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Like many prominent sportspeople, I had harboured no ambitions to go into coaching after my playing days, hoping instead to pursue a lucrative career in the media as a commentator and pundit and general bitcher about everything.
This plan was playing out quite well, until I made a mistake also common to many prominent sportspeople: I had children.
And it is via my offspring that I have found myself pitched reluctantly into the harsh, frustrating, entirely unfulfilling field of coaching. I have now experienced life as coach of both my son’s cricket team and my daughter’s basketball team, and I remain hopeful that one day, perhaps far in the future, but some day, a team I coach will win a game of some sport or other.
But as heartbreaking as the coaching caper is, it is quite valuable for gaining an insight into the experience of those who coach, not as a hobby or an obligation on behalf of their progeny, but as a vocation at a professional level.
Coaching the Under 9s in the Casey Junior Basketball Association is obviously a very different matter to taking charge of several million dollars worth of footballing flesh in the NRL, AFL or A-League, or of trying to harness the talents of the country’s best cricketers in an unending round-the-world circuit. But at the very root of the matter, when you take on a team – any team – you find yourself tragically bound to it, and your happiness or misery inextricably bound up in its performance.
It’s a revelation to be a coach, because all of a sudden you realise why the coaches you’ve been watching your whole life and forming a rather dark view of behave as they do. It’s not necessarily unfair to say that coaches, as a breed, tend to be a pack of mild-to-middling wankers – but it is unfair to say that without noting that it’s practically unavoidable in the job they’re in.
There are worse jobs than being a coach, but they pretty much all involve either mortar fire or human faeces.
That coaches become pouty, petulant and paranoid is no surprise: the task they have taken on practically guarantees it. If a coach feels that the world is against them, it is because once you’re in the coach’s chair, there is no other logical conclusion to reach. To be a coach is to feel all the forces of the universe conspiring to ruin your day, over and over again, relentless oppression leavened only temporarily by the occasional victory, which brings blessed relief, but never euphoria, because you know only too well the tragedy that awaits tomorrow.
It is, of course, hard being a player of sport. At the highest level the pressures are immense, the glare of the spotlight sometimes intolerable. But at least a player, when faced with the vagaries of the field, can take action. One can intervene in events, change the course of the match, or at the very least relieve one’s frustration with some healthy, well-adjusted violence.
A coach has no such comfort. A coach must watch from the sidelines and live through every mistake, every blunder, every grotesque twist of fate, in abject impotence. A coach cannot throw the pass, make the shot, kick the ball or tackle the opponent. A coach can merely instruct, implore, urge and exhort, and then watch as every well-laid plan crumbles to dust in the heat of combat.
The fact is: the players don’t do as they’re told. They don’t follow the plans you drew up. They don’t implement the skills you tried to teach them. They did everything so perfectly at training, and now they seem to have forgotten everything. In practice they hurled themselves with gusto into every endeavour, and now they hold timorously back and let the opposition do as they will. They stuff up, they take the wrong option, they fumble and flail and all your wonderful dreams of masterminding glorious victory evaporate in minutes.
This is what the coaches you see in their boxes and on the sidelines every week are going through: the agony of meticulous planning and tireless preparation cast unto the wind like so many dandelion seeds. The fallibility of the human organism – or in the case of umpires, the inhuman organism – obliterates all they’ve worked so hard for, and they’re still expected to keep it together.
So I beg you: when next you see a coach explode in obscenity-laced fury, or answer media questions with sullen sarcasm, cut them some slack. Show some sympathy the next time you see a wild mentor smashing a phone or expressing some forthright views on a referee’s parentage. Because for the sake of we sporting fans, they are going through hell, and even when things go right they have to let the players soak up all the cheers.
Give the coaches a break: they are quite, quite mad, but they became so for the greater good.
And if you know a way to teach eight-year-olds how to stop passing the ball to the opposition, for the love of god let me know.