The Coach: Leadership for Excellence / The Game - The Thrill of Being a Coach

The Coach: Leadership for Excellence  -- An Audio Cassette Program

Designed and Produced by Peregrine Press for the Amateur Softball Association

Author: Dr. Peter S. Pierro                                         Narration: Dr. Robert Grupe

Copyright © Peregrine Press, 1987                         

Introduction

In the late 1980s I spent three  years as a professor at Langston University, an Historical Black College and University (HBCU). LU is located just north of Oklahoma City. They were three of my best college teaching years. The staff and the students at LU were of the highest professional and personal quality and a pleasure to be associated with. 

Besides my college teaching I was allowed to be an adjunct writer and trainer at the Amateur Softball Association - now USA Softball - in Oklahoma City.  I had the pleasure of working with Cindy Bristow, a Hall of Fame softball player and member of the coaches’ training program. For one of my tasks, I was asked to develop a set of materials for coaches and parents of players to improve their interpersonal relationships with their players. 

The result was an audio tape set of eight extended sessions. 

Tape 1 - Side 1    The Game - The Thrill of Being a Coach

Tape 1 - Side 2  The Coach As Leader

Tape 2 - Side 3 The Players - Getting to Know Them

Tape 2 - Side 4 The Challenge - Being Your Best

Tape 3 - Side 5 The Team - Working and Playing Together

Tape 3 - Side 6 The Goal - The Joy of Coaching

Tape 4 - Side 7 The Parents - Partners in the Quest

Tape 4 - Side 8 The Expert - Excellence in Coaching             

This information will be presented in our blogs in its entirety in the following weeks with little or no editing. Any changes, such as my bringing the context up to date, will be noted.  Each side will produce more than one blog.           

The Game - The Thrill of Being a Coach

This week as I was working on this initial presentation of this program, two pieces of information caught my attention. The first is a fund raising letter from the United States Olympic Committee, dated December 20, 1987, that begins, "Somewhere in a lonely field in Kansas a 15 year-old boy jumps as far as he can. Is he the next Carl Lewis? And on a dusty road in Vermont, a girl thinks of Joan Benoit - and runs another mile."

The letter goes on describing the efforts of our athletes to get ready for the Olympic games and asks us for our support by sending a contribution. The letter ends, "Make that extra effort with the young long jumper - go that extra mile with the runner. It's a team effort, and the team needs you now!"

This is the kind of message that makes us excited about working with young people; about being a coach. We can, of course, support  our Olympic hopefuls, but closer to home, we can be positive influences in the lives of the players that we work with personally, the players on our team.

And then, Cindy Bristow gave me a clipping from the December 15, 1987,  issue of USA Today, headlined, "Sports and Suicide; Some tragic stories." In this article, Mitch Anthony, Executive Director of the National Suicide Help Center points out that teenage suicide is up 300 percent the last 20 years and that the role of sports in that statistic needs to be examined. Among the cases that he has encountered are a high school player who hanged himself after being cut from the team and a top-level runner wishing she had a broken leg so she wouldn't have to face her father's criticisms over not setting records.

Mr. Anthony goes on to say, "If I'm going to point a finger it's going to be more with parental relationships than with coaches." And he concludes, "If I can capsulize this, sports experiences for many teenagers are devastating to their self-esteem. Kids today hear so much about success, they think it's a sin to fail."

It was striking to me that in these two messages, we have the best and the worst of what coaching can be. We, as coaches, can assist our young hopefuls in the fulfilling of their potentials, and we can do it by working with them and their parents in a constructive, positive manner, or we can do it in a destructive, negative manner. That is our choice.

The materials in these tapes, in fact, all of the materials that come from the Amateur Softball Association are in the constructive, positive mode. So this is our task, to be the best coaches and models for our young athletes.

Next week we will present a set  of  guidelines to help you on your journey.