Monthly Archives: October 2010

3 Ways To Keep Females In Coaching and Athletics Administration

Coaching career, Female athletes, Work/Life balance

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This is the third of three posts that I’ve put together for a myth busters series about women and athletics. Read Part One here and Part Two here.


Check out these numbers from the Acosta/Carpenter report*:

At the collegiate level, 43% of women’s teams have a female head coach, while 97% of men’s teams are led by a male coach. Only 19% of collegiate athletic directors are females…and studies show that when the athletics director is a female, more female coaches are likely. 28% of athletic trainers are female. 12% of head sports information directors are female.

There are lots of percentages and information there, but the moral of the story is: where are all of the females in athletics going and how can we keep them around?

If 58% of assistant coaches of women’s teams are female, why the dramatic drop off from assistant to head coach? And if we’d agree that most athletic directors transitioned out of coaching and into administration, I suppose it’s not surprising that of the 1051 AD’s out there…only 201 of them are female.

So what’s going on here? I think that part of the problem is that we, as coaches (male and female), have accepted myths about women in athletics to be true. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Things that people believe deter females in athletics (and how we can prevent them from happening)

  • Marriage and family. Women are able to lead Fortune 500 companies, but it’s still a commonly held belief in athletics that once a female coach gets married and has kids, that that’ll be the death of her career. In the great article, Women and the Uneasy Embrace of Power, on the Harvard Business Review’s website, author Jeffrey Pfeffer asserts that women must choose “a partner in part on the basis of whether that individual will be supportive of their power quest.” In this case, the power quest is being successful in athletics…which is possible for the woman who has a supportive home base.
  • Female athletes prefer male coaches. Here’s a quotation taken from a popular volleyball forum: In my opinion, I think girls would rather play for a guy because men don’t let their feelings or emotions dictate how they coach. Women coaches let their emotions control how they coach too much. Honestly though, I think the biggest factor in that is they have probably played for men most of their volleyball lives. While we can say those are just the crazy folks on a discussion board, I think that’d be the easy way out and it’s our jobs to make sure that we’re coaching from a logical and fair place. Emotions don’t have gender…both sexes display emotion. Female athletes don’t mind emotions (anger, excitement, whatever), but it’s got to make sense for the situation…and it’s got to be fair. Saying that, I believe that the last sentence of that quotation says it all. Most people prefer what they know…and most athletes know male coaches.
  • Gender dynamics baffle them. Going off of the previous point, the typical female athlete has had male coaches and is used to coach/player interaction from that standpoint. Check out what Kathy DeBoer has to say about this gender conundrum. DeBoer is the author of Gender and Competition: How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently and the current Executive Director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association and former Senior Associate Athletic Director at the University of Kentucky. She says that girls and women “highly value attachment as a defining element of femaleness” and that a “web of relationships characterizes the female culture.” So the things that a female athlete looks for in a male coach are dramatically different than what she looks for in a female coach. As female coaches, we have to know how to manage our female athletes in order to be successful. We can be tough and we demand great things, but we’ve got to understand what’s different about our female to female interaction.


Those were three solid answers to common myths out there about women in athletics…hopefully you’ll pass this along to your female athletes and to female coaches that you know. We’ve got a great chance here to show that women can, in fact, be quality coaches and administrators!

*Click here to view the full Acosta/Carpenter report.

A Coach’s Guide To Creating Harmony On A Female Team

Books, Female athletes

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This is the second of three posts that I’ve put together for a myth busters series about women and athletics. Read Part One here and Part Three here.

Mean girls. We’ve all heard that phrase and I worry that we all believe it on some levels. I’ve heard coaches, mothers, and female athletes themselves talking about how girls and women can’t get along and that their team’s had “girl issues.” I don’t believe that issues or conflicts have a gender attached to them. What I do believe is that women can, in fact, get along and they can compete (together!) at amazingly high levels. So now, let’s look at the…

2 prevailing myths that too many people believe about female athletes

  • Myth #1: Women aren’t competitive.
    This is usually uttered by the exasperated male coach of a female team. Check out this scenario: it’s game point in a close volleyball match. The two teams are pretty evenly matched…they’ve been trading points the whole game. Your team is about to serve for the game and the opposing coach calls a time out. You huddle your team close around you and you look your server in the eye very intensely and tell her, “it all comes down to you Susie…we won’t win without you!” You think you’re firing her up and showing her that you believe in her. She hears: “Don’t screw up! If you miss this serve, your team will hate you!”

    Women are very competitive and will rise to any occasion…together. Studies show that women get onto teams to be a part of something and to socialize, then once they realize that they’re good, they’ll keep playing. That’s exactly the opposite of guys who join teams because they’re good and happen to make friends along the way. So, the moral of the story is, if you want to motivate your female athletes to greatness, remind them of their teaminess. At that same time out, bring your team in, huddle them up close and (while making eye contact with all of them) say: “ladies, you all have worked your tails off to get to this point. You’ve hit, you’ve passed, you’ve set, you’ve played amazing defense. Now, Susie is going to crush this serve and we’re going to win this game.” You’ve said the same thing as the first example, but now you’ve included her in a group effort.

  • Myth #2: Girls can’t get along.
    If I could have a cause as a coach, it would be to eliminate the world of this perception that female athletes can’t get along. You’re probably thinking…well Dawn, you coach collegiate athletes, but my middle school girls are ripping each other apart! I’ve coached middle and high school as well as at the Division I and III collegiate levels and I’ve learned one major lesson: the coach sets the tone. It’s our job as the coach to understand what makes female teams tick and what motivates each athlete. As Kathy DeBoer says in her book, Gender and Competition: How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently, “until recently, it was not politically correct to think of women as different. If you said women were equal, then they couldn’t be different. The wonderful news is we can now say women are equal and different. And that’s a huge and dramatic breakthrough.” So now that we know it’s kosher to say that female athletes are different than male athletes, let’s cut to the crux of the issue.

    The coach runs the show. Do you secretly believe that females are “catty” or can’t get along? Then that’ll come across to your team. How? You’ll let bad behavior slide because you think that it’s somehow a female trait. If two people have a conflict and they’re men, it’s no big deal…if they’re women? They’re catty. So the first thing is to evaluate your belief system and make sure that your team understands what you will and will not accept. I’m pretty explicit with my team about this whole “girls can’t get along” thing and how I think it’s a crock. The next step is to empower them with conflict resolution skills and also to help them understand the different personality types and how they interact with each other. I certainly don’t expect my team to make it through an entire season and not have issues that need to be addressed, but I haven’t given them license to brush it under the rug as “girl problems”. Conflict doesn’t have gender and we, as coaches, can’t give our teams excuses to not learn how to effectively deal with those conflicts.


So I’m hoping that this has confirmed what you already knew about your female athletes: they’re strong, confident, competitive, and resilient problem solvers who will run through walls for their teammates and their coaches.

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3 Things That You Believe About Title IX That Just Aren’t True

Female athletes, Title IX

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This is the first of three posts that I’ve put together for a myth busters series about women and athletics. Read Part Two here and Part Three here.

As the name of this blog may have given away, I’m a woman. And as I’ve detailed on the “About Coach Dawn” page at the top right there, I’ve played and coached sports for the majority of my life…it’s a huge part of how I identify myself. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has heard of a men’s sport being cut (usually it’s volleyball or wrestling or gymnastics) and felt my heart breaking for those student-athletes who’d devoted their time and energy toward getting better at their sport. That feeling is usually quickly followed by frustration as the reason given for cutting the male sport is Title IX. As Charlie Brown often said, “aaargh”!! Cutting a men’s sport is a decision made by the administration and not something that is forced upon them by the government so that women can play. Title IX is an easy scapegoat, so let’s discuss three commons myths about Title IX and uncover the truth that lies beneath.

The 3 myths people hold about supporters of Title IX

  • You must be man-hating and un-American. Back in the day, a perfect day for an all-American guy would involve baseball, football, and apple pie…the only place a woman would fit into that old school story would be making the pie! I’d say things have changed a bit since then and hopefully most folks understand that women are not only interested in sports, but very capable of competing at a high level. Those of us who recognize the benefits of this amendment don’t hate men and we don’t want to take opportunities to compete away from men…we just want those same opportunities to be extended to women.
  • Women’s teams are taking money from the men. Actually, since the institutions fund athletics, both men’s and women’s, the athletic director and president decide how those funds should be allocated. In a 2005-2006 study by Dr. Christine Grant, she found that FBS schools (those schools that opt in for football bowl games) spend about 78% of the money allocated for men’s sports on football and basketball…it was 43% in that same study for Division III. Given the disparity in those numbers, it seems pretty clear that it’s a decision problem and not a lack-of-enough-for-men’s-and-women’s-sports problem.
  • Things are equitable now. The short answer is they’re not. The long answer is that athletics has come a long way since 1972 when Title IX was passed. In terms of equipment, training facilities, medical treatment, academic support services (and lots more!)…today’s female athletes are enjoying the fruit of a whole lot of labor. Where we can stand to even out a bit? Female sport participation rates, scholarship allotments, and operational budgets in Division I are still well behind our male counterparts.


Hopefully I’ve shed a little light on Title IX and hopefully you’ll make sure that the female athletes that you coach understand this. I can’t imagine there’s a much more powerless position than to feel like your existence is based upon taking things away from someone else. Title IX is about giving opportunities…not taking. Make sure your ladies know that.

3 Leadership Lessons I Learned From Voltron

Leadership, Team chemistry, Team roles

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I can’t be the only person with fond memories of childhood cartoons and one of my favorites was Voltron. If you’ve never seen this cartoon (really?!), I’ll give you a quick run-down of the plot. The main characters were a group of five fighter pilots that operated mechanical lions and kept peace in the land. Most times, they could defeat the enemy, but at the end of every episode they were confronted with a foe that required a higher level of teamwork. This was always my favorite part of the show…where they would “form Voltron”. The five mechanical lions can be assembled together to make one giant fighting machine…and he was unstoppable! Two of the lions would form the feet and legs, two would form the arms and body, and the fifth would form the head of the giant robot. Let’s look at the lessons that we can learn from the cartoon Voltron about functioning as a successful team.

3 things Voltron taught me about leadership and teamwork

Teamwork is required to complete the big tasks.
Many times, your team can get away with an unbalanced offensive scheme, but against that big foe…the one who just happens to have a very balanced defensive plan, your team will need to learn to trust one another to do their jobs. Using our Voltron example, the other pilots knew they could count on each other to always do the same thing…they were confident in their teammates because they’d been consistent in their execution in the past.

Every member of the team knew their role was appreciated.
Using volleyball as an example, if my setter all of a sudden tried to be a hitter…we’d be in trouble! We need her to do her thing and we need our blockers to block and our hitters to hit. If any of them decide that they’re unhappy with the glory they’re receiving, then the team will suffer. It’s our job as their coach to remind them that they’re all important to the team and critical to achieving our goals. Whether they’re a starter or reserve, each person on the team is necessary for us to be successful.

They had a strong leader.
Teams have two leaders, the head coach and the floor captain…both must be confident, prepared, and decisive. As the coach, it’s our job to make sure that the team is well-prepared, able to make in-game adjustments, and can take advantage of whatever weaknesses the opponent may have. Your floor captain needs to operate with a high skill level and she should be consistently energetic…all while holding her teammates accountable for their effort on the court or field.

Hopefully you can look at your team and see those three elements there…if not, you’ve got a good starting point for a successful team.

If you’d like to see a one minute clip of Voltron, click here…it’s pretty awesome!

How The Mighty Have Fallen (Or Pulling Off A Surprise Victory)

Goal setting, Mental game, Movies

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If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him.
There will be blood in the water,and the sharks will come.

-Ivan Vanko, Iron Man 2

This year, the Penn State volleyball team lost their first match in almost three years. That’s 109 straight wins, thank you very much. That is quite the streak and I’d imagine that their uniforms alone have won a lot of those matches for them…meaning that the intimidating force of their streak caused their opponents to falter rather than fight. It’s from that vantage point that I’m writing this post while sitting on a bus coming back home from a road trip…and as you may have guessed from the quotation at the beginning, we’re watching Iron Man 2. I heard the villain in the movie say those words and I thought about the impact of doing the unexpected…how to accomplish the upset and (on the flip side) how to bounce back from a significant loss.

Upset special: How to beat the team you’re not supposed to beat

Prepare: To pull off the big win, everyone needs to know what the streaking team wants to do in every situation. Your players (and coaches) need to be able to look at the opponent’s personnel and know exactly what they will try to accomplish. Preparation breeds confidence and I’d say you’re going to need confidence in copious amounts in order to pull this one off!

Believe: At the heart of the matter, your team needs to believe that the task can be accomplished. The coaching staff needs to point out at least three tangible ways that your team can defeat the streaking team. Every Goliath has its weakness and your team of Davids needs to be equipped with knowledge of where they should aim their slingshots.

Respond: The streaking team has crazy swagger because all they do is win, so your team has to be prepared for battle…the other team won’t just lie down. What does your team need to do when the streaking team makes an amazing play? Answer back. Again and again, until the mission is accomplished.

It’s not the end of the world: How to rebound from a significant loss

Perspective: In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big of a deal. Everyone’s healthy and whole right? No one’s dead, all limbs are attached. You lost a game…that’s all. The fact is, for a sixty to ninety minute period of time, your team wasn’t as good as it needed to be and the beauty of sport is that they get another chance to compete and play better.

Believe: The coach needs to remind the team of their goals and remind them of what they’re trying to accomplish over the course of the season. As long as everyone continues to believe in their goals and in each other…the team can rebound.

Respond: The next opponent had better watch out, because your team is fired up about kicking some tail! It’s not just their skill level that’s high, but their energy and intensity had better be like you’ve never seen before. Not only to prove it to yourselves that you can return to dominance, but because now every team believes that they can beat you…at least they think that they have a shot. It’s your team’s job to snuff out any glimmers of hope that they see in the opponent.

No matter what side of the coin your team falls on…hopefully this helped to show you what they need to do in order to accomplish the big win or rebound from the surprise loss.

Party Foul? Social Media For Today’s Coach

Coaching career, Social media

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I’ll admit that I was late to the whole “social media” thing (feel free to imagine me using air quotations), but now that I’m on board, I love it. I like writing on this blog, sending out tweets on Twitter, and finding old friends on Facebook…I’m even finding that LinkedIn is more vibrant that I was led to believe. But as coaches, our reputations are a big part of who we are and why institutions hire us and we’ve got to be careful of what we put out there on the Internet. So let’s ask ourselves a few questions that hopefully will eliminate some mistakes I’ve seen folks make and give you a clear vision of how to use social media to your advantage.

3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Clicking The “Friend” Button

  • Should I friend players, player parents, or former players? It depends on how you use your Facebook page. Are you twenty-two, just out of college, and taking cell phone pictures of yourself smooching random people at a bar? Well, I think you already know the answer to that one! But if you’re using your page for networking and can keep it professional, then friend away. I think it can be a great way to connect and reconnect with former players and colleagues. If necessary, you can always create a Fan page for yourself that can be used as your professional entity while keeping your personal page for real friends and not “friends”.
  • What’s kosher for my Facebook page? You probably already know the general stuff that shouldn’t go on your page, so I won’t go into that. But what about your friends? Are they knuckleheads? You think you’ve got it all together, you’re not putting anything inappropriate on your page, you’re friending other folks in your profession…you’re doing it up! But do you need to set your privacy settings so that the pics your friends have of you acting a fool don’t end up going out to all of your FB friends? I learned that lesson after my family started putting up all sorts personal pictures from way back in the day. They weren’t inappropriate or anything, but not exactly what I wanted my “Coach Dawn” Facebook page to reflect.
  • You know it doesn’t go away, right? Delete isn’t really delete, that’s all I’m saying. What you say in your Facebook status update or that you tweet out every day is saved in some manner that techie people understand and I don’t. You can also try to deny that you wrote whatever awful things you said in the heat of the moment (like this soccer coach did), but no one will believe you…especially if they’ve printed out the pages and handed them to your boss like the parents in the previously mentioned soccer coach story did.


Hopefully this can serve as a guiding post for you in your future social media ventures. Good luck and be smart!

4 Rock Solid Ways To Get More Stuff Done

Coaching strategy, Time management

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Since I’ve started this blog, I get this question over and over again from fellow coaches: where do you find the time? I typically smile and say it’s hard work (which it is), but I really enjoy doing it (which I do), so I find the time. But is there really such a thing as “finding the time”? We’ve all got the same seven days in a week and twenty-four hours in each day, correct? So it’d be more precise for me to say that I’m managing my time better and attacking every day with a plan. While I’ve never been one who’d be accused of being disorganized, now I’ve taken time management to near maniacal levels. Here are four things that you can learn from the special kind of crazy that I’ve become.

4 Things You Know You Should Be Doing (But Aren’t) To Manage Your Time Better

1. To-do lists. Start each day by thinking through all of the things that you need to get accomplished. Write it all out, even if you know that there’s no way you can get all of it done. Eons ago, I took a Franklin Covey class and they encouraged us to write out everything you need to do…phone calls, emails, meetings, etc. That way you’ll know what happened to your time and you won’t be trying to figure out how it got to be practice time and you still haven’t gotten anything done yet. Whatever you can’t do today gets carried over to tomorrow’s to-do list. If it’s not on the list, it doesn’t get done…plain and simple.

2. Do the crappy stuff first. Once you’ve written that list, figure out the stuff that you really don’t want to do and knock it out first. Otherwise it’s going to get to be about midday and you’ll have to deal with meetings, player drop-ins, lunches, and whatnot that will keep pushing that to-do item to tomorrow’s list.

3. Give yourself time limits. If you’re like me, once you start working on something, you want to hammer away at it until you’re finished. Sometimes that’s just not an option. Look at your list and figure out how much time you can devote to that item and stick to it. Tell yourself: I’m only writing emails for an hour because I’ve got to make calls for two hours…and then I’ve got to get home so that my family doesn’t hate me. Then stick to it.

4. Focus! Does this happen to you? You’re working away on something and then your phone dings. You stop what you’re doing to check the email you just received. And since you’ve already stopped, you might as well hop online and check things out there…oh, and texts, gotta send out a couple of those! Smart phones will be the death of productivity, I’m sure of it. We can check all ten of our email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and send out a few texts all from one place. I personally love having access to all of these things, because it means I can get work done from wherever I am. But it also means that, much like Pavlov’s dogs, I’m trained to pick it up each time it chimes. Sometimes at work, silence (of all that dinging!) is golden.

Now that we’ve gotten rid of the “I’m so busy and I don’t have time for anything” excuse, we can all go out and be more excellent than we already are!

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3 Steps To Accomplish Your Goals…No Matter What

Coaching strategy, Goal setting

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“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

-James Stockdale

At the beginning of the season, the sky’s the limit. But after a few weeks and some competition, the team starts to see where they stand…and that’s when it’s time to take a step back and give your team a hard look. I don’t care whether or not your team is undefeated or hasn’t recorded its first win yet, every coach must give their team a once over. That quotation above is from a man who was able to embrace both optimism and realism (a great trait for any coach to have!) in an amazing way…as a Vietnam prisoner of war. While our situations most certainly are not that severe, we do have an obligation to look at our teams with that same mix of optimistic realism. Let’s look at three areas where the discipline to confront reality is necessary.

3 Ways To Stay On Track And Make Sure Your Goals Are Accomplished

Revisit team goals. When your team first got together, they sat down and wrote out some team goals that they thought they’d be able to accomplish by the end of the season. They showed them to you with pride…maybe they even posted them up in the locker room. At the halfway point, it’s time to check in on those goals. Have you already accomplished some of them? Well then push your team to create bigger and harder to accomplish goals. Or do you need to tweak those goals because you’re no longer able to accomplish them? Regardless of which side you fall on, make sure that your team’s goals are serving their purpose: to motivate them and push them to greater heights.

Evaluate midway performance. Every practice should involve evaluation, but the halfway point should bring with it a new eye to your non-starters. Are they getting better? Would you feel comfortable putting them in the game at any point? Are they still motivated (and trying to get some court time) or have they resigned themselves to being on the bench? In terms of your starters…who are your gamers? Who do you want in control at crunch time? How about your offensive and defensive scheme? Is it working the way you’d planned or do you need to change it up? These are all good questions to ask yourself at the halfway point.

Take stock. How’s the team morale? Are they fired up and motivated? Are they a tight-knit group who enjoy each other’s company and operate like a well-oiled machine? The halfway point is also the time to review your coaching plan. Do you know how each of your players is motivated? Are you doing that? Is there anything that you can do differently to ensure that your players continue to improve through the end of the season? Finally, recruiting. When you take an honest look at your team…what are you missing? Can those holes be filled through your recruiting efforts? Then you’d better get after it!

Look at that quotation again, because I think it’s powerful. We always have optimism: that we can keep winning, that we can start winning, that we can get better…but it’s with a realistic eye. When we do that, we can help our teams accomplish their goals.

The Great American Hoax: Work/Life Balance

Coaching career, Work/Life balance

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So coach, you go home at 5 pm or some other reasonable hour, right? And you get plenty of sleep and eat very healthily while you’re in season too, huh? And of course your family is super happy with the amount of time you spend at home? I ask those questions with my tongue placed firmly in cheek, but the issue of work/life balance is a hot topic amongst employers all over…even the NCAA is on the bandwagon. In my mind, true balance isn’t an option while I’m in season (I’m a Division III coach, we don’t get “help” with stuff), but I look at the year as a whole and strive for balance over the long haul. I believe there are some things I can do for myself and others that will make each part of my life more enjoyable, in season or not. So let’s look at the…

4 Things You Must Do To Achieve Balance

Work: Coffee and colleagues. With those two things, I can conquer the world! Though I may consume caffeine at an alarming level while in season, it’s one of the things that makes me smile during the long days and weeks of season…try to take that away from me at your own risk. After all, isn’t one of the purposes of work/life balance to find happiness in all facets of life? Well, coffee makes me happy dangit! As do the other coaches I work with. Over the years, they’ve been instrumental in helping me work through problems, making me laugh, going out for lunches, and just generally being supportive. Where would we be without our colleagues?

Family: This is going to sound so stereotypically female, but I love cooking. Like big, extravagant meals cooking. But that’s hard to do during season, so I try to do this once a week for my family because it’s one of the ways that I can show them that I love them. Coaches, you may think this sounds sappy (that’s because it is), but you’re spending way more time at work than you are at home…make sure the fam knows that they’re important to you. My way is cooking…what’s yours?

Friends: I’m probably the worst at this one because most of my friends are coaches who are just as crazily busy as I am. But we need to be able to chat about things that are unrelated (gasp!) to our teams or even sports in general. What if, and I know this sounds crazy, we just talked to people about what’s going on in their lives and in ours? I’m going to have to remind myself to follow my own advice and stay connected with my friends while I’m in season.

Self: When I’m out of season, exercise is my preferred method of taking care of myself. In season? Just time to relax is huge…having an hour to sit and veg out has an amazing impact on my outlook on life. A close second? Spending my Sunday afternoon watching NFL games at a sports bar while munching on yummy wings and a tasty beverage. Whatever your “thing” is, make sure to do it. Taking time for yourself is essential so that you can give your best to your team.

Hopefully you were thinking of things that you currently do that affect your happiness level in those four areas. I know this stuff isn’t rocket science, sometimes we just need to be reminded of what we already know we should be doing.

Now go out and be balanced!

The 4 Most Important Steps Required to Guide Your Team Through Crisis

Coaching strategy, Leadership

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It’s going to happen to all of us eventually. It’s going to be of our own doing…or maybe it won’t. It’s going to test the mettle of our teams. Regardless, it’s going to be where we earn our coaching stripes. Every coach at one time or another, will have to deal with guiding their team through a crisis. For me, it came during my first collegiate head coaching stint when I had to manage traveling by air in New York state immediately after the September 11th attacks. Whether it’s something big or small, the coach’s job is to manage and frame the situation for their team. In crisis circumstances, we really do set the tone. Let’s look at a few ways that leaders can manage critical situations with their teams.

Take these 4 steps to guide your team through a crisis

  • Be calm. As the leader, your team will look to you for cues on how to react. It can be an issue as small as a player who doesn’t go all out in practice and as big as a players drinking to excess and getting into trouble with the police. Regardless of the crisis, your team wants to see if you’ll freak out, if you’ll be fair, and if you’ll be consistent.
  • Be supportive. A player on your team is having relationship troubles, or just failed a big test, or their parents are fighting…depending on the timing, each of these situations can quickly turn a personal crisis into a team crisis if not managed correctly. Your job as their coach is to be there for them and help them in any way possible. This is why parents trust you with their children…because they think that you’ll care about them as both a player and a person.
  • Show leadership by managing the situation. If it can distract or embarrass the team members or the program, ideally you want to avoid that sort of thing. Things that come to mind that coaches have done over the last few years: partying with their athletes, telling lies on their resume, driving while drunk, domestic disputes…these are all distractions that will cast a black eye on your program. Once these types of situations occur, handling them with care and grace are essential to getting your team back on track.
  • Never be the cause of drama. You would think that this goes without saying, but I hear of too many teams whose rallying point and motivation is their mutual dislike of their coach. I also hear too many coaches say that they don’t care if their team hates them as long as they like each other. Why would you want to bring that sort of negative energy onto your team? You can’t help your team conquer a problem if you are the problem.

Hopefully these tips will be helpful to guide you and your team through whatever crisis presents itself.