The Coach: Leadership for Excellence /The Successful Coach, an Exploration

Designed/Produced by Peregrine Press for Amateur Softball Association

Author: Dr. Peter S. Pierro  

The Challenge - Being Your Best

Success #1

Let's start this side off with a simple question:

How many of you out there would like to be a successful coach? Well, I'll just accept that all of you have your hands raised. I presume the reason you're listening to this tape is so that you will be more successful in the future.

Another simple question, or perhaps not so simple.

What is success?

Let's leave that up in the air a while and do some exploring. We'll begin the quest with an article I wrote several years ago for another publication.

Winners and Losers - How Can We Separate the Sheep From the Goats?

I was watching a report on the New York Marathon on the news last night. There were 14,000 starters, 2,465 of them women; who planned to run the 26+ miles.

The first person to reach the finish line was Alberto Salazar, Bill Rodgers, who was trying for a fifth first place finish, came in fifth. Grete Waitz was the first woman finisher. She placed 74th overall and set a new woman's record for the marathon run. Pattie Catalone was the first American woman to cross the finish line. She wanted to become the second woman (joining Waltz) , to break the 2 hour, 30 minute mark. She came in at 2 hours, 29 minutes and 34 seconds.

The stories in the television coverage focused on these four and a number of others who had finished; an elderly person, a heart attack victim, an amputee, a wheelchair contestant, and some first-timers.

With that information, here are some questions to ponder:

1. Was Salazar the winner and the other 13,999 losers?

2. Was Rodgers a failure for not reaching his goal?

3. Were the heart attack survivor, the amputee, and the wheelchair contestant losers?

4. Was Waitz a loser? Was she the winner of a special group?

5. Was Catalone a winner because she set a new personal best time and reached her goal of breaking 2 hours, 30 minutes? She came in 80th overall.

6. Should we allow each contestant to evaluate himself or herself? In other words, is success determined by the athlete or by some other person?

Let's take this in a broader view. Who determines whether you are a winner or a loser? Can you decide if someone else is a winner or a loser? How much do we allow others to judge whether we are successful and how much judging of others do we do?

And then the last and perhaps biggest question for the coach; after you decide who the losers are, what do you do with them?

Winners In the Survival Game

Business leaders, the smart ones, know that "Survival of the Fittest" is not logical. There can be only one Chief Executive Officer, but you can't kill off the rest of the organization. Everyone in the corporation must believe that he or she is a 'winner'; the comptroller, the sales manager, and plant manager, the foreman on the line, the diemaker, the typist, the groundskeeper. If you make any of them 'losers', you diminish the whole operation.

Let's take another case. There are 28 teams in the National Football League. Sometime in the middle of January we have a Super Bowl Game and one of the 28 is crowned The Big Winner. Are all of the rest losers?

I hope the 27 non-champion teams do not quit because they didn't win the championship. Today is December 22, 1987, and there is a small item in the newspaper about Dave Rimington, the former All American center from Nebraska University. He is now playing with the Cincinnati Bengals who have a woeful 4 win, 10 loss record so far this season. Rimington says, "It's an awful experience. This is about the worst. I'm tired of saying, it's the worst. Just put me away somewhere and get me out of my misery for a while."

This really is a difficult time for Dave Rimington, but you and I know that he will be back next year because his concept of being a winner is not limited to being on the Super Bowl Championship team. That certainly is one of his goals. He won't give that up too easily, and next year is a new opportunity.

Losing a game does not make you a 'loser'. What you do and who you are, are two different things. You can lose and not be a loser. You can be, act, and feel like a winner regardless of the circumstances.

And so it is with your team. The players, the batboys, the parents, your assistant coaches and you, must all feel that you are winners. Also, you might want to consider the effects of making some of your players winners and others losers. If any of your players feel inadequate, the whole team suffers.

Success; a Personal Viewpoint

Success is a personal creation; it just doesn't happen by accident. Of the many definitions of success I have found, this statement by Paul J. Meyer seems to me to be the most exact:

"Success is the progressive realization of worthwhile, pre-determined personal goals.