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.
Bakkies
Guest
Jumping straight into an under 13s side isn't easy when they're haven't done the basics at younger ages. It's tough watching them on a full pitch playing XV a side looking lost, running side ways, not reading defenders and not making decisions Under 8s is hard Yakka but your dealing with that straight away and building a team.
ethan
Guest
The irony of the title asking coaches to be given a break, and everyone in here just calling them 'mad'...
Bakkies
Guest
Put fluorescent bibs on your half backs helps so the kids learn that the players outside them know that they need space to let them run
Bakkies
Guest
At that stage they should be handed over to more technical coaches. The Dad unless he has that knowledge has done the hard work I took a under 8s team and the coach at the time was coaching straight from the manual that she was taught in the coaching course. Bribing the kids with lollies at the end of the sessions. She started using bags for tackling and rucking practice when the kids were taught how to tackle and ruck. I was more in to tackling on bodies. The so called tackling bags the junior clubs use are really mauling shields. Useless said it many times. The kids are doing their tackling practice in training games when I'm coaching, tracking and nailing moving targets like Wayne Smith teaches in his Rugby site clip. She left for a while and didn't come back. Lollies after training is gone too
bigbaz
Roar Guru
I have found that kids will believe my b/s to about u/15 stage, after that they have worked me out and realise I have nothing.
bigbaz
Roar Guru
Yep, really good idea, we have a five pass rule if the game is looking ugly.
Nick Turnbull
Roar Guru
Interesting
Cadfael
Roar Guru
I was lucky, my coaching career (only assisting) started with U 13s. Much easier. What was hard was managing/coaching my daughters Little Athletics age groups over the years (9-16). The boys were simple.
Bakkies
Guest
The hardest part of the season is at the start when they're still playing GAA and Soccer (Summer sport here). They're getting in to their formations for those sports from the start and not moving up with the game when it's in play.
ethan
Guest
Great humour Ben! The joy of coaching is seeing all your methods come together for victories, and the positive impact you can have on others. But obviously if you are not getting the results, there is not much joy! I imagine Steve Hansen is a pretty happy fellow.
Xiedazhou
Guest
Pity the Wallabies coach didn't learn one of the basics of coaching Under 8's - don't play favorites with your selections.....
Chaz
Guest
Lovely piece! Having coached my son's team through the age groups, it's remarkable to see the change that experience brings. At 8 they drive you nuts with their overwhelmingly enthusiastic inability to follow simple instructions, whilst believing that you have the answers and the reason things don't go right is down to them not you. By 12 or 13 they begin to have their doubts and by 16 or 17 they see you for what you are- an enthusiastic Dad who in fact has not played for 30 years and knows considerably less about playing the game than they do, whatever your knowledge on the history of the game. The coaches who are vicariously trying to relive their youth and still believe in their guru like ability to impart enlightenment to their charges are the ones that start to to lose it and those that can actually make a profession out of it are as you rightly point out the ones that have completely lost the plot. Probably my happiest moment as a coach was handing over to a 25 year old so I could at last give up the lie recognised by both me and the team that I knew what I was talking about!
DaniE
Roar Guru
Ah, that's where I'm lucky - the parents this year have been wonderful. Nice kids, lovely parents, makes me want to give them a fantastic rugby experience.
Geoff Parkes
Expert
That's just it Dani, the kids are crazy, but they're also awesome at the same time. The parents are also crazy, but not awesome....
Boz the Younger
Guest
"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 whiner about everything." Yes, it is interesting how those with the most to say so often have done the least ... a good, timely article.
mania
Guest
I've been roped into coaching 8 yr olds again I recommend you get them running up and back in a straight line, ie a defensive line. once you get them doing that as a team you should be sweet and the rest should be easy. ps - getting them to run back and forth in a straight line is the hardest thing to learn.
AussieKiwi
Guest
Great article Ben! "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." And let Cheika know too, it might help him with Foley. The swarming instinct is strong in the eight year olds, whatever the game the spectacle invariably resembles a swarm of bees buzzing up and down the pitch/court. No matter how many "spread out!!"s the doting parents may yell out. The coachees are known to have selective deafness too.
Bakkies
Guest
That's why it's important for them to play as many games of Rugby as possible even at training and encourage them. When I coach when a game gets out of hand there is a chat with the opposition coach about the getting the kids to pass three times before the try is awarding.
Onside
Guest
The good news, "I am coaching children ". The bad news , "they all have parents " Re passing, swarming; children do not develop peripheral vision until the age of eleven+. When looking straight ahead , it is physically impossible for young children to see team mates running alongside them , out of the corner of their eye . No peripheral vision !.
Cam
Guest
Hence why teachers are so important. A good teacher is great to have, but an excellent one is invaluable.