THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY OF COACHING YOUTH SPORTS

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Coaching my son's team is a great bonding experience
Coaching my son’s team is a great bonding experience

As a father, one of the best bonding times I’ve ever had with my sons has been coaching their sports teams. Unfortunately, it also has been one of the most trying times and has tested my resolve and patience more than once. On top of all that, you have the dreaded “parents” to deal with which can really make or break your love of coaching pretty quickly. (I know, I’ve been a  dreaded parent myself before as well). I’ve been coaching my boys football and baseball teams going on 10 years now and I’ve had my share of ups and downs so I’ve put together a few do’s and don’t below that will hopefully help you along your journey or get you started on this rewarding role.

The Good 

The good is the reason you coach, it’s what makes all the other stuff tolerable and if you get enough of it you may even continue coaching. 

coaching football, coaching polo
Donning my custom coaching polo as we get game ready on Saturdays.
  • First and foremost, the ability to positively influence a group of athletes I’m coaching is #1 on my list.  Win or lose, if I can get a bunch of kids together and see weekly progress in the team and in the athlete personally and see visible improvements by season’s end, I will walk away feeling like I’ve done a great job and believe it’s by far the most rewarding aspect of coaching. 
  • The Development of Character is a very close second because sports teaches life skills like nothing else in the world can. Being a team player, helping others, lifting your teammate up when they are down, getting up time and time again after falling and how to handle both victory and defeat like a champion. Character is what makes a boy a man or a girl a woman and I get to be a part of that maturation. 
  • The Memories.  For the rest of their lives, they will look back and remember their teammates as well as their coaches taking the time out to mentor them, push them and get the best out of them when they were young and long after you’re gone, these precious memories will live on. How’s that for a legacy!

The Bad

Unfortunately not all of your interactions with your players will be great.  I’ve been blessed enough to have coached some amazing kids in my time but I have ended up at times doing more damage than good. Major Payne is a funny movie but nobody wants a real life Major Payne coaching their kids.  In order to avoid this costly mistake you need to focus on a few things

  • Never make the game more important than the kid’s. “IT’S JUST A GAME”.  If you find yourself wanting to strangle a kid you are probably taking the game too seriously.
  • Encourage your kids constantly- point out the bad but when they fix it make sure to encourage them for it repeatedly.  If you want a behavior to continue, encouragement is your best weapon.  Most athletes do not respond well to criticism unless it’s limited and immediately followed up by encouragement when they do it right. 
  • Be prepared- It’s easy to say it’s just a game and not come in ready each game but that’s an attitude you need to drop if you’re going to coach.  You need to be understanding and encouraging to your players but as the coach you need to make sure you are always ready and prepared.  Believe me, the kids and parents all know when they have a dud coach and you don’t want to be that guy. 

The Ugly

The parents, some can really be that bad. To be fair, you get a lot of great and supportive parents, but there is rarely a time that I’ve coached where I didn’t get at least one or two critical and divisive parents.

The worst ones are the parents that scream and put their kids down during the games. If you want your kid to hate you when they grow up, congrats you are well on your way when you do that. There’s also the average athlete parents that think their child is the team MVP.  I can see them after every game creeping around the group with a frown on their face before hearing those dreaded words “coach can we talk for a minute?” 

The last thing you want after coaching for two hours and pouring your heart out is Karen’s lecture on how you clearly don’t see that their kid is the best kid on your team and you need to be playing them more than your “favorites”.  My favorites according to Karen are always the best 2 or 3 players on the team and the only reason I’m playing them according to Karen is because I like them and not because they are any good. 

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that every season I’ve coached I’ve thought about being done with it for good because of the parents which is why you really need to make the good count. Times like this, I have to put myself in Karen’s shoes and appreciate that they are being their kids number one fan, which is something to be admired. I also look to my assistant coach/coaches for input so we can address the parents concerns and do our best for the kid. Sometimes, no matter what I do, it will not be good enough for Karen. 

The kids look good in their league provided football jerseys. For your own  custom football jerseys, check out Allen Sportswear’s custom football uniforms. Disclaimer: Allen Sportswear did not provide the league’s NFL stock jerseys.

Block out all the noise and focus on the kids, get your encouragement from seeing them flourish and don’t worry about Karen watching your every move. If you do this you can have an amazing and rewarding coaching career whether it’s for little leagues or something bigger like high school or college.  You have a chance to change a child’s life and there aren’t many things in this life of ours we can do that will that kind of impact.

Written by: Todd Marinshaw (President/CEO Allen Sportswear, Dad/Football Coach)

Hiring- How it Can Make or Break a Company

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Over the years of hiring for different positions locally and internationally,  I have had my fair share of accomplishments and failures to learn how much the right hires can make a company unique and special while the wrong hires can erode everything you have built to accomplish. When I think about chicken, the first thing that pops to mind is Chick-Fil-A and that is because of the amazing people that work there.  They always have a ready smile, a great attitude and for some reason they seem to be the only fast food place in town that remembers to put your condiments in the bag every time you go. That is not by accident, sure, they train well, but I believe they hire for that and in doing so they have distanced themselves from every other chicken place or burger joint in the planet. Now let’s look at KFC, the original famous chicken place.  Personally I think their chicken tastes better than Chick-Fil-A but I will drive past three KFC’s to get to one Chick-Fil-A. I am sure you know the answer why- their employees look like they hate working there, they ask for your order at least 3 times and when it comes it is usually still wrong. They don’t have a product problem, they have a hiring problem and that is why Chick-Fil-A is wiping the floor with them.

 

You can take any industry in the world and find the same set of issues over and over again. Whether it’s a small business or a Fortune 500 company, hiring can make or break an organization.  Company A has great service while company B has average to bad service and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which one is winning. So what does it take to make a great hire? Here are three steps to getting things started right.

Hiring for cultural fit ensures organization success

  • Identify your culture – Who are you and what do you represent? A team culture has to be decisively defined from the inception of a business. If you had  a hard time figuring it out, you most likely are already in the thick of figuring it out the hard way. But it is not too late. Take your top two to three high performing employees and break down what they do that makes them indispensable.  Try to be as specific as possible. An example would be: “Yesterday Paul had a client he was about to lose to a competitor but he thought outside of the box and bundled Product X which has been sitting in inventory thus creating more value and now the customer has changed his mind and decided to work with us.”  I know this seems simplistic, but flesh out day to day examples of core values that make an employee stand out- whether it is innovation, integrity, adaptability, accountability, self improvement, teamwork, integrity- find it and define it. Conversely, pick your average employees and figure out what makes them mediocre. An example would be,  “The team did not meet a project deadline this month, and instead of owning up her own failure and finding areas of improvement, Debbie jumped at the opportunity to blame another team member and management for lack of process or resources. She does this often and is hardly open to criticism. “ But Debbie shows up everyday! But she does not demonstrate accountability, and her blame game is starting to be contagious. Stop right there! Realize that average employees are worse than bad employees, because they have enough good qualities to make it hard to let them go but they keep you and your team from having another high performer. The sooner you’ve established what you do and do not like through specific examples, it becomes apparent what type of company and culture you are trying to build. Once you have a well defined company culture, you need to refine your recruiting and hiring process to support these core values.

 

 

  • Finding the right candidates – If finding a good candidate was as easy as just writing a post on Monster and the floodgates would open, there would be no need for professional recruiters and talent acquisition specialists. Finding the right person starts with going to the right places. LinkedIn and Indeed.com are great places to post jobs for people actively seeking work but you do not want to miss out on passive candidates. Go beyond traditional recruiting and use sites like Exalead.com. Be proficient at using Boolean search terms to narrow down your list of possible candidates. There are books and tutorials as much as there are college courses that cover Boolean search so I won’t go over that. The key thing is to target the right places to conduct your search. Your search strategy should have a well defined skill set along with job titles to make sure you do not miss out on a future rock star that just happens to be in a different field at the moment. (And if they happen to be in the same field, beware that non-compete). Once you have your passive candidate short list, reach out and grab that coffee. A friendly discussion about career paths can go a long way. Other creative ways to find good candidates is to  maximize social media networking, incentivize referrals or be active in community events. The best employees I have ever hired I found through networking or referrals. Some of them were not even actively looking. One that comes to mind is someone I met at church. I remember thinking “this kid is driven and has a great attitude”. Someone from my hiring team was eyeing another candidate who had a double major from the most expensive college in town and who had a stronger background in our industry. Fortunately, cultivating fresh talent won the argument that day and long story short, my “kid” was instrumental to some of the best years we’ve had in revenue growth and customer satisfaction, and validated my philosophy that I can train skills all day long but I can not train character or force a fit.

 

 

  • Interview to win –  One of the common mistakes most interviewers make is asking the same set of questions to different candidates. While this is useful for an initial screening, at the very least  I always use a strengths based test to have an initial read on a candidate’s mental aptitude and personality dimensions. This allows me to have a customized list of questions to conduct behavioral interviews, allowing me to probe and have a stronger understanding of a candidate’s potential and areas for improvement. I go back to step one and look at my list of core values. For example, if flexibility or adaptability is one of them, I would use questions to prompt for this, such as “Describe a time when you were expected to complete a project with a tight deadline and with little to no direction.” I can then observe if the candidate shows indecisiveness or has the ability to act on his or her own. A good HR department will have an exhaustive list of well formulated interview questions with interpretive guides to use depending on the candidate’s profile.  Use them! Above all else, listen. Many interviewers go into an interview and end up spending the entire time talking. A good candidate always turns the table and gets me and the panel talking and I have to remind myself to make sure to listen more than I talk.

 

 

These are simple steps without the geek speak and there is much more to employee retention than recruiting and hiring. It  is important to study the trends, best practices and ethics in the field of Human Resources and to use technology to make the process easier, but at the end of the day, finding the best talent boils down to knowing and understanding people and starts with who you allow in. And when you find them, repeat Step 1. Religiously. Identify your high performers versus average performers. Evaluate both for these core values and not just performance. It is easy to get caught up in a reclamation project but keeping an average employee can lead to a toxic work environment, or you may be holding them back from being a high performer somewhere else. Define and protect your team culture and do not compromise on finding employees that fit your vision and your company culture.

 

 

By: Todd Marinshaw. Todd is the director of sales and talent acquisition at a sportswear business based in Oviedo, FL and one of the founders of iPrevail, a non-profit organization focused on consistent and sustainable support for foster homes, homeless assistance and natural disaster survivors.