“To f*ck up is to find adventure.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep reading Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error until Schulz made this point at the end of chapter two. I thought all of chapter one and most of chapter two were too abstract and philosophical for my taste. But then, in the last pages of chapter two, she set the hook and both my highlighter and I were in. That’s when she wrote about the medieval knight errant and reminded readers that the Latin word errare, meaning “to roam”, gave rise to the English words “error” and “errand”. The English word “errant” can be used to express either idea. But enough about etymology. To be errant is to be wrong but also to be on an adventure.

In this spirit, Schulz gives readers the ‘Cuz It’s True Constraint: you believe what you believe because your convictions (you believe) are based on facts. You’re willing to accept the general notion that your beliefs may be biased, but if you pick a particular belief, you’ll probably say, “but not that one”1. You don’t believe things because they make you feel better, smarter, or more in control. That’s what other people do. You believe things because they’re correct. Wrong is something other people do and they do it for the wrong reasons. Schulz points out that even when you do admit you were wrong, it immediately becomes past tense because you no longer believe the same thing. You were wrong. Being wrong is not something people like. But, sometimes, you will be wrong. Mistakes will be made, even by you.

So why do you make errors? One big reason is that your brain is really good at inductive reasoning. You extrapolate out from a little bit of evidence to make claims that reach farther than they should. For example, you learn language by hearing others conjugate a verb a few times then you go out and conjugate it the exact same way in every situation until someone points out that you should say “took” instead of “taked”. People are built to work on assumptions and you don’t realize when that gets you into trouble. As Schulz phrased it, “every one of us confuses our models of the world with the world itself” (p. 107).

You silently substitute how you think the world works for how it actually works and then quickly convince yourself of the certainty of your model. So if you are certain that your model is how the world works and you see that my model is different from yours, then my model and, therefore my world, is wrong. You can see all the ways that my world is wrong but you can’t see how yours might be wrong in the slightest. You see my certainty as laughable but your own certainty as righteous. (It is worth remembering that this book was published in 2010 and written even earlier than that so there is now more than a decade of social media to show just how right Schulz is about how people treat being wrong.)

To me, the beauty of the book is that Schulz doesn’t turn it into a how-to on not being wrong, nor does she pontificate. She writes an ode to and explanation of “wrongology”. The closest Schulz gets to telling readers what to do about being wrong is suggesting that it is about far more than getting your facts straight.

Schulz is saying that people aren’t naturally inclined to fix their mistakes because they don’t want to see them. It costs people too much emotionally to admit their mistakes, so they hide from them as much as possible. But, Schulz says, facing up to those mistakes is necessarily intertwined with actually doing something about them. You can’t fix what you are unable to see. But seeing is painful.

There is a vulnerability in being wrong and it scares the crap out of people. Because fixing your mistakes means fixing yourself as well as your facts. But Schulz describes an “optimistic model of wrongness” in which error is a force that “imperceptibly helps...us human beings - to grow up” (p. 289). She’s saying that being brave enough to admit your mistakes to others is what makes you a better person as much as, if not more than, fixing the mistakes themselves.

So what does this have to do with coaching? Nothing. Everything. I take this book as an invitation to admit to and talk about being wrong. How does my wrongness affect my decisions? How does it affect how I treat those I see as wrong? How do I deal with my mistakes when they are made apparent? How do I treat those that show me my errors? As a coach, your relationships with athletes in your care (and with so many others) are built on trust and a power imbalance. Your positions of power can raise the stakes on the errors you make. Do you rely on your power to make things “right”? Do you rely on some version of “because I’m the grown up and I know better” to paper over your misjudgments? When you rely on your power to manage your mistakes, you do so at the expense of the trust placed in you. Your model of the world encourages you to be certain you have done the right thing so it’s difficult to understand why faith in you would erode.

There’s a tension between being right and being trusted. Coaches can go through their entire careers believing that the source of their trust is their knowledge. But the truth is trust and knowledge are far less related than you think. That might be my biggest takeaway from Schulz’ book. I don’t have to sell others on my certainty because I can gain trust just as well with my sincerity. Showing others how I manage uncertainty and error makes me more trustworthy because they never have to feel like I’m trying to convince them of something. I’d rather be wrong and deal with the consequences. After all, that’s where the adventure is.

“The science” is a commonly-used term by GMS staff at presentations I have attended. That term tends to represent two ideas, motor learning and scientific research. I have learned a fair bit about scientific research through my academic career but I haven't had the same kind of exposure to the field of motor learning. My memories of motor learning were all of hearing a clinic presenter talk about motor learning in much the same way as I have mentioned, as “the science”. And what was the clinician's level of expertise in motor learning? I have no idea now and I likely didn't know at the time either. It likely was not made explicit since it was not the main focus of what the clinic or presentation was about. This is the point: non-experts taking the words of possible non-experts and giving them the same weight as the actual “science”. I don't know how well the speakers actually know “the science” but the words sound good to me and, therefore, carry more weight in my mind. It doesn't matter if I am agreeing or disagreeing with what the speaker said, what I have overlooked is their role as an interpreter. They are sharing either a portion of the body of research or, more accurately, their perception of that portion. I, like most people, will unintentionally conflate the speaker's words with the words of the original idea that the speaker describes.

This conflation becomes very obvious if we use an opinion instead of a fact. I will tell you that, based on my experience, Arizona’s Grand Canyon is grander than the Great Wall of China is great. As you evaluate my statement you are likely to understand that it is an opinion. If I tell you instead that the Grand Canyon is longer than the Great Wall, it is much more likely that you will evaluate the statement as a fact (true or not) rather than an opinion. If you have no previous experience with either of these wonders, you may not be able to evaluate the truth of my statement, which leaves you in a precarious place. If we are friends and you trust me because I happen to be really good at trivia games, you may readily accept what I say. If we are friends and I am really good at trivia games and I like to pull the occasional prank, you may not trust me. But what if I am a speaker at a conference and I make the same conjecture? What if that conjecture is embedded in the presentation I give and it is part of a chain of evidence that I use to reach an important conclusion? If you're not a connoisseur of wonders of the world, you may not even notice because both of us are paying more attention to whatever conclusion I reach. You trust me not to lead you astray as I build my argument and I do my best to earn that trust.

To be clear, I am not saying that conference speakers are trying to lead you astray nor am I saying that you need to check the credentials of every speaker you listen to. I prefer to work from the assumption that presenters are earnestly doing their best to give you a concise and coherent story without getting bogged down in nuance any more than is necessary. So what does that have to do with motor learning?

When I hear people (from either side of the GMS fence) tell me what GMS believes or what “the science” says, I want to know more. I want to investigate the claims, not out of mistrust but out of fascination with learning. I want to root intellectual laziness out of me and that means reading “the science”. That means asking questions. Often. That means digging deeper instead of just digging in my heels. I don't want my initial response to be “they don't know what they're talking about”. I want it to be “I don't know what I’m listening to”. That curiosity can help me see what I need to wrap my head around. In the case of GMS, it meant learning more about motor learning.

I read Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis by Richard A. Schmidt and Timothy D. Lee in the winter of 2020 with the intent of learning what everybody meant by “the science”. I found it to be boring at moments and exhilarating at others. Above all, I found it thought-provoking. I highlighted stuff, I downloaded research papers to read. I talked with friends that know more about this topic than I do. I talked with friends that rely on motor learning but in different contexts. I dug deeper. I learned. I came away with as many questions as answers. I'd tell you what I learned but that would defeat the whole point of this exercise.

As for the Great-Grand comparison, go look it up. Or, even better, if you're able, go look for yourself.

Society has a mindfulness problem. But it isn’t the one you would think of, or that popular culture and media would have you think of. It is the most ironic of mindfulness problems. You think you know what it means to be mindful: to be aware, to be present, to be in the moment. You’ve listened to countless soothing voices remind you to bring your attention back to your breath. But for what, exactly?

I certainly don’t take the position that mindfulness serves no purpose or that it doesn’t have any benefits. But I do agree with Ronald Purser’s main claim, that mindfulness is supposed to be rooted in something larger than yourself. I think that having clarity and focus is important but why should you seek to be clear and focused? McMindfulness teaches that your thoughts are a problem that needs solving or fixing. You are supposed to be mindful so you can be in control of your thoughts. Purser shows how mainstream mindfulness has incorporated the Protestant work ethic to its detriment. That work ethic tells you that you can achieve anything if you work hard enough, but when you apply that to mindfulness you drive yourself to be mindful only of yourself. You learn that controlling yourself is all you need to do. But that, says Purser, is not what mindfulness is.

The author makes many incisive observations about how McMindfulness has neutered what mindfulness is meant to be and about how mindfulness has become a tool of corporate interests. And while I agree with his arguments, I can’t provide more or better insight about those areas. What I want to share are my thoughts on how McMindfulness has influenced how coaches function and how they interact with others, especially athletes in their care. As coaches are wont to do, they have taken a complex framework and turned it into a drill they do in practice. Coaches have flattened the contours and nuances of mindfulness into a thing that they can plug into their practice plans rather than keep the complexity and have it change how they view coaching.

To be clear, I think that a simplified version of mindfulness is beneficial in sports and performance. While my interest in ecological dynamics and related theories of skill acquisition may lead to differing opinions of what coaches and athletes should be mindful of, I still think that both groups can free themselves to perform better by applying ideas of mindfulness. The issue is that mindfulness means so much more than “just focusing” and I can’t turn away from that. It is meant to have you better understand your place in the world, not just your place in the game. It is meant to position you to do something about the conditions you see in the world. When you use self-awareness mindfulness techniques divorced from their roots in social and community awareness, you miss the point of mindfulness. In McMindfulness, you use these techniques to slow your thoughts but you do so to make space for small actions like jumping higher and moving quicker or “better”. Purser is reminding you that the purpose of stillness of mind is to give you more clarity on what exists around you and how you are perceiving and interacting with everything outside of you but you can only do that by first making space within you. You can then use that space to be part of big actions too.

So are you using mindfulness in teams to help you do something to some object like a ball? Or are you using it to do something with those around you? Are you using it to be better coaches or better teammates and better humans? I don’t think you should just do a minute of focused breathing so that you are better at ignoring external “distractions”. I think you should use the breath as a way to see your team and your place in it more clearly. I won’t mistake a feeling of stillness for a feeling of peace. To me, the peace comes not from a quiet mind but from right living. The breathing gives me a chance to reflect on how I am living. I can see if I am working together with my teammates in meaningful and positive ways. Part of that reflection may be that I need to do my job better but I think that should come after the reflection on how I am integrating with my team. If I can’t or won’t be mindful of my part in the larger whole then I am putting my ego before all else, which is antithetical to a mindfulness practice.

I also think that using mindfulness practice is an opportunity to create awareness of things that exist outside of your teams as well. I think that you should be asking yourself how your coaching and their playing sports makes an impact on the larger community and the world. How can you use who you are and what you do to be a meaningful part of your community? If creating stillness and peace within yourself and your team means that you must do work outside of sport then I think you have taken Purser’s words to heart. I am not saying that sport should only be an avenue to social justice but I do want to say that mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition means that all of these lie along the same path.

I have been thinking lately about the communities in which we practice: our teams, our opponents, our spectators, our histories, our futures, and ourselves. I have been wondering what it is that we are creating, recreating, reproducing, passing on, and adding to. When we say we want athletes in our care to grow and develop, what do we want them to grow and develop towards? How do our daily choices and actions contribute to that? How can mindfulness be part of that vision? Let us meditate on that.

W. Timothy Gallwey shares a personally important coaching epiphany in chapter 1 of his book, The Inner Game of Tennis:

I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn: that images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instruction worse than none, and that trying often produces negative results

It is likely you have felt this at some point in your coaching career, that talking and trying create more problems than they solve. Many of you have felt those feelings and then have continued on your way without changing your coaching methods too much. But Gallwey didn't. He integrated ideas from D.T. Suzuki (ego-mind), Abraham Maslow (peak experiences), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (flow) to create his idea of “relaxed concentration”. He draws attention to how judgmental athletes tend to be of themselves as they perform and goes on to point out the effects that this judgement tends to have on their performance as well as on their self image. To move out of this judgmental frame, he encourages experiencing performance as it is. This is done by allowing performance to happen without interrupting it with thoughts of what should be or what didn't happen. Today, you may better recognize Gallwey's “relaxed concentration” as “mindfulness”. Mindfulness practices revolve around noticing rather than directing thought. If an athlete doesn't know what their body is currently doing, how can they be expected to make changes?

A typical coach's response to this is to say, “but I am telling them what their body is doing” and my reply is that you are substituting your observations for the athlete's. You are saving them the effort of noticing (and thinking) for themselves and dis-empowering them by doing so. This is how learned helplessness is learned, even though you weren’t trying to teach it. In contrast to helpless athletes, autonomous athletes can problem-solve more effectively and can collaborate with coaches to find solutions that they either couldn’t find or haven’t found alone. So do the work to empower your athletes and see what they are capable of.

“Doing the work” means asking athletes to notice what their bodies or specific parts of their bodies are doing. They'll need some guidance from you at first to get the hang of it. They'll ask you to do the noticing for them, to which I usually reply, “it's your body, you tell me what it did.” You can get them to notice by asking them questions as opposed to telling them what just happened. Generally, I ask questions like, “can you show me what your body looked like at contact.” As they get better at recreating that, I can make the questions more specific like, “where was the ball relative to your hips?” This empowers them as they learn to trust their own senses, particularly their kinesthetic awareness. As they're learning, they'll tend to use evaluative terms like good and bad rather than descriptive terms that demonstrate an awareness of positioning, timing, etcetera. Rather than tell them that they're describing it wrong, I will reframe their words by asking, “what did you feel that makes you say it was good/bad?” This gets them thinking more in terms of what is rather than what they think should be.

As they get better at noticing and describing what their bodies are doing, then, together with them, you can build mechanisms for creating changes. You can take a specific aspect of an action and ask the athlete to vary it in some way, like asking them to drop their hips lower and notice how the feeling differs from previous reps. You can ask athletes to picture the change they want to make or model the change without actually executing the skill, such as, “show me where you want your hand to be at contact.” By creating an image and a physical model of the skill they wish to perform, they can then execute the skill, notice what they actually did, and compare that to the image/model that you constructed together. Athletes will tend to describe what they did in binary terms, meaning that they either felt their hand in the “right place” at contact or not.

You will likely notice athletes using more judgmental terms than descriptive ones when comparing. Athletes will tend to say that the most recent rep was better or worse than the previous one instead of higher or lower or other more-descriptive terms. As before, you can reframe these into questions that move them back to descriptive terms, like “what did you notice that made you like that one more?” Then you can go back to having them model what they felt like at contact, etcetera. To save time in the feedback loop you are creating between coach and athlete, you can set up different numbers that describe different states or relationships like “one means you contacted the ball in front of your body, two means you contacted it even with your body and three means you contacted it behind your body.” Then the athlete can give a number after each rep instead of giving a more complete description of the rep thereby increasing the number of reps that they can get in a short period. There shouldn’t be a “right” or “wrong” number, just different numbers that serve as shorthand for different feelings and movements. The emphasis isn’t on doing it a certain way, the emphasis is on noticing how it is actually being done.

You can also introduce new skills to athletes by having them observe the skills in others. You can show them a few reps of a new skill and then ask them to repeat what they saw. You then take advantage of their now-developed skill in noticing their own actions and comparing those actions to the ones they observed. You will notice differences between the athlete's version and ours. You can draw attention to those specific parts in the same way discussed above. You may need to model a few more contacts and ask the athlete to watch that specific part of the movement to help them create an image to apply.

So far this describes how you can use mindfulness in training but how can you transfer that to competition? The answer is that you remind them that they have the power to decide what to notice about their performance as well as the power to decide how to interpret what they notice. You can encourage them to be proactive about picturing and feeling the next skill that they will perform. When you see them reacting to their last touch, you can help them reframe by asking them what they noticed about that touch. You are reinforcing the same mental skills that you built in practice, which helps them recognize the value of those skills. You are also creating an effective way for the athletes to move through stressful situations (see my post about failing faster) by creating a framework for their thoughts.

Incorporating mindfulness into your coaching style and into athlete learning and playing requires a shift in how you interact with them as well as a shift in how they think. These shifts will require time in the practice environment so that the extra processing can take place. As you and the athletes become more proficient with mindfulness, the process of giving, receiving, and assimilating feedback will become faster. As athletes learn to picture and feel what they want to do, the coach's act of reminding them to see/feel the thing they want to create replaces the coach's modeling of behavior during competition. The end products are athletes that are more empowered and engaged in their own actions.

I first published the above in 2018. When I moved my blog to Substack, I used the move as an opportunity to revisit many things I wrote in the past. While I have edited what I first wrote, it is almost entirely the same as it was then. I present those thoughts as they were so that I can tell a story that begins with when I first read Gallwey. But, I also think it is useful to share some thoughts as I look back.

If you read this post and found yourself having strong opinions about how I structured the activities, feedback, and interactions, you may be a motor learning nerd. I acknowledge the shortcomings and differences between what I wrote and the canonical versions of information processing, ecological dynamics, nonlinear pedagogy, OPTIMAL theory, focus of attention, language of coaching, etc.. I’m not trying to dunk on any of these ways of thinking, nor am I trying to faithfully adhere to one school of thought. (The latter admission is yet another shortcoming.) I respond to these valid criticisms in two ways.

First, to me, the most important theme in this post is athlete empowerment. I willfully place that goal above philosophical consistency in this case. I value both things but, because this subject demands that I place one above the other, I chose empowerment. It is possible to simultaneously empower athletes and maintain a consistent view on motor learning but then I’m not writing about Gallwey’s ideas anymore. So, rather than write a critique of Gallwey’s methods from one side or the other, I wrote to honor another value that I hold dear, supporting athletes learning about themselves. If you read this valuing motor learning more highly, you didn’t do anything wrong. But I ask you to reread it while asking yourself this question, “does this encourage coaches to support different kinds of athlete awareness?” It might not do so in your favorite way but that brings me to my second response.

I stand by the ideas I present not because they are philosophically consistent but because I think they represent an interesting and practical transition between different modes of thought. I don’t believe that Gallwey’s ideas are a magical middle way that coherently integrates IP and EcoD views but I do think that a coach can transition from one view to the other following Gallwey’s lead. Some would say that what I’m suggesting is using an “it depends” approach, in which I use whatever philosophy I find convenient in the moment. I say that Gallwey provides a bridge. Bridges are not substitutes for solid ground, one moves across a bridge fully aware that they are in a more precarious position. The point of a bridge is to move across it, not live on it. I accept that using the coaching moves I illustrate takes me off philosophically solid ground. I am willing to do that in order to move somewhere more solid. I think that there is something in this post that everyone can use while still remaining aligned to their motor learning beliefs. The question to me, at that point, is do you want to cross the bridge?

In his book, The Score, C. Thi Nguyen gives coaches a different way to approach practice and competition. He writes about striving play and achievement play. It would seem he’s just giving synonyms for process-focused and outcome-focused, but I think there are important differences. For Nguyen, striving is much more than just focusing on how things are done.

For context, he’s writing about how the arbitrary rules adopted when playing games provide valuable lessons for living. He includes sports in his framework, using examples like marathons to demonstrate how people make relatively easy things arbitrarily difficult for “enjoyment”. The idea is that you get to choose the rules you adopt, which allows you to choose the challenges you face. Choosing your challenges is where the enjoyment comes from.

Striving play does overlap with being process-focused because choosing your challenges means you’re narrowing how you try to reach a goal. You’re not trying to reach your goal in any way, you’re trying to reach that goal via some specific route. To use a marathon to illustrate, you have to follow the race course rather than taking the shortest path from start to finish. But striving play is much more than process.

While process orientation would be focused on what running feels like, striving is focused on how running makes you feel. The difference is massive. Striving play is about how you believe your chosen challenges will shape you. Striving play helps you become someone during or through your struggles. Your choice of struggles is an expression of who you are and who you want to be while you’re playing the game. Achievement play is an expression of who you are as well.

Nguyen isn’t saying that such players only care about winning, but he is saying they value winning more than they value how the win is obtained. Achievement players don’t play games to relish the struggle. They accept the challenges not so they can become, but so they can overcome whatever they must in order to win. In some sense, they’re indifferent to the challenges. If struggles are mostly absent and the win is secured, then they’ve accomplished what they set out to do. That’s an important difference between striving and achieving: in striving play, the struggles matter.

To better understand the relationship between striving and achieving, it’s important to first consider two more terms, goals and purposes. Nguyen quotes his graduate school advisor, Barbara Herman, to separate those terms:

Herman points out why the difference between striving and achieving exists, because players are subject to different values simultaneously. Both your goals and your purposes are expressions of your values. They can carry different weights at different times. They are interconnected and it can be quite difficult to consider them separately. So consider them together. Nguyen is clear about how players are influenced by both goals and purposes.

It seems pretty clear that achieving players are better suited for competition than for practice. The scoring systems of most sports are set up to reward winning with little regard for how victory is achieved. They allow the goal and the purpose to be the same. But form sports like gymnastics and figure skating are exceptions and they present an important lesson in how striving and achieving can interweave.

In form sports, how skills are performed matters. They have to be challenging to do and look right. Winners are those whose skill performances are more challenging and look better than their competitors. In form sports, there’s a special combination of striving play and achieving play. Players have to pursue difficult things in order to win so the best of these athletes are the ones that combine striving play and achieving play.

But you can find similar cases elsewhere in sports. Many timed sports, like swimming and cycling are similar to form sports. Competitors don’t have to maintain great form in order to win the way gymnasts do. But it really helps. Cyclists who excel at time trial and track disciplines tend to hold more aerodynamic positions for longer, even as they tire. But they can overcome such shortcomings by just putting out more power than their competitors, enough to overcome the loss of aerodynamics. But there’s more to their striving than might be apparent at first.

Swimmers benefit from process orientation, excelling at being hydrodynamic and mastering the strokes. But one of my favorite example of striving play comes from Daniel Chambliss’ ethnography on American swimming1. While he points out that the best swimmers excel at the form aspects of their sport, he also highlights another aspect of their striving play.

This is striving play. Winning becomes something ancillary. Important, yes, but also something that is often secondary to striving. The swimmers Chambliss describes don’t come to practice every morning only thinking about winning. They’re thinking about what they have to do in today’s practice. That shift in focus has much in common with being process oriented but there’s a crucial difference. As Chambliss said, they like it.

It’s possible to be process oriented because you are an achieving player. As I said before, you don’t have to like the challenges, they’re just part of the process of winning. You can be indifferent to the challenges when you’re process oriented. But you aren’t indifferent to them in striving play. And that’s where I think coaches can benefit from paying attention to the kinds of play they are supporting in their coaching.

Think of Chambliss’ swimmers. Even though they spend hours in the pool, “swimming back and forth over a black line”, they don’t seem to embody the “grind culture” that is currently so prevalent. Why? Because they are striving. The key for you is to create opportunities for athletes to strive instead of creating conditions that demand only process orientation. To do that, allow winning to be put aside. Support reasons for play that go beyond the score.

Coaches tend to regularly maintain, or even accentuate, the importance of winning. But you can make winning disposable. You can make it important without making it the most important thing at every moment. Coach athletes to value the mastery of a skill. Coach athletes to value the development of self. Coach athletes to value how they treat teammates and opponents. Most importantly, show them that those values are important in their own right and not important simply because they lead to winning.

Because sports are so tied up in scoring, it becomes easy to coach things that make scores better and marginalize things that make people better. Affirm the purposes of the athletes in your care. Help them explore the purposes that exist within the games you coach.

Procrustes was a figure in the adventures of Theseus. Procrustes was not a good person, offering travelers a bed to sleep in during their journeys but then torturing and killing them when they didn’t fit in the bed he offered them (and they never fit). His grisly treatment gives us the term Procrustean bed, which, to quote from his Wikipedia entry, describes situations in which “an arbitrary standard is used to measure success, while completely disregarding obvious harm that results from the effort.”

The aphorism about lying in the bed you made presents a different lesson, one about consequences. The idea is that your actions have consequences. When you make decisions and choose your actions, you are creating consequences you must live with. While reading Nguyen’s book, it occurred to me that the beds coaches make for themselves and their teams are often Procrustean in nature.1

Without realizing it, coaches frequently create arbitrary standards that don’t actually reflect what they initially set out to do. The harm that results from the effort is not physical or mental though. The harm done is a limiting of potential and a loss of values.

To me, the most prevalent version of coaches’ Procrustean bed is when coaches research what the “best” teams do as a way of focusing and directing the training and expectations for the teams they coach. There’s much to be learned by studying the characteristics of the “best” teams. But there’s a trap in such studies.

The output of studies of the “best” aren’t actually characteristics of particular teams, they’re what Nguyen calls metrics. For him, metrics have two key components: they function as scoring systems for value judgements and they use data to render those judgements (p. 100). That’s the trap. Without you realizing it, the study swapped characteristics for metrics.

When you collect characteristics across many teams, the characteristics cease being qualities they possess and, instead, become items on a checklist. In an effort to not get bogged down in too many details, the study sacrifices context so the results can be abstracted and aggregated. In his book, Nguyen describes the Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy and the sacrifice of context is the work of his first Horseman, Scale.

Qualities don’t scale well. They require too much context to understand. There are too many interconnected factors that make a good team exactly who they are. Synergy is a sum of factors that doesn’t make sense when you try to tease it apart. Each good team has their own collection of factors that make them good. While there are commonalities among the best teams, the way those common factors are arranged and relied upon differ. The reasons why those common factors work for each team differ. And that synergy gets lost in aggregation.

Trying to aggregate the subtleties of each team into something meaningful is incredibly challenging because it’s about more than just the qualities but also about the connections between them. There’s no room for subtlety when you do things at scale and the only way these studies work is when you do them at scale. So you end up with a checklist of common features but no understanding of how those features actually show up in each team.

And if you don’t realize that the checklist isn’t the same thing as how teams actually embody the features on your checklist, that’s when the features become metrics. So you end up with a checklist full of “championship standards” or something like that. The goal for your coaching is no longer figuring out how to get the best out of the team in front of you, the goal is now to get the team to fulfill as many of the standards as possible, as often as possible. Your coaching goals are expressions of your coaching values so changing your coaching goals means you’ve also changed your values.

In his book, Nguyen writes that “metrics are engineered values” (p. 100). They are artificially constructed values, not ones that come from you and your context. Your study of the “best teams” was undertaken as a way to determine what you should value in your practice and your competition, not some imagined, theoretical ones. You started out valuing winning or valuing improved performance. But the study gave you engineered values and encouraged you to value the checklist instead of your understanding of your specific situation. You can’t value all the different contexts that gave rise to all the different items on your checklist. But having the checklist means you don’t have to. Nguyen puts it this way:

Your checklist isn’t a bad thing, but it drowns out the bigger question, how does this team best reach for those standards? That’s the awareness you can’t allow to be drowned out. The team doesn’t have to reach all the standards. There may be items on your checklist that this team just isn’t built to achieve. Your skill as a coach is in recognizing that fact and looking for other items on the list where the team can compensate. Nguyen puts it this way:

That’s the thing about Procrustean beds, they don’t fit anyone. And the “best teams” bed doesn’t fit anyone because it’s trying to fit everyone. It’s trying to tell everyone, not just this team, how to play. Fitting everyone makes your checklist comprehensible, but it also makes it less effective. You lose the uniqueness of this team and you lose it at your peril. It’s much easier to flatten everything out into a set of common features, but ignoring features or combinations that aren’t common is where you miss out. That’s where the best stuff happens, in the exploration of how this team strives to be its best.

So often, studies of “the best” become exercises in boiling those teams down to things they all do when the beauty of their excellence is in how they express their uncommon identities. As a result of essentializing those teams and individuals, you chase an contrived, cobbled-together version of success. Chasing an artificial, scaled version of success will move you in a positive direction but not as far as a version of success tailored to this team will move you.

You can generalize what good teams do but not what this team should do. So, by all means, conduct studies of the best teams. They can teach a lot about what the best teams do. But they teach you very little about what the team you are coaching does. Don’t mistake what they do for what the team in front of you ought to do. Those are two different studies entirely.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eight, “Etienne Wenger: Coaching and communities of practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

I ended part 1 saying if you want to get better at coaching, go coach with someone who can help you produce meaning in your coaching. Now I’ll dig into why I think that’s so important.

While you can learn by having co-participants with little knowledge, that makes you like the two blind men in the painting above. You are each trying to make sense of a situation while lacking some vital understanding of that situation. It’s incredibly valuable to have a mentor that can offer their understanding of not only the situation but also some understanding of your perspective. A mentor is at their most useful when they see what the learner sees and can verbalize how they understand what the learner is trying to understand.

Co-participants influence the meanings each person takes away from each situation they experience together. (So the mentor also potentially learns too!) This is not a passive process, even if it isn’t entirely conscious. In the academic literature, the process is considered to be negotiated. That means you shouldn’t just ask a mentor what to do and then go do it without consideration. There should be a back and forth between you. There should be an opportunity for who you want to be to emerge instead of having your coaching style dictated to you by another person.

The process of negotiation makes meaning. It also makes you. This is a big reason why co-participation is so important in learning. Without it, you don’t form your own identity. Your identity is not just who you are in isolation, your identity is who you are in relation to others. You figure out who you are by seeing how you want to fit in and how you want to stand out. You figure out who you want to be by seeing how others respond to who you currently are.

There’s an interplay involved in learning and becoming a coach. There’s being a coach, and there’s coaching. They are interconnected, both of them are necessary. You have to do the verb and you have to be the noun. Your learning and your becoming are both part of doing the verb and being the noun. In fact, the relationship between doing the verb and being the noun is also negotiated.

For many novice coaches, their journey begins with being the noun. They are hired to coach because of their playing experience. Even though they have experienced what is often called the “apprenticeship of observation”, they have yet to do the verb, to actually coach. Doing the verb is vital to the development of a coach’s identity. It is by actually doing coaching things that one builds the concept of the coach they want to be. Even if you’ve read about or watched a video of something you’d like to do, it isn’t until you start doing it yourself that you feel what it’s like for that new thing to be part of what you do (and who you are).

Just reading about coaching or watching videos about coaching aren’t learning because neither brings meaning to being a coach or coaching. It’s not until you change your behavior that learning has taken place. If you read something (like a Substack post about meaning) and you go coach exactly as you had before you read it, then you haven’t learned anything. If, on the other hand, you read something and it helps you see yourself differently in coaching spaces, then you may change a decision or two while you are coaching. That’s learning. And it also demonstrates the connection between being and doing.

If you decide that you want to be someone a little different than you were when you coach, you’re changing the noun first. Maybe you tell yourself you’d like to be the kind of coach who wears golf shirts and buttons the top button. So you just start doing that when you coach. Maybe you tell yourself you’d like to be the kind of coach who doesn’t talk much to the team right after competition, instead saving your comments for a later time. So you just start doing that. The specific reasons for the changes aren’t the most important thing, what’s most important is that your reasons hold sufficient weight that they lead you to change your behavior. That’s making meaning.

But you can also change your behavior first and that leads you to change how you see yourself. That’s changing the verb first. Perhaps you notice you are using a drill or game much less than you used to. Perhaps you find yourself speaking differently to athletes than you used to. Upon reflection, you see that those drills, games, or words no longer reflect the person you actually are when you coach. While your behavior has changed, it isn’t until you reflect and create meaning for the behavior changes that learning has taken place. You create meaning by doing the verb. The meaning you create is what allows you to be the noun.

Learning is this interplay between doing and being. Who you are and who you want to be influence what you choose to do in your coaching and how you choose to do those things, and vice versa. All coaches, regardless of their experience, are always changing in some ways because they are always shifting what they do and who they are. Learning to coach, then, is a continuous process.

Meaning creates the filters through which you process “new” coaching ideas. Who you currently are and what you currently do will shape your responses to new ideas you are exposed to. Those ideas are always all around you. They’re in the way you see others coach. They’re in how you feel as you’re coaching and how others feel as they are coached by you. They’re in your changing perspectives as you age and gain experience.

It would seem that you don’t need a mentor as you age, gain experience, and become better at understanding yourself but I argue that you do. A mentor reflects who you are back to you and presents you with ways to understand how you do the verb and how you are the noun. A mentor shows you things that are in your blind spots. They don’t tell you what to do with what they see, they create space for you to see it for yourself and create meaning for yourself. They teach you about yourself, rather than instruct you about who you should be or what you should do.

To sum all of this up, learning means changing what you do and who you are when you coach. Those changes arise because of the meaning you make. If you really want to keep learning and keep improving at your craft, you have to keep learning which means continually creating meaning for what you do and how you do it. Reflection and mentorship are two vital ways to do that.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eight, “Etienne Wenger: Coaching and communities of practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

There was one short phrase in this chapter that really started me thinking. It’s not the main point of the chapter but, to me, it’s the most important takeaway.

This simple statement belies a massive idea about coaching. Most coaches assume the ultimate product of learning is knowledge but I don’t think that fully explains what learning is or the role learning plays for coaches and players alike.

Allow me some latitude to set up my exploration of meaning. I want to start with art. I’ll use an example of a public art installation to help explain meaning.

The sculpture above resides in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City2. Like many works of art, there is a small sign nearby to tell you about it.

This little sign can be thought of as providing information about the sculpture and, after reading the sign, you could say you have some knowledge about the sculpture. But what have you learned about it? What do you really know about the sculpture at this point? While you know more than you did before you read the sign, I’d argue you have learned very little. But what more is there to know? Much more than just what appears on a little sign.

So what is there to learn? Meaning. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, so allow me to explain how it’s being used.

You can think of reading the little sign as “what is meant by a concept” but I’m most interested in “implied or explicit significance”. By this definition, you can think of meaning as a bridge between knowledge and understanding. While the little sign next to the sculpture gives you a little knowledge, it doesn’t give you understanding. It’s like knowing which words in this sentence are nouns. Knowing that gives you some information about the sentence but it doesn’t help you understand what the sentence is saying. If you want to understand the piece of art, you need things like this article about it to learn what the artist is trying to say through the piece. This is one way “meaning” can be used, to help you distinguish between knowledge and understanding. The sculpture becomes more than just a four meter tall piece of bronze from 1990, it becomes a symbol or a statement.

The separation between knowledge and understanding is everywhere in coaching. Coaches commonly mistake knowledge for understanding when they believe they only need to learn drills and tactics to be functional. They seek to understand sport and athletes mechanistically. They think they only need to be able to describe what athletes are doing in their game to say they are coaching. That’s like saying identifying parts of speech is the same as reading comprehension. That’s like saying the physical and historical characteristics are the most important things to know about of a work of art.

Assuming that acquiring knowledge is the same as learning is like assuming that piling bricks together is the same as building a house. For the bricks to become a structure, there must be a framework the bricks fit into. The larger framework gives the bricks their significance. So it is with knowledge. The coaching things you know require significance; they need understanding.

If, as Cushion states, meaning is the ultimate product of learning, then something won’t be understood until its meaning is established. Learning, then, is a process of discovering the many meanings of what you do. It’s the process of gaining understanding. This, as Cushion might say, is meaning-making. It’s the process of recognizing which bricks make sense in the building you are constructing. It’s the process of not only finding bricks that work but also of making your own bricks and of understanding how to fit all your bricks together.

If you read the article about the sculpture, you are presented with the perspective of the article’s author as well as the perspective of the sculptor. Through his quotations, you can learn about the sculptor’s meaning for his work. But there’s a key difference between learning about Pomodoro’s meaning and generating your own. Not to get too meta, but knowledge of his meaning isn’t, in itself, meaning; to you it’s just knowledge. While you might better understand what he made, that knowledge is not very helpful to you if you are creating your own art. And that’s what gives meaning its…umm…meaning.

To create meaning, you have to wrestle with ideas yourself, not just read about the meanings of others. Learning means changing your perspective; it means changing your relationship to what you observe and do. Learning means looking at something again and seeing it with different eyes, ones that have been influenced by the understanding of others. But you need the meaning of others to understand your own meaning.

Meaning-making, and therefore learning, can’t be done alone. According to Cushion, you need “differing perspectives”. Learning means comparing your observations, thoughts, and interpretations with co-participants. The act of comparing can take many different forms and most coaches opt for comparing by talking about situations rather than experiencing those situations together with the people they’re comparing notes with. But that’s more like reading Pomodoro’s quotations about his work than standing in the courtyard taking in the work with someone else.

How do you find out Sfera con Sfera moves? You could watch the video above. But how do you find out what it feels like to stand in front of a 4-meter tall, intricately designed, spinning, brass orb? What’s it like to catch the glint of the sun off of it? To truly participate, you need to be in its presence. You need to have a direct relationship with it, not hear about someone else’s experience.

But the direct relationship has to be between you, the situation, and co-participants. To build your own meaning, you need others standing there with you so one of you can say to the other, “did you see that?” or, “look over there”, or, most importantly, “what do you think of that?” That’s what it means to co-participate. That’s how you establish meaning. You do it by comparing your thoughts to the thoughts of others interacting with the same situation as you. It’s the same for coaching.

Cushion points out that coaches need co-participants when they coach. That may seem obvious; a coach without athletes and a practice or competition setting isn’t really coaching. But that also means coaches need co-participants to learn as well. Reading a book or watching a video about coaching isn’t learning because it isn’t social. There’s no opportunity to create meaning, that won’t happen until you’re actually working with athletes. You can compare notes with other coaches after the fact all you want, but that’s not learning the way standing next to each other in the middle of practice or competition is. If you want to get better at coaching, go coach with someone who can help you produce meaning in your coaching. This is why I think mentorship and apprenticeship are so valuable in coaching.

That’s where I’ll pick up in part 2.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 3, I gave some detail about the symbiotic nature of field, habitus, and capital. The relationships between people are fraught with the consequences of our politics. While it can be difficult to see the causes and consequences at first, it’s an important step because it sets up the last step: making changes.

Ask yourself why coaches can fall back on compliance. Ask yourself what a player’s “yes” is worth if they can’t say “no”. Do you believe a coach’s work should be more on players than with players? Do you believe the coach-player relationship should be determined by force of will? Is demanding that players do what you tell them going to make you feel like you’re doing your best coaching? These are all things that the field allows and, therefore, perpetuates. Because the field perpetuates them, coaches will perceive that what the field allows is what the field requires to be successful.

This is where the subjects of habitus and field become even more sensitive. Because the field allows (or even encourages) you to coach for compliance, then being a “successful” coach means having compliant players. The field encourages coaches to do things for “the player’s own good”, but doesn’t encourage them to question how they know what that good is. If you’re rewarded for coaching that way, why would you coach any other way? After all, you’re competing for social goods when you coach and the field determines which social goods are at stake. If that’s what the field wants, that’s what the field will get because there are no incentives to go against the field. Or are there?

Remember that fields are products of the habitus of their members; it’s a two-way street. You can shape the field, even as it shapes you. In some ways, it’s as simple as saying you don’t want to abide by what the field values. That departure can be small, it doesn’t have to be wholesale rejection of the status quo. The only prerequisite is recognizing that the field isn’t currently supporting the habitus you want.

Think back to that player that wanted to be coached hard. I described them as seeing something missing from the field. There’s no rule saying that people have to do all the adjusting; the field changes too. Maintaining your habitus, despite the mismatch with the field, creates the conditions for change in both you and the field. That may seem daunting, like you’re taking on an entire institution. But, to the extent that’s true, you at least don’t have to confront the whole institution head on. It’s possible to begin in a corner of it and work your way out.

Remember that fields are interconnected and nested. You can create your own, smaller field within the one you aren’t fitting into quite like you want. The smaller field can be nearly identical to the larger field that subsumes it. But, within the smaller field, you (and others you include) can choose what your field will support and what it won’t. Coaches and teams already do this all the time, every time they say things like, “in here, this is how we define success.” Statements like those are how you change the world, or at least the little corner of the world you coach in. But you can’t just say that and then take someone else’s definition of success.

I had a professor in grad school who, when teaching how to create data visualizations, exhorted the class to never accept the default settings2 that applications choose for those visualizations. Bourdieu helps you realize field and habitus are constantly choosing defaults for us. He also helps you realize field and habitus are malleable. They can’t really be built from scratch, but they can be influenced and changed.

Rather than just accepting the default settings of “how it’s always been done” or the default settings of “how you were coached” or even the settings of what’s popular or common, you can actually choose deliberately. It’s okay to accept a lot of the conventional wisdom. It’s okay to be influenced by the field, but there’s much to be gained from questioning what that influence is and how deeply it shapes your coaching and your relationships.

One aspect of the larger coaching field I choose to change in my smaller field is what coaches talk to players about. I want players to have the opportunity to wrestle with ideas too. Instead of recommending that players conform or comply with my coaching because “that’s just how it is”, I would rather help them see the consequences of actions in terms of the field. I want to help them see the world through their own eyes and not just through mine. I want their “yes” to mean something so that means I need to create space for and then foster their understanding. I choose to accept that players have their own habitus that I need to understand rather than overcome. If you want to do that, you can’t just talk about sports. You have to start talking about something that actually means something.

That player who wants to be coached hard? Instead of you forcing them to change or them forcing you to change, what if you helped them see ways they could gain capital in your shared field? Remember that sports are just their (and your) way of trying to secure social goods. They’re looking for ways to belong and that doesn’t have to mean the same thing as conforming. What if belonging was a product of sharing their ideas about why they want to be coached hard? What if coaching was a product of sharing your ideas about what it means to coach and be coached?

You can be part of creating a field in which that kind of coaching is “how it’s done”. When people speak of “normalizing” some behavior, this is what they mean. It requires willfully changing how and why things are done (field), who you are when you’re coaching (habitus), and what you value and expect while coaching (capital).

Exploring Bourdieu’s work can feel a little bit like seeing through The Matrix for the first time. It can be very challenging but very freeing. It can been challenging because his work can leave you feeling unmoored from past certainty about what to do and who to be3. It can been freeing because it helps you realize that so many limits in coaching are only limits when you agree they are limiting.

You don’t have to accept the default settings. But, once you move past them, it’s nothing but work. Glorious, daunting, never-ending, rewarding, life-changing work.

P.S.: Here’s a quotation from one of my favorite cartoonists, illustrated by another one of my favorite cartoonists. The quotation drives home the idea that you don’t have to accept the field’s defaults if you decide they don’t work for you.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 2, I described Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field and began illustrating how habitus, capital, and field are interconnected. I alluded to the fact that the interplay between them is, well, complicated. In the language of social science, it is contested. That doesn’t mean sociologists argue about if the interplay exists, it means people interacting with each other bring different habitus and, therefore, different understanding and expectations. Those differences bring about challenges, conflict, and, hopefully, resolution and change.

Power difference and reproduction: the coaching process

An important factor the trap of “they don’t care how much you know” highlights is how much coaches follow what they see others do or what they believe other coaches value. This, in Bourdieu’s terms, is part social practice and part habitus.

Cushion is explaining that social practice produces habitus and habitus produces social practice. The first is learning, the second is reproduction. Reproduction is an incredibly important and incredibly under-appreciated part of social learning. Social practices change as individuals’ habitus interact in slightly different ways over time. But social practice is based in something, in some kind of history. It was there before you and it gave you some understanding of what you could do. Think of social practice as a hiking trail through a literal and figurative field.

Sometimes, like in the picture on the left, it’s clear where you’re supposed to go. Social practice has made the “correct way” obvious. Sometimes, like in the picture on the right, it is less obvious. There may not be a “correct way”. But that’s where habitus comes in. Are you a fan of stairs? You’ll probably go left. Do you have really great shoes you want to test out? Maybe you’ll go right instead. It depends on who you are and how you interpret the trail ahead of you. But the interplay between who you are, how you interpret things, and the “correct ways” of social practice deserves your attention.

The trail example makes the interplay of habitus and social practice seem like a neutral thing. But remember I told you all coaching is political because social goods are at stake. Social practices can, and often do, stealthily limit your coaching in troubling ways. The most basic example of social practices limiting your habitus is the practice of coaching how you were coached. While the coaches you were exposed to may have been excellent, that doesn’t mean their ways of coaching are appropriate for you. Their ways of coaching are expressions of their habitus and are tuned to help them acquire capital they value most.

What ends up happening to novice coaches is they don’t discover and deliberately nurture their own habitus until they’ve already unknowingly built it around someone else’s practices. Again, this seems like a neutral thing, especially if you liked the coaches who coached you. But…

This is why I think Bourdieu’s work is so important in coaching. Coaches often overlook that coaching is not just the technical and tactical; it’s not even just the psychological. Coaching is an expression of habitus. It is a reflection of the field. Both habitus and field encompass far more than the drills you choose or the strategies you use. For example, the typically active and talkative coach who becomes passive and quiet when their team is playing poorly is not using some coaching move they learned, they’re expressing their habitus. The coach who has a drill they only use for punishment is similarly expressing their habitus much more than they are demonstrating their coaching prowess.

Those are two examples of what coaches do that reproduces social practices that are coaching-adjacent but don’t seem to be straight-up “coaching”. Coaches may not have learned those exact behaviors from coaches they were exposed to, but they did learn that “coaching” can include these expressions of influence and control. Coaches use these behaviors to communicate messages to the players in their care, usually messages of displeasure and dissatisfaction. Coaches and players have learned that coaches can act on those emotions but players cannot. That’s the danger of unexamined reproduction of social practices.

I’m not trying to make some version of the “players have all the control now” argument or the “kids today” argument. This isn’t about picking a side in those arguments. It’s about interrogating why those narratives exist and how they affect coaching and playing sports.

It’s unlikely you’ll see habitus and capital anywhere on the agenda at the next coaching seminar you attend. But habitus and capital are part of the fabric of coaching, so why aren’t those topics being discussed? I think the biggest reason for not talking about these topics is coaches’ lack of vocabulary around such topics. Bourdieu supplies a framework to have bigger and more important discussions. Cushion supplies some questions using Bourdieu’s language:

So let’s explore these bigger and more important discussions. Let’s question the status and necessity of capital within coaching contexts.

Consider the player who says “coach me hard”. A player like that brings a previously-formed habitus with them into a new field with a different hierarchy and different social practices. The coach sees a habitus that needs adapting while the player sees something missing from the field. What’s going to change? The distribution of capital (and power) in the hierarchy establishes that the player’s habitus will change rather than the coach’s style. The player doesn’t need to agree with the coach that their behavior needs to change, they only need to comply. This is an example of symbolic violence.

It’s symbolic violence because the coach doesn’t have to overtly force the player to comply. Players know if they don’t comply they will be labeled as “not coachable”, “not caring”, or “not competitive”. Getting stuck with those labels could cost non-compliant players capital, which would manifest as being benched, being isolated, or not receiving the same coaching as compliant players. Those outcomes are combinations of coaches’ habitus and “coaching”. I put coaching in quotation marks because the coaches’ actions aren’t clearly coaching behaviors, they’re just human behaviors carried out by coaches.

It’s symbolic violence because of the arbitrary nature of coaches’ responses to the player’s behavior. The field allows coaches to respond as they choose while simultaneously not allowing players to respond as they choose. There’s no clear connection between coaches’ behaviors and their values as coaches. These behaviors aren’t clearly used to help the player become “better”, they’re used to make the player comply.

Consider another example with similar implications, “buy in” from players. On the surface, it seems that coaches are trying to have players agree with an agenda the coaches provide. But again, even though coaches seek buy in from players, they don’t actually need it. Coaches can demand compliance from the player and non-compliance will have the same repercussions mentioned above.

In part 4, I’ll finish on a more hopeful note about how neither you nor coaching are as bad as it might appear, mostly because both you and coaching are capable of changing each other.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

In part 1, I described Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital but I left out his third major concept, field. While habitus and capital are fairly easily understood in terms of an individual and in terms of one-on-one or small group (e.g.: team) interactions, the concept of field helps coaches understand the larger context within which coaching happens.

Field

At first blush, the concept of field in coaching seems straightforward enough. It’s the where, when, and who of coaching. But it’s not that simple. Field is also the why and how of coaching.

As I’ve written several times previously, the coaching you do comes from somewhere. Habitus explains some of where your coaching comes from. Bourdieu gives a framework that explains the origins of some aspects of your coaching you may not have considered previously. Field sets people’s expectations of what coaching and being coached should look like. Field determines what kinds of capital are important and what kinds aren’t. Field is how everyone knows who the leaders and followers are. Understanding the field you’re in allows you to know which coaching moves can work and which ones can’t. But the positions everyone holds and which moves work keep changing because people keep changing.

That’s kind of the goal of coaching, isn’t it? Coaches are trying to help players grow and change. You’re always helping them stretch and reach to move closer to their potential. You are always changing too. You’re gaining experience and trying new ideas. All that is gradually incorporated into who you are and the coaching you do. Bourdieu is reminding you that, as you and the athletes in your care change, the field you’re all in both enables and limits the changes that happen.

Fields and capital in coaching

Coaches and players are striving to change themselves but their reasons for doing so are rarely interrogated. It’s assumed that they’re trying to achieve things like earning scholarships and you’re trying to achieve things like winning championships. Bourdieu reminds you the things you’re each pursuing are kinds of capital. As each of you gain and lose different kinds of capital, standing in your field can fluctuate. Think of how perceptions of players change when they move into or out of the starting lineup. Think of how perceptions of coaches that have “lost the locker room” or won a conference tournament change.

Bourdieu invites you to see those changes in standing through the lens of field and capital. Coaches and players are striving for social goods. There are many ways to pursue those goods, many reasons to pursue them, and many things to do when those goods are attained or lost. There are many directions to go from here but I want to focus on how novice coaches move through their field. Cushion writes about the kinds of capital novice coaches typically seek.

A reminder from part 1 of Bourdieu’s types of capital:

• Economic (that which can be immediately and directly converted to money)

• Social (such as social position and connections)

• Cultural (such as specialized knowledge)

• Symbolic (from honor and prestige)

Cushion says that novices have “limited social gravitas”. While I agree with his assertion, I think it’s also a narrow view of social capital. Cushion seems to be saying that new coaches don’t have social capital because they don’t have many established relationships in their field. No one will take them seriously because no one knows them. It would appear the solution is to get people to take you seriously so they want to get to know you. That’s using cultural capital to earn social capital.

But, to me, that view is narrow because it assumes social status is all there is to social capital. I don’t think it is. There’s trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. Can trust be earned by knowing stuff? Yes, but it can also be earned by taking care of others. It can be earned with consistency of behavior. To me, this is the root of the cliché, “they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. The cliché tells you to pursue social capital directly, even as a novice coach, instead of pursuing cultural capital first. It’s a cliché because expert coaches tell novice coaches this constantly. Why doesn’t anyone seem to learn the lesson?

Because they think they learned it. They take time outside of practice to build relationships, asking players about their lives outside of sport. For many coaches, that effort seems to suffice for showing how much they care. To me, it demonstrates, that capital is only useful as part of field. While I agree that coaches really are showing care and gaining social capital, they’re still missing a vital perspective about field.

The statement above gets to the heart of the difference. The issue, in Bourdieu’s terms, is that the capital the coaches are earning can’t be easily used in the field they want. While there is some consistency in habitus and social rules between the “outside sport” field and the “inside sport” field, that doesn’t mean capital earned in one field is easily transferred to the other. Coaches have power inside sport that they don’t have outside sport. They have much more control over the hierarchies inside the teams they’re part of. They can show care for a player outside of sport but then disregard them inside their sport because the player’s “inside sport” cultural capital is very different than their “outside sport” social capital.

Just like coaches, players are pursuing both cultural capital and social capital both outside sport and inside sport. When coaches don’t fully honor players’ pursuit inside sport, they fail to learn the lesson of showing how much they care inside sport. Experienced coaches work at connecting with players’ pursuit of capital inside sport and finding ways to support each player’s individual pursuit. I don’t think that kind of work is inaccessible to novice coaches. I think it’s just something that falls into a blindspot because they’re so fixated on showing how much they know.

That brings us to the last section, where we try to understand how coaches are influenced by fields and habitus. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already guessed this will not be wrapped up neatly. That’s where we’ll start in part 3.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter four, “Pierre Bourdieu: A theory of (coaching) practice”, written by Chris Cushion.

The quotation below sets the stage for this discussion.

Cushion is saying that coaching is often treated as a collection of skills, drills, and competitions. According to this view, coaches can take individual drills, games, and ways of performing skills, mix and match them, and call it coaching. The problem with this, Cushion points out, is that coaching loses its connection to the people that are being coached and to the people doing the coaching. It becomes a thing coaches do to people instead of a thing they do with people. The social aspect of coaching is crucial because coaches and players aren’t things, they are people and people inevitably relate to one another in different ways as they do things together. People have things they value and those values impact how they do what they do together.

I’m going to cheat and include a quotation from a different book, but I think it provides a crucial perspective. I read this quotation from linguist James Paul Gee several years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.

Although Gee is referring specifically to language, the quotation makes the larger point that all our social activities are “political” because social goods are involved. Gee refers to “money, status, power, and acceptance” as social goods and that connection is perhaps the most important lesson in the chapter I’m discussing here. As Cushion states at the end of his chapter,

So how can people make sense of the politics of coaching? As the title of the chapter indicates, Pierre Bourdieu created frameworks to help explain. The sociologist had three areas of focus that, together, shed light on how social goods are distributed and contested in coaching. Those three areas are habitus, capital, and field.

Habitus

The word habitus closely resembles habit, and with good reason. It describes actions people take that are expressions of who they are, what they believe, what the their history has disposed them towards, and what they see in the situation they’re in. You can see that habitus may be part habit, but it is also much more than that. As Cushion writes,

There’s a circular nature to what habitus is and how it is expressed. It reminds me of the M. C. Escher piece, Drawing Hands. Habitus is both a creator of structure as well as a structure itself that is created. Habitus is part of a feedback loop in which it is simultaneously both cause and effect. One hand draws the other into existence.

But those descriptions might not have given you a clear idea of how habitus actually shows up in you and in your coaching. I don’t know if it’s possible to easily sum up habitus, but I’d start with two words: structured improvisation. Every practice, every competition is at least a little bit planned and at least a little bit made up. That’s not exactly what habitus is, but it gives you a great way to relate.

What makes the structured improvisation of habitus different than that of practice and competition is that the structure of habitus is mostly invisible. It is the “…combination of a social actor’s deeply ingrained identity and his or her less fixed, occupational identity (Meisenhelder, 1997; Everett, 2002)” (p. 44). The improvisation flows out from these identities. It is improvisation because the combination of identities and moments is ever-changing. Improvising based on that structure creates new understanding and new possibilities for action that become part of the structure that then gives rise to new improvisation.

Habitus is both how you act and what has shaped your choices and actions. But it is not formed or reproduced in a vacuum. Habitus is a product of and a producer of social practices and structures. And Bourdieu saw additional factors that also influence and impact social practices.

Capital

Like the habitus/habit similarity, the second piece of Bourdieu’s frameworks uses a word that calls to mind other meanings. You may be familiar with capital as it relates to economics, where it refers to the means to acquire goods and services. When Bourdieu talks about capital, he’s talking about the means to acquire social goods.

Gee referred to money, status, power, and acceptance as social goods that are always at stake in social interactions. Bourdieu refers to several forms of capital:

• Economic (that which can be immediately and directly converted to money)

  • A pro contract is a form of economic capital

• Cultural (such as educational credentials)

  • Knowing specialized language about your sport is a form of cultural capital

  • Habitus is closely related to cultural capital

• Social (such as social position and connections)

  • Wearing popular clothes and shoes is a form of social capital

• Symbolic (from honor and prestige)

  • MVP and All-American awards are forms of symbolic capital

  • Being seen as “coachable” or credible are also forms of symbolic capital

Having capital gets you power so many social interactions are driven by the desire to either demonstrate the capital you possess or gain capital. Different people may pursue different forms of capital in the same situation. The same person may pursue different forms of capital in different situations. It’s all very context-dependent, with people ranking the importance of different forms of capital in various ways. People leverage one form of capital to gain more of another.

A coach can portray themselves as knowing a great deal about coaching a particular skill when talking to players (cultural capital) but then choose to portray themselves an knowing less when talking to another coach (symbolic capital). A coach can leverage a conference coach of the year award (symbolic capital) into a better contract at another school (economic capital). A player may emphasize how much their team likes them (social capital) to convince their coach to select them as team captain (symbolic capital).

Coaches, players, and other stakeholders are constantly cooperating and competing for social goods. You can be positive, you can be negative, you can (very rarely) be neutral. What you can’t be is outside of it all:

Who you are and what you value is constantly being shaped by the coaching you do as well as where, when, and who you are coaching. Capital is just a way of framing some of the factors that shape your coaching world.

Bourdieu has one more concept that affects coaches. While habitus and capital are fairly easily understood in terms of an individual and in terms of one-on-one or small group (e.g.: team) interactions, the concept of field helps coaches understand the larger context within which coaching happens. That’s where I’ll start part 2.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter three, “Michel Foucault: Power and discourse, The ‘loaded’ language of coaching”, written by Jim Denison.

I ended part 1 saying it’s virtually impossible for me to coach purely subject matter when I see power everywhere. I can’t watch others coach and only see how they coach skills while ignoring how they use power. You are never teaching just subject matter. You are always exercising control and, therefore, teaching others how to respond to that control.

Many coaches are aware of how they use power only in explicit situations. They know they’re demonstrating power when they impose punishments. They know they’re demonstrating power when they make decisions that could be either given to players or made with player input. They are far less aware of how they use power at other times. Remember power influences what others can think, do, and be in spaces they share with you. Who gets to make decisions, both during and outside of practice and play? Are all players wearing the same outfits at practice? While the players may get to choose what they actually wear, whose choice was it to match in the first place? Why is matching important? Who does most of the talking in huddles? What’s the ratio of questions to statements or to requirements? These are all expressions of power because they are all rules, whether explicit or implicit. They all speak to what you will support players thinking, doing, and being.

Discourses and power are intricate and many-layered. It’s possible to give with one hand while taking away with the other; to appear to acknowledge the power of others while also dismissing that power. I knew a coach with an “open door” policy and they regularly met with players who had ideas and concerns. Allowing such meetings is a one way of sharing power. That same coach would often use those meetings to listen to those ideas and concerns and then explain to players why their ideas were inadequate or why their concerns were invalid. The coach could still say they listened to the players, but they also influenced the players to think, do, and be exactly what they wanted the players to be. The coach made space for players to express themselves while simultaneously negating any sense of empowerment they may have hoped for as a result of their expression. The coach was able to do this because a larger discourse supports such behavior.

In part 1, I mentioned that coaching is its own endeavor but it is simultaneously located within a larger discourse. The specific coaching you do is nested within the discourse of sport coaching in general. It is nested within the discourse of the community where you coach, like the city you’re in and/or the league you coach in. Those discourses set expectations for what kinds of coaching and playing behaviors are valued. Others, often people not even present when you coach, are influencing what you (and players) can think, do, and be. Those larger discourses can facilitate certain behaviors while inhibiting others.

Coaches are, more often than not, liberated by larger discourses that affect coaching. Players are, more often than not, limited by larger discourses that affect coaching. For instance, in my “open door” example above, notice who has the power around having meetings. The coach is free to determine the “appropriate” forms of communication. The player is limited to the forms the coach chooses. But how was that balance determined? We are simultaneously subject to the discourses we are part of while also shaping those discourses as well.

We shape discourses by how we set rules for others and for ourselves. We shape discourses by when and how we follow, bend, and break the rules others have set for us. Teaching can be setting rules. Teaching can also be an exploration of the space created by rules. Denison works to show coaches your coaching can be better when you pay attention to how discourses impact you. He works to show coaches how your coaching can improve when you actively engage with your situation rather than passively accepting it. What does that active engagement look like?

I am always asking myself what I am teaching to others. I am teaching them how to play a sport and how to comply with my control over them. Players trade their autonomy for a chance to learn how to play a sport from someone they perceive as an expert. Today’s society tells us that the “truth” is specialized coaching is necessary to learn sports so players appear to have no choice but to subject themselves to the control of a coach if they want to participate in sports. While there are varying degrees of control exerted by coaches over players in such a discourse, the control nevertheless exists. Even a “player’s coach”? Yes. A player’s coach is a coach that chooses to express their power, just in less-controlling ways.

But player’s coaches may or may not make the nature of the discourse plain. Players may only see they have more autonomy playing “for” such a coach. But they are still subject to the “truth” that dictates a coach is necessary. There is still an unstated assumption that a coach must be part of the experience. I’m not saying that all players should rebel and there should be no more coaches. I am saying that the nature of the coach-player discourse may need the coach to make the first move in changing that nature.

Remember that people are never powerless to change discourses. Foucault believed individuals “…had the opportunity to negotiate and to work within power relations in productive and positive ways” (p. 34). Once you create an awareness of how you function in a particular discourse, you create the means for changing that discourse. This is what it means to coach in an engaged way. In my opinion, part of a coach’s expertise is creating space for changing a discourse. In the words of the author:

The thing I want to point out in this approach is how the author talks about helping the athlete construct a new narrative. A “new narrative” can mean a lot of things, like believing they can play a new position they haven’t played before or that they can get stronger via a new strength program. But it can also mean helping an athlete open themselves to a new way of performing a skill. Rather than just demand that an athlete change their behavior to create change, the coach instead seeks to change the athlete’s relationship to the behavior. That, too, is power because it is influencing what the athlete views as possible and what they are willing to try.

Another example of constructing a new narrative is how a coach interacts with a player that expects the coach to “coach them hard”. There are frequently many aspects of the discourse that influence players to accept, and even encourage, derogatory and controlling behaviors from coaches. An engaged coach can help the player construct a new narrative about what kind of coaching facilitates better performance. But that construction will take much more work than just telling the player they should just start over and believe something else.

I think a coach in this situation can help an athlete create a new narrative by asking two questions. First, the coach can ask them how coaches in their past have treated them. Second, the coach can ask them who they think holds primary responsibility for getting the best out of them. With these questions, the coach is inviting the athlete to reflect on the power relations in their past, compare them to present power relations, and consider possible new relations going forward.

It’s so much easier to think of coaching as just teaching subject matter. Foucault shows you that coaching is not and never can be just about subject matter. You cannot socially engineer your way out of that truth. The influences of power are everywhere. Your coaching can be so much better when you learn about the discourses you are in and choose to engage with them rather than just conforming to them.

I’m always trying to read books that stretch my thinking about coaching and learning. I recently read two books that stretched me a lot so I am writing about concepts from those books for two reasons. First, I don’t think these books are widely read so if I don’t share them with you, I don’t know that anyone else will. Second, selfishly, writing about these concepts helps me think through what they mean to me and how I could incorporate them into my own coaching. I see these as opportunities to wrestle with some big ideas in front of others. I hope you find these explorations both interesting and edifying.

The concept below comes from The Sociology of Sports Coaching edited by Robyn Jones, Paul Potrac, Chris Cushion, and Lars Tore Ronglan1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter three, “Michel Foucault: Power and discourse, The ‘loaded’ language of coaching”, written by Jim Denison.

This book tackles some topics that transcend coaching but have profound impacts on how coaching is done. The chapter on the work of Michel Foucault contains this statement in the introduction:

If I want to understand coaching better, I need to first provide a framework that will help me understand coaching better. The beginning of that framework is the recognition that coaching exists both within a larger context but also as a unique endeavor in itself. To understand this idea, the author uses Foucault’s concept of discourse. You can think of a discourse as a collection of ways of thinking, doing, and being that shape your experiences of the whole world as well as specific parts of the larger world.

When I say coaching exists as a unique discourse, I mean there are ways of thinking, doing, and being that only make sense within the context of coaching sports. For example, in volleyball, the term “set” is used in two different ways. Coaches and players rarely need to stop and explain which one they mean because, to them, the context is usually quite clear. To non-volleyball people, the difference between the terms might not be clear at all.

When I say coaching also exists in a larger context, I mean there are many aspects of coaching that are influenced by broader systems elsewhere in the world. The nature of the relationship between coaches and players resembles much of the structure and expectations of teacher-student relationships. While some words, like “set”, have special meaning, others, like “learn” are used more or less the same way as they are elsewhere in the world.

You can call “seeking to understand coaching” engaging in discourse analysis. The authors frame it like this:

That suggests that discourse analysis is far more than just simply defining words. Discourse analysis is a process of coming to understand who people can be and who they become as a result of being part of a particular discourse. Analyzing what coaching is or how it’s understood can take a lot of forms but the book chapter I’m digging into uses a specific kind of analysis, Foucauldian discourse analysis. That means the author was considering discourse through a very specific lens, that of power. The author quotes Foucault when defining power as “a relationship whereby the actions of some help to guide or direct ‘the possible field of action of others’” (p. 31). For Foucault, power is about relationships and how different people can influence what others think and do.

The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote engage in a specific discourse. They both agree to participate according to certain rules. (Wile E.’s agreement is implicit in his continued pursuit of his adversary. What if he just walked out of the frame instead?) The rules allow them to (briefly) defy the laws of physics. The rules also doom Wile E. Coyote to constant defeat. While both characters have the power to act as they choose, only one of them is allowed to succeed. This, Foucault tells us, is how rules (power) construct “truth”.

I put “truth” in quotation marks because it emphasizes that truth is not nearly as objective as we assume. The key idea is that truth is socially constructed, in the real world as well as in cartoon worlds. But not everything can be contested in the real world. You can’t socially construct your way out of the effects of gravity, for instance, no matter what Wile E. Coyote might want. But you can (and do) socially construct your way into almost everything about coaching.

Denison is saying that what “coaching” is, is agreed upon, usually without much notice, by coaches and athletes. That agreement becomes the “truth”. Coaches demonstrate their agreement with what coaching is by acting in certain ways, like having players warm up before practice or competition. Players demonstrate their agreement with what coaching is by participating in the warm up. This is an example of power being about how one person or group can influence what another person or group thinks and does. The coach does something because they think it’s objectively true and players follow the coach because they believe the coach is always right. But players also follow because coaches don’t like coaching players who don’t agree with them.

While power may be unequally distributed between coaches and players, it is important to note that neither group is powerless. Just like Wile E. Coyote, there is some power present, even if it isn’t exercised in a contrary way. For instance, if a player doesn’t agree with the assertion that warming up is useful, they could arrive late to practice to avoid warming up. And, even though coaches typically hold more power than players, they are simultaneously in relationships in which they hold less power. For instance, coaches are regularly subjected to coaching orthodoxy. If a coach uses an “unconventional” warm up, the coach ends up answering endless questions about their competency and/or being told to change the warm up.

Some might call what coaches and players feel “pressure”. We can talk about pressure being exerted on the coach to change and conform. But, according to Foucault, it would be more accurate to think of influence rather than pressure. For Foucault, pressure suggests outright control of the discourse. But coaches may not see themselves as being pressured and, instead, see themselves as maintaining the status quo and answering to the requirements or the standards of coaching. Coaches want to maintain the status quo because doing so helps them feel competent. That’s the difference between pressure and influence, the person agrees to conform on their own.

I’ve mostly kept the focus on how coaches are subject to power in how they choose how to coach. And, believe me, that can give you enough to chew on about how you choose to coach. But what I think about even more is how coaches’ power is silently shaping how others experience their coaching, sports, learning, competing, and, ultimately, how those others experience themselves. I can’t stop thinking about this quote from the chapter: “Sport in this sense, as practised [sic] by many coaches, can be thought of as a modern discipline that is ‘both an exercise of control and a subject matter’ (Shogan, 1999: 11)” (p. 32).

It’s virtually impossible for me to coach purely subject matter when I see power everywhere. I can’t watch others coach and only see how they coach skills while ignoring how they use power. You are never teaching just subject matter. You are always exercising control and, therefore, teaching others how to respond to that control.

That’s where I’ll pick up in part 2.

What is “One Player at a Time”? - read here

Like many coaches, coaching is the second act of Cindi Miller’s athletic career. But, you could say coaching is also her third or fourth act as well. And she packed even more into each act as well. When Cindi reflects on her playing career, she feels like she went from being very loose and celebratory to overly focused while in high school and then back to loose while in college. While she felt more loose, she also found herself treating playing as a job, telling herself that she was paid to perform. She also took the title of “student-athlete” very seriously. When she wasn’t in the gym, it was all about school. With that level of focus, it’s pretty impressive that she was able to feel loose while she was playing.

But that looseness belied her “have to” mentality around playing. Contrast that with Emma, a player Cindi worked with during her time coaching in college. Cindi describes Emma (not her actual name) as treating volleyball “more as a hobby” and that she approached the game with a “get to” mentality. In a word, Cindi described Emma’s approach as “joy”.

Cindi described Emma as “one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met”. Cindi described her playing self, on the other hand, as driven more by a sense of responsibility than anything else. That contrast is important because Emma’s approach to sports helped Cindi understand a lot about herself, about the coach she was, and about the coach she wanted to be.

Both Cindi and Emma were perfectionists as players but that perfectionism was expressed very differently in each of them. Emma was very much a people pleaser. Since many people-pleasing behaviors can also be called “coachable” behaviors, it’s important to distinguish between the behaviors and the motivations behind them. It’s hard to know if a player’s constant head nodding and attention to your every word is rooted in a desire to maximize their potential or to minimize the disappointment of others. Cindi came to learn that Emma’s coachability was a product of fear.

That fear doesn’t have to be caused by the coaches, it can be something players bring with them. But coaches can certainly bring it out of players, no matter their intentions. That’s something Cindi learned from Emma. Cindi, as a young, inexperienced coach, was often too tangled up in figuring out who she was supposed to be and that kept her from seeing who Emma was. Cindi, being close in age to the players she was coaching, felt the need to create separation between herself and them. Cindi also felt unprepared, saying “athletes came into my office and I felt I wasn’t qualified to help them.”

Cindi was caught in situation created by the way coaches are (or, better, are not) developed. Young, inexperienced coaches are left to their own devices instead of being guided by the coaches they work for and with. As a result, Cindi was powerless to help players like Emma in the ways they needed it most. Since no one helped Cindi figure out how to talk to Emma about anything other than volleyball, Cindi’s coaching was severely limited.

Cindi’s sense of not being prepared led to her to feel like, in her words, “I needed to know all the answers.” Unfortunately, knowing all the answers was restricted to volleyball stuff. She felt she wasn’t allowed to address issues of personhood, empathy, or compassion. That made anything more than the most rudimentary kinds of coaching awkward. As a young, female assistant coach, she was expected to be the “good cop” to the head coach’s “bad cop”. Cindi found herself enforcing rules that she didn’t align with. And, while she could feel that disconnect, she didn’t have any way of managing the situation. She told me she wanted “to be their safe space.” But when you don’t feel equipped or supported to talk about anything more than volleyball, how do you do that?

Cindi described the coaching part of her as being “emotionally disregulated”. She watched as Emma showed the “other end of the spectrum” of her joyful emotions during practice and competition. When Emma wasn’t feeling okay with how she was measuring up to people’s standards, it would hit her hard. Cindi watched Emma “power through” her negative emotions. Cindi talked about learning from Emma in moments like that, but she didn’t talk about being able to help Emma make sense of what she was going through. Cindi told me Emma “couldn’t verbalize where her feelings came from” and I don’t know if Cindi knew at the time where those feelings came from either.

Cindi eventually left college coaching and also stopped coaching club volleyball for several years because the gap between her values and the values of the coaches and club she worked for was too much for her to reconcile. She said she “couldn’t be complicit in causing fear in athletes.” But, lest you believe this story is one of burnout and missed opportunities, Cindi is coaching again. She’s also in regular contact with Emma and other players from those college teams. She kept those experiences with her and learned from them as she studied to become a therapist. She brought her education to bear on her experiences and came to understand her coaching in a different light. She talked with former players and learned with them and from them about what coach-player relationships can be like.

Cindi recalls apologizing to Emma years later for her inauthenticity. She apologized for not allowing Emma and others to have the same experience she had as a college student and athlete. She remembers Emma giggling and saying there was nothing to apologize for (which, Cindi added, is exactly what a people pleaser would say). She recalls Emma calling her “Coach Cindi” and how that made Cindi realize that title was something she no longer wants to identify with. It might be appropriate to describe “Coach Cindi” as putting athletes first and people second. It’s hard to put anything other than sport first when you feel like you don’t have the tools or the support to coach people first.

Now, Cindi says her coaching is firmly rooted in “person first, athlete second”. To her, that means her coaching embraces that neither she nor people in her care should expect themselves to have 100% to give every day. It means not expecting people, including adults, to have perfect emotional regulation. It means not expecting perfect performance. Perhaps, above all, it means listening.

As Cindi returns to coaching, she’s asking herself how she can impact athletes in a different way, one that reflects her belief in “person first, athlete second”. She described the “whirlwind” the players in her care felt as they experienced compassion from a coach, something that “Coach Cindi” may have had but couldn’t express. Cindi seeks to feel emotionally regulated as she coaches, not allowing others to determine her mood the way they could when she was an athlete and, again, as a young coach. She’s “in love with light bulb moments right now”, helping people in her care to make connections, both athletic and emotional. She works to be “calm, cool, and collected”, showing people in her care how much she loves and cares about them.

But, perhaps most important to me, is that Cindi wants to feel joyful in her coaching. She never forgot how palpable Emma’s joy was to her and others around her. It may be the highest tribute a coach can give to a person they coached. Cindi embraced this emotion that she, herself, had such difficulty expressing for so long, and made it a centerpiece of how she and others experience her coaching.

Have questions for Cindi? You can ask me here, you can email her directly, or follow her on Instagram.

When you’re at a national qualifier (or any other club tournament), you may find yourself needing to scout an opponent you have no prior knowledge of. You might only see one match before you play them. What can you do to prepare yourself and your team to play against them? At VolleyStation, we’re surrounded by expert scouts so we asked them what they would do. We organized their ideas into easily actionable steps for you to follow when you’re scouting at your next tournament.

Four Questions to Guide Your Scouting

It’s easy to just watch an opponent play and jot down random notes about what you see but it can be difficult to turn those notes into something coherent. Here are four questions that will help you stay focused on what matters.

1. What can they do?

2. What do they want to do?

3. How can we absorb their pressure?

4. How can we exert pressure on them?

What can they do?

This question seems like an invitation to write down anything and everything the team you’re scouting tries, but it’s actually asking you to discriminate between what they try and what they can actually do. Here are things analysts recommend focusing on.

• What are their common attack patterns? (Some analysts we talked to said they weren’t concerned about specific rotations, but others were. We say try both and see what works best for you.)

• Who are their strongest and weakest passers?

• Do they have particularly powerful servers or servers who often serve short?

What do they want to do?

This question helps you narrow down everything a team might do into the essence of that team. Every team has certain things they want to maximize to give themselves good opportunities to score. Good scouting helps you focus on what your opponent emphasizes.

• Who is their top attacker?

• Who are their secondary attackers?

• Who are the most common attackers in certain situations (like first ball, transition, or rotation 3)?

• Which rotations do you see them start in?

How can you absorb their pressure?

As you’re watching a team’s offense, it’s important to think about how you will defend against them. You don’t have to change your systems dramatically, but you do want to pay attention to how their offense is going to put pressure on your defense.

• What are some general attack directions/tendencies? (Analysts we talked to emphasized keeping this very general, don’t get bogged down in details.)

  • How will your team defend against their most common attacks?

• Do they serve particular passers or particular areas of the court?

  • How will your team handle passing responsibilities against their serving strategies?

How can you exert pressure on them?

By noting some of a team’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, you can map your own team’s strengths on top of those to make some tactical choices.

• How do they defend against attacks from each zone?

  • Who can you set to exploit their defense?

  • Where can you hit to exploit their defense?

• Which rotation can you start in to maximize the pressure you can apply?

• How can you apply your serving strengths to exploit their passing?

What do you communicate to your team?

If you answer all the questions above, you’ll have far more than you need to compete against the team you scout. Take a few minutes to consider what you should do with the information you’ve gathered.

• What did you see that’s interesting vs. what did you see that makes a difference?

  • Not everything you see will require changes from your team. If what the other team will do doesn’t change what you want to do, there’s no need to bring it up.

• Keep your notes and changes focused on what your team can do.

  • If an opponent does something you’ve never faced before, let them know it’s coming but don’t spend time trying to devise a new plan that your team has never tried. It’s not all about adjusting to the other team. Stick to your strengths, play your game.

More KIT than KISS

College and pro analysts have much more information than they communicate and they recognize they don’t have to Keep It Simple, they need to Keep It Tight. Your players can understand what’s happening and they don’t need it explained to them. You need to decide which factors will score enough points to matter and which factors won’t score enough to be decisive. It’s not about how much information the players can handle, it’s about prioritizing and editing that information down to what will drive winning.

In the end, remember your scouting is a distillation process from many possibilities down to fewer likelihoods but not all the way down to certainties. Don’t hesitate to change your plan if the match isn’t going the way you scouted. Stay curious and nimble during your match.

Thanks to Andrew Clark and Daniel Jones, among others, who contributed their ideas when I reached out.

I thought I’d share it here for those that are thinking about location data. A few notes about the talk…

• The 50/50/50 club in the first plot (slide 4) is an idea that originated with Andrew Clark. The 50s are percentages: kill percentage, good pass percentage, and serving knockout percentage. A player joins the club by having greater than 50% in each of those metrics in a single match. Think of it kind of like a triple-double, but harder to do. Only 8 LOVB players have 50/50/50 matches this season.

• The “Multiplicative Idiocy” drawing (slide 21) is from The Oatmeal. While I think the comic puts it rather harshly, I really like the main point, that combining ideas is multiplicative rather than additive. I see it constantly in brainstorming meetings, people trying to marry ideas together and ending up with a result that is less than the original separate ideas. I think it’s important to consider that not all ideas should end up together. Sometimes, some ideas should lose.

• If you don’t remember it, the weight room controversy (slides 23 & 24) was a very public display of a systemic issue that can affect how support staff can be affected along with teams. Factors outside your control can severely hamper what’s possible.

• As I mentioned, I love Sankey diagrams (slide 27). Visually, they can be amazing. I think there’s so much in sport that works well with flowing visuals.

Here’s a link to the slides: Google Slides link

Here’s the video:

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In part 1, I gave some initial thoughts, both of the authors and of my own, about the how to define coach development and about the first two stages the authors lay out, beginner and competent. In part 2, I described the authors’ views on stage 3, proficiency, as well as my own thoughts on what it means to be proficient. In this part, I’ll discuss expertise, as well as dig into what I still haven’t figured out about coach development.

The last stage is perhaps the most fraught, possibly because it’s viewed as the ultimate goal of coaches. But, even if it is so highly sought after, that goal can still look very different for different coaches. And that variety maybe can’t be captured within a single framework.

Expert Stage

Experts, as far as the authors are concerned, are simply coaches who consistently get the best performances out of athletes in their care. The athletes “learn more and perform better than athletes of less expert coaches” (p. 155). Much of what the authors go on to describe about expert coaches are just extensions of skills evident in other stages of coaches: extensive knowledge, intuitive decision making, excellent planning, etc.. The key to expertise, it seems, is doing a larger variety of things that lead to positive outcomes more often.

While that seems a bit self-evident, I think it’s worth digging into. The authors are saying three things about experts: they do a wider range of things than proficient coaches, the things they do lead to improved athlete performance, and the things they do lead to improvement more often. To put it another way, expert coaches have more tools and they know better when to use each one to get more of what they’re looking for. But I wonder if there’s some survivorship bias in this description. Did the authors look at coaches they deemed to be experts and conclude that anything they did must be expert behavior? What if the results the authors observed were correlated to expert coaching behaviors but not caused by them? These are difficult questions to study and answer. Even if those questions don’t have easy answers, I think the points the authors make are still worth considering.

Why do expert coaches have more tools that work better? Because they’ve figured out what works for them and what doesn’t. But that’s not a reference to a list of moves they rely on or avoid, it’s a reference to them understanding their personal strengths and weaknesses. They don’t walk into situations, size them up, and pick a tool out of their toolbox. Picking a tool out of a toolbox infers that coaching actions are discrete, external things that coaches can acquire and I don’t think that’s the best way of looking at expert coaching. Instead, I believe they walk into a situation, have a conversation with that situation, and develop a way to add to that conversation that moves the situation forward. This view is taken from Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner, a book the authors are fond of.

I believe expert coaches help a larger percentage of athletes a greater amount because of their understanding of specificity. They understand that individual athletes are just that, individuals. They aren’t identical, and coaches treat them identically at their peril. Helping each player get more out of themselves is a product of expert coaches’ ability to tailor their coaching to who they are coaching and the situation in which the coaching happens. This is another example of the metaphorical conversation the expert has with the situation.

Developing these metaphorical conversation skills actually does take time because each coach needs to build their own viewpoint and voice. I think there are two main reasons why most coaches don’t reach this stage in their coaching. First, many coaches run out of time. As I’ve mentioned earlier, that’s where I think the coaching community should change how it treats beginning coaches. We have the opportunity to engage with them and help them shape how they view coaching. Second, it takes a lot of reflective work on your values and purposes. That work isn’t mandatory to coach, it’s just mandatory to be an expert coach. Many coaches will put their efforts into other areas of coaching. And that brings me to the stuff I can’t reconcile about coach development.

What Else Is There?

I can’t escape this feeling that there’s some kind of track that runs parallel to the stages of coaching expertise presented by the authors. Coaches can (and do) view their game and their place in it through a variety of lens. So expertise can look a lot of different ways and I think that variety of excellence is somehow both explained by and also outside the framework the authors have constructed. Their stages explain a lot about the skills coaches possess but I’m not sure those stages can tell me if a coach is good or successful. That might be because there aren’t single ways of defining either of those terms.

I think this might be due, at least in part, to the lack of coaching goals and values described in the framework. The skill framework laid out can be considered in the absence of coaching goals and values but I think, without goals and values, coaches are left wondering which skills are worth pursuing more intently than others.

As much as it seems to go against what the authors outline, I think it’s possible to be an expert at elements of coaching without aligning with the progression of stages. One coach can become very adept at collecting and applying drills and games in their practices. Another coach can create an amazing toolbox, full of techniques for players to master. Both coaches could be simultaneously considered expert coaches and yet that designation doesn’t capture what you or I might consider most important about coaching. They have found ways of coaching that satisfy them and they are working to maximize their skills within their definitions of coaching.

What might lead to different definitions of coaching and different paths to coaching expertise? The authors suggest one way for a coach to consider themselves successful, by measuring athlete improvement. But that characteristic is far from the only way. That measurement of success relies on a particular coaching value: player improvement. Are there other values a coach can hold that still allow them to become experts?

“Perform better” is a broad concept so it feels like there’s plenty of room for valuing different aspects of performance: physical ability, technical skill, competitiveness, among others. It seems like helping players improve in any of these areas could be an indication of coaching expertise. And there are still plenty of other values and goals coaches can have for their coaching and for the athletes in their care. I’m not sure I can say that players “performing better” is the only way to measure coaching expertise.

Another complex topic in coach development is learning from outside sources. The authors state that proficient and expert coaches learn from a variety of sources: other coaches, conferences, coaching books, non-coaching books, etc.. (I argue this is another thing beginning coaches don’t have to wait to do, but that’s not the point just now.) A coach’s goals and values will direct them to outside sources that hold ideas that are most useful to them. It’s not only important that coaches seek diverse sources of learning, but also that they are aware of what they learn from those sources. Seeking outside sources of learning is an expression of not only a coach’s skill but also an expression of their values. The expertise is not in seeking outside sources, but in knowing what to bring back to your coaching.

Maybe the most challenging thing for me as a coach developer is understanding the relationship between developing coaching skills and developing coaching values. I think both areas are vital for coaches and they are necessarily intertwined. What a coach wants to learn in one area is influenced by what they care about in the other. I think what makes mentoring coaches so challenging is when they are unaware that such a relationship exists. I go back to the Logic of Appropriateness: if a coach wants to know what to do in a given situation, they need to know who they are. As much as I’d love to just tell a coach what to do, my answer is rooted in who I am and I would be doing that coach a disservice by telling them what I would do instead of guiding them to what makes sense for them.

As awkward and dissatisfying as it would be in the moment, I think my job as a coach developer is to bring the coach’s attention to themselves before returning it to the situation. As with so many kinds of learning, it isn’t easy or comfortable and it often doesn’t make sense to the learner at first. But that’s better than imposing my own values on their coaching. But maybe that’s the most important lesson about expertise: it isn’t something that can be earned, given, or found. It doesn’t just happen over time, it has to be built.

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In part 1, I gave some initial thoughts, both of the authors and of my own, about the how to define coach development and about the first two stages the authors lay out, beginner and competent. In this part, I’ll discuss proficiency.

Beginning coaches, you may remember, tend to rely on algorithms to coach because they view coaching environments as stable and consistent. This reliance narrows their vision to mostly things related to players following coach plans and instructions because everything else can be thought of as constant. Competent coaches recognize the dynamic nature of coaching situations and plan differently to account for that. The main difference between them is how they view coaching situations. I think that shift in view may be more important than the differences between any other stages. But let’s get into the next stage anyways.

Proficient Stage

According to the authors, a big difference between competent coaches and proficient coaches is what they notice. In addition to seeing what their team needs, proficient coaches also see what the individuals on the team need as well. They can keep track of individual players’ performances while managing the demands of practice and competition.

I think the authors assume proficient coaches add this skill on top of the skills of a competent coach but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure a coach has to adopt the view of a competent coach in order to exhibit the skills of proficiency. A coach can notice how both a whole team as well as individuals on the team are or are not following rules. A coach can have intricate plans for both a whole team as well as individuals. So maybe there’s more to proficiency than just seeing both team and individuals.

The authors say proficient coaches notice the things that matter most; they don’t treat everything as being equally important. Another way of describing a proficient coach’s approach is:

While beginning and competent coaches often see the symptom, it is the proficient coach who can see past it and identify the cause. Once the cause has been identified, it is far easier to supply the appropriate cure. While a beginner flounders in futile attempts to cure all the symptoms she or he sees, the proficient coach easily cures the multitude of symptoms by eliminating the cause. (p. 152)

I don’t think a coach can grasp what is most important in a situation without critically evaluating what the situation actually is first. In that sense, I would put this skill after competence. But it also feels like the authors are resorting to flowery language without really specifying how these skills are developed, they only indicate that proficient coaches have developed them.

The authors seem to believe that skills like being able to notice both player and team progress and diagnosing causes are products of time and I’m inclined to agree, but with reservations. I think they’re describing the world as it is: it takes so much time for coaches to expand their vision because they’re allowed to spend their early coaching careers doing things that don’t build coaching expertise. But that doesn’t mean they have to take so much time to develop that wider vision. There’s nothing magic about the passage of time that improves coaches by itself. Coaches develop because they change their behaviors to meet changing situations. There’s nothing requiring coaches to wait to change their behaviors. Coaches could accelerate their development by choosing (or being mentored to choose) to focus on different things.

The authors do make a recommendation about how coaches might do this: “Beginning and competent coaches can speed the development of this process by attempting to identify the environment cues that are most pertinent to a player’s performance and the lesson goals…” (p. 153). I’ll build on their recommendation by quoting from a different book, Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential: “Accelerating learning requires…being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it” (Grant, 2023: 33). There’s a lot of uncertainty for coaches who choose such a path but I think that’s for the better because coaching isn’t about certainty, no matter how much coaches may act as if it were so.

So getting to proficiency can happen slowly, over time, mostly by chance. Or it can be achieved by creating and taking chances. I think a beginning or competent coach would have a difficult time figuring out how to create such chances by themselves but I think they could learn from more knowledgeable others that took an active interest in their development. I think guidance from mentors could help less experienced coaches feel secure in exploring and taking chances instead of seeking security through rules and procedures when they are left to their own devices.

There’s a lovely phrasing of the idea of exploring and taking chances instead of seeking safety that I am borrowing from Martinus Evans, founder of the Slow AF Run Club (I highly recommend checking out his story and his mission). He said he didn’t have to be competent to belong, he said he needed to “be there to become”.

Regardless of how coaches find their security, it seems that feeling secure positions coaches to learn and develop sufficiently to be considered experts. That’s where I’ll pick up in part 3, talking about expertise and what I still can’t account for in coach development.

The concept below comes from The Sports Coach as Educator edited by Robyn Jones1. Specifically, this concept is taken from chapter eleven, “The development of expert coaching”, written by Paul Schempp, Bryan McCullick, and Ilse Sannen Mason.

I was inspired by this passage from the chapter:

Borrowing from the work of David Berliner (1994) in educational psychology, the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developmental stages in becoming an expert coach. Specifically, the skills, knowledge, characteristics and perspectives common to coaches as they pass from beginner, to competent, to proficient, to expert coach will be identified (Bell 1997, Berliner 1994). While these stages seem to imply a hierarchy, everyone passes from one to the next on the journey toward improvement. One can, however, choose where one stops in developing expertise. To help meet the new challenges of sport, these stages will be presented so that sport coaches may identify their current stage and recognize the skills, perspectives and knowledge necessary to elevate to the next level and beyond. (p. 145)

In the time I have studied coach development and reflected on the traits of coaches I encounter, I have had great difficulty achieving any kind of clarity around grouping coaches in a coherent way that describes how and how well they function. Much of my difficulty arises from a central problem: there doesn’t seem to be just one way to group them. I don’t think there’s a single spectrum coaches can be slotted into. I don’t think there are clear groups coaches fall into that describe who they coach, what they coach, how they coach, and what their goals are based on those other factors. I think it is possible to be a good coach doing good work towards good goals and still be seen as less than by other coaches that are doing arguably average work towards different goals. How is a coach developer to make sense of that?

I find the variety of ways the pieces can fit together both intriguing and frustrating. I love that there are so many ways to be a good coach. But how do I support developing coaches that are trying to assemble pieces in different ways than me? Their values and methods may be equally useful but not appropriate for who I am and how I want to coach. It’s one thing to tell another coach, “you’re doing it wrong” and help them find the right way. It’s something completely different to tell that coach, “you’re doing it differently” and give them expert guidance about how to coach their way. How do I communicate to them that they should keep doing what they’re doing, even though that’s not what I would do?

It seems that assessing coach development relies on some sort of absolute structure of coaching prowess and I can’t seem to decide on what that absolute structure is. Maybe there are elements that are universal, like similar behaviors that are applied regardless of differing values or situations. Those seem hard to find too. How specific can one get about what good coaching behaviors look and sound like before unintentionally introducing contexts that don’t apply universally? This is where “The development of expert coaching” comes in. The authors echo my thinking:

Simply knowing the characteristics and qualities of an expert is, however, not enough. Remember, too, that experts are individuals and their thoughts and actions often take on an idiosyncratic, at times eccentric, quality. Therefore, in considering the stages and the characteristics of each, understand that they represent commonalties [sic] among coaches rather than a prescription for being a great coach. (pp. 145-146)

The authors lay out a framework that tackles some of the issues I’ve been wrestling with. While I don’t think they have all the answers (or maybe even all the questions), they gave me a lot to work with and consider. As I said in the introduction, one of my reasons for writing about this book is to share it with others and another reason is to give me space to reason through what I’ve read. So I’m going to talk my way through their framework and hope that at least one of us benefits from doing so.

The first thing to do is lay out the “developmental stages in becoming an expert coach”. The authors use four stages: beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. Laying out these stages necessitates explaining what each one is. I’ll intersperse the authors’ structures with my own thoughts about them. I’ll begin at the beginning…umm…beginner.

Beginner Stage

Their conception of doing the job correctly includes following the organizational rules and procedures, particularly those centered on establishing order and managing the practice environment…This seems natural because through the naive eyes of a beginning coach, it is relatively easy to notice players on-task, listening, following directions and enjoying the experience. It is more difficult to discern athletes who are actually gaining knowledge, developing skills or improving performance. (p. 146)

The authors believe beginners are beholden to rules and procedures. They suggest beginners focus on them a great deal, use them extensively in their practices, and measure success by how well athletes appear to be following the coach’s rules. As a result of this focus, the authors continue, beginners “…seldom feel any personal control over the conditions and events of the practice and, therefore, may lack a sense of responsibility for their own actions” (p. 147).

I think their feelings of lack of control or responsibility are due, at least in part, to beginners’ lack of rules and procedures to control both themselves and the athletes. If they only had the right rules, they tell themselves, their practices would go better. So they go in search of rules to create the structure they think is necessary. I think this is expressed by beginner coaches asking more-experienced peers for drills and techniques. These are clearly procedures that less-experienced coaches can follow, which can give coaches that feeling of control they may be lacking.

What’s interesting to me (and highlighted by the first quote in the next section) is that coaches can be successful and potentially never leave the beginning stage. As a result, it feels strange to me to call this stage “beginner” if a coach in that stage can be well into their career. But what I realize is there are two ways you can view a career unfolding, in terms of time and in terms of development. A coach can work in the profession for years but not develop very much in that time. What is unconsidered, though, is the converse of that statement. Can a coach develop a great deal in a short time? Is a coach that does so considered a prodigy or can such a learning trajectory be more accessible than thought?

The authors describe the coaching world as it is but, at least in this case, they don’t consider if it could be different if coaches learned differently. Many people, including the authors, seem to work from the assumption that becoming a good coach takes time for everyone, everywhere. But what if you take the authors’ main assumption about beginners, that they desire rules and procedures to the exclusion of more helpful coaching tools, and help beginners see that desire as a limitation to their development?

Beginning coaches could be exposed to the traits and habits of competent coaches through deliberate, structured mentorship and teaching. Such facilitation would both accelerate learning and decrease frustration as coaches would spend less time acquiring rules and procedures, then finding those things aren’t helping them coach as they expected, then discarding those rules and procedures.

More on that in a moment. First, consider what beginning coaches need instead of structure. Consider what competent coaches do instead.

Competence Stage

As the authors lay out the second stage of development, they point out that many coaches “Despite having efficient management routines...never aspire to develop instructional prowess or help athletes learn” (p. 149). Coaches can remain in the beginning stage and still be...umm...competent. Such coaches are as successful as they choose to be. But, to move on to actual competence (at least as the authors define it), coaches move on from focusing on rules and procedures towards something else.

As beginning coaches accumulate experience, they begin to look to that experience to determine solutions and make decisions instead of simply following the rules and procedures they searched for previously. The authors refer to this as “strategic knowledge”. Such knowledge helps beginning coaches advance, and another piece of their advancement is a shift from being guided by rules to being guided by purposes. Being guided by rules means coaches expect the process to look the same, to look like what the rules dictate. Being guided by purposes makes the process more dynamic. This shift allows coaches to move from having to stick closely to their plans towards contingency planning which, according to the authors, is “if/then” planning. To them, competent coaches “see similarities across context” and can rely on their experience to choose what to do based on what they see.

The ideas of strategic knowledge and similarities across contexts give insight into the limits beginning coaches are imposing on themselves2. “Rules and procedures” can be thought of as algorithms. Algorithms are enticing to beginning coaches because they remove the need for expertise which, by definition, these coaches don’t yet have. The problem is expertise requires skill, judgement, and discretion. Coaching via algorithm allows coaches to avoid actually developing the expertise they need to become competent.

Another issue with coaching by algorithm is doing so requires stable environments. Following the same procedure in stable environment should get you the same results. But coaching environments are rarely stable, which leads to consistency in procedure but not in results. I think beginning coaches become competent coaches not when they focus on strategic knowledge but when they can reckon with the inherent instability of coaching.

Competent coaches reckon with instability by exchanging algorithms for principles. Contingency planning and other applications of strategic knowledge are examples of principles, which are different kinds of rules. Principles allow discretion and adaptability. Principles don’t have to be followed exactly the same way by everyone, everywhere, at all times. So, to exchange algorithms for principles, coaches have to let go of their expectations of stability and sameness.

That’s where I think there’s space for short-circuiting this inefficient way of developing. It is the duty of more-experienced coaches to disavow beginning coaches of the notion that coaching situations are stable enough to work in the way they imagine. Rather than allow beginners to build upon an imaginarily solid foundation, more experienced coaches can do more good for beginners by pointing out how contexts impact those imagined foundations. While there’s certainly more that experienced coaches could do, it would be enough of a start to do that.

This leaves two more stages and a lot more thoughts still to come. In part 2, I’ll enumerate proficiency and expertise, as well as dig into what I still haven’t figured out about coach development.