in therapy, training, and skill acquisition! (But you do.) You should be able to trust your coaches implicitly! (But you can’t.)
I feel odd. Like I’m asking for some sort of utopia. One where coaches and practitioners deserve the trust that athletes must surrender in exchange for a mere chance to play the game, or a spot on the weight room floor, or medical advice. I guess I feel odd because this trust feels so far away—as if I’m asking for world peace. But I’m not. I’m asking for coaches to have earned the trust of athletes to do the job they are all paid to do.
What’s Yours Is Yours
Despite their intentions and titles, some coaches make athletes worse. Humans are animals, after all, and all organisms make mistakes. I bet all of you want to avoid suffering from your coach’s errors. How do you do that? Stay tuned (and subscribed), and I’ll guide you.
I first wrote to your movement and skill coaches because many of them needed to hear it and because coaches of all kinds still hold the power in sports for good and bad reasons. Regardless, it’s your career, and there are things you can do to make the most of it. You are not powerless—unless you believe you are.
You may need to realize some hard facts, however:
While many of you like your coach or physical therapist, his good intentions and likable personality do not mean he actually helps you.
I say this with a serious and compassionate tone: It’s your career, your time, your energy, your body, and your mind. If you care about any of the things in that list, it’s time to take ownership of them (if you haven’t already). It doesn’t matter if you’re thirteen or thirty-three. But the older you are, or the bigger your goals, the more responsibility you need to take for yourself.
As you can tell, I’m going to speak to you as if you were one of the Apiros athletes who I care so deeply about. My candor will be unwavering. If any coaches read this, consider this a warning: some things may be hard to hear.
Some of you need to wake up. Well, technically, none of you do. But for those of you who are on the precipice and want a nudge, I hope my words send you over, and you wake yourself up.
The Stakes of Each Season
Even if you get to choose retirement instead of it being forced by injury or roster removal, the whole thing goes so fast. Each season feels like a slow grind but they add up quickly, and each one is a large percentage of your career.
Let’s say Oliver’s soccer career went from sixteen to twenty-seven. Just one season was nine percent of his career, and I bet he didn’t take his first two nearly as seriously as the last. (Which is a good thing, people. He was six-fucking-teen…playing a game…for fun. God, youth sports fire me up.)
The math is more simple and more dire for collegiate athletes.
If you got skillful enough to make it to the pros and perhaps picked your parents right too, your career could be taken from you at any moment. You might only get one to three off-seasons to elevate your game. You have more to gain and more to lose, and it is easily lost. So take more responsibility.
Regardless of where you are, you have no time to waste with coaches and therapists who fail you. So why put your career into the hands of someone undeserving? Someone whose career will continue after yours ends, even if they ended it!
Are you starting to see how backasswards our culture and traditions are? To my world, I welcome you.
I know, some of you are asking me, “But what can I do? They make all the rules!” Listen, you have more options than you realize, and some of you will need to be more creative than others. I’ll try to help but please remember: it’s your roster spot, your mortgage payment, your Achilles, your thoughts, your emotions, and your dreams. Yours. Find a way.
In this series, I’ll show you the doors, maybe even open a few, but only you can walk through them. (FYI: For simplicity, I label all people who help your body, mind, or skills as a coach. I’ll explain a curious reason why in part three.)
Good Omens
The first thing you need to do is figure out if your coaches help or hurt you—if it isn’t already apparent. Don’t worry; I’ll help you audit them. Once you figure out where you are, you can decide where to go, and I’ll give you a map of sorts.
Let’s start with the big picture. Becoming a great athlete requires problem-solving—from you and your coaches. There are only two problems to solve: how to stay healthy and how to become more skillful. Truly, these are your problems that coaches merely help you solve. (Mental health and skills are included.) Either your coach actually keeps you healthy, and you see your skills evolve, or he doesn’t. Your audit can be as simple as that.
By the way, jumping higher or throwing harder is only a means to become more skillful. You could pitch 16,000 mph and jump to Jupiter, and eventually get tested for steroids. But none of that matters if you can’t throw strikes, if you intended to land on Saturn, or if your rotator cuff is in two pieces.
Your coach should demonstrate two primary skills to solve these two problems:
Results-based strategies:
Good results in athletic endeavors require creativity. Your coach needs to try new strategies and learn from mistakes. She needs to create challenging and novel practices that result in you making mistakes instead of expecting perfection from predictable practices. (This concept applies to movement, therapy, and skill practices.)
Process-based strategies:
The number of effective and broad processes in sports is small. Load management and tendon health are two, but even those require some personalization. Statistical and tactical data that help sports coaches call better plays are others. Great coaches consider the proven processes in addition to their instincts. You want someone who knows the few processes worth trusting.
So what does that look like for you? It means that any time you’re trying to get a result, like learning a new skill or upgrading an old one, your practice and training sessions should look and feel different from time to time. Sometimes surprisingly so. Fun is a good indicator. Predictable, monotonous, and popular practices are notoriously unfun and just as useless. Honestly, your sessions might look like an imaginative child designed them, and that’s a good thing.
This results-driven creativity applies to movement and strength training too. Even rehab could be less drab. You deserve sessions that are so creative they don’t fit neatly into the cells of a spreadsheet. However, your coach should repeat effective processes for some specific adaptations, like strength or endurance. If she applies too much chaos, you won’t get the adaptation you want.
But your coach should know which processes have been proven effective! And she must be able to explain them to you if you ask. (You should always ask.) She should know their utility from research and years of experience with a mind sound enough to admit mistakes and be objective with herself. So, ask about the research she’s read and mistakes she’s made, and what she’s learned.
Smoke and Mirrors
So many athletes say they’re trusting the process, and in doing so, they exonerate themselves and surrender their careers. Trusting the process too much can be deceptively dangerous. You deceive yourself into a sense of safety while ignoring the mistakes that are trying to teach you something. If you’re “trusting a process,” the process should have been proven trustworthy!
Trust is a simple equation: behavior over time, something (or someone) becomes predictable. If you’re trusting your finite career and energy to a process, it better have worked before. Just because it worked for Thing 1 and Thing 2 doesn’t mean it will work for you. You need a process that works for you. Your coach’s responsibility is to prove it, and yours is to question it.
This next trap is a tough one because few of you can escape it. Ideally, your coach does not punish your mistakes. That only creates more unnecessary problems for you (and her, she just doesn’t realize it.) The mistakes are the consequence. If you’re not learning from your mistakes, that’s partially on her. She should figure out why. That’s her job. Not yours. Don’t let her put that bad juju on you!
If you can’t fire your coach, my best advice is to change your thoughts and relationship to her and the punishments. Your thoughts might turn into, “Okay, I’ll treat my coach like an irritable fan. Can I stay focused while she yells?” “I get to see if I can ace my serve while out of breath and exhausted, what a challenge!” In essence, your mantra becomes “everything happens for me instead of to me.” It’s cliché, I know. But if you think like that, you’ll turn any lemon-coaching into your lemonade.
So now that you know what’s at stake and a few things to look for, what do you do about it? I’ll tell you in the next two posts. I’ve made lists with free and paid options, which should help you regardless of where you are in your career. By the way, these posts get sent out to email subscribers first. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.