Even if you’re not the head coach you still have a
great channel to your Board. You are the hands-on
coach with the Board member’s five-year-old son or
daughter. You are still setting the groundwork for
tomorrow. The coach/athlete/parent pyramid is a
crucial relationship for you I used to think of it
as a triangle but it is actually a pyramid In a
triangle with the coach on top, you take out the
concept of coaching the coach. But in a pyramid,
you’ve got the head coach who has the idea of
direction, coaching down one leg to the other
coaches, coaching another leg to the parents,
coaching down another leg to the athlete.
But look, your club is not
you, your club is the people who pay the bills and
the people who do the work. If you are going to
rebuild your club, you’ve got to get good parents on
the Board, good parents who believe in what you
believe in, because you cannot run away from the
parents. You should meet with them after practice,
when you can just sit around and talk with folks.
Parents who are absolute, inflexible
my-way-or-the-highway people, you don’t want on the
Board. You can’t afford to have a flake deciding
your future on the whim of what his five year-old
did last weekend. Find something else for the
difficult parents to do.
How do you do that?
You know who your good parents
are, you know whom you trust. So you have to finagle
a little. You sit with them and talk to them. “You
need to be on the Board. You believe what I believe.
We need to get this club moving in the right
direction. You need to be on the Board.” It really
comes down to that and is that simple. Say, “You
can’t sit back and let these people do what they
want to do, you need to be a Board member. You need
to have your opinion heard and you need to have your
opinion shaped into the way this club is run.
You get the bad ones to do
something else. “You know, I don’t know if a Board
position is really right for you, because you know,
you do such a great job organizing things. I would
really like you in charge of organizing all the
Friday night parties for the Novice group. Every
Friday after practice do something different like
having hot chocolate, pizza, or lasagna or lobster
bisque, something that’s not going to eat up a lot
of your time. I have faith knowing that if I put you
in this job, it’s going to get taken care of because
you know how to get the business done.”
If you are the head coach and
you are in a situation of rebuilding, you may even
have to bring in non-swimming people onto the Board.
You may have to bring in a banker, someone who has a
business sense, an entrepreneur, and a plumber. When
I had team in Tyler, Texas, believe me we needed
plumbers someone who could stop that pool from
draining itself occasionally. Then, make sure that
these people count. Make sure that they know they
count. Make sure that their leadership is important.
Because even if you take the not-so-good parent, the
one that can be so destructive, and put him or her
in charge of something, you make them feel that what
they are doing is important. More likely, they will
come to you and ask you what you are doing instead
of grousing to everyone else in the stands.
Your coaches must be coached to
deal with these folks. For some you are hired to be
fired, remember? The cycle is coach, make a mistake,
get fired, get hired...repeat. Coaching is an
apprenticeship without a structure. You only learn
to coach by coaching. You learn how to be a good
coach, hopefully, by coaching under good coaches or
by listening to them. Parents are the same way,
administrators are the same way. All this stuff we
talk about with parents applies to the principle of
your school, if you are a school coach. Principals
don’t know swimming. The Principal might be a former
football coach. Chances are the Athletic Director
is. But you, the experienced coach, you have got to
coach the inexperienced coaches and inexperienced
administrators.
Taken from an edited
transcript of a presentation that Mike Lewellyn gave
at the National Age Group Coaches Conference in
April 1999. |