Who Are Our Customers?
Posted on Nov 20, 2007 under Coaching Basics |With extensive experience in sports marketing, I often see many connections between the business side of the game and the coaching side of the game. Think about the following business-model questions and how they apply to your role in teaching your players and elevating the game.
Who are your customers?
The players need to be your first priority. For it is the players and their game that your role is centered around - not the parents, the clubs, the tournaments. Always put the player first when you plan your coaching philosophy, teaching style, and season expectations. Then, consider the age, gender, skill capabilities, maturity levels and all of the other qualities that make your team unique and unable to “pigeon hole”. There is no best way to coach any particular age or skill level, because every team has its own profile. Hopefully, this sparks healthy excitement (rather than dread) as you want to touch and inspire these young people in your own way.
Are you reaching them?
Are they getting to me?
The link between the coach and the players must be a two-way street. From one direction you affect the players and from the other direction you learn from the players. For many coaches, it is difficult to practice, rather than just consider, this dialogue in their coaching. It is very easy to get caught up in winning/losing, teaching techniques, tactical instruction, and other mumbo-jumbo to a degree that you are merely giving, not receiving.
Players catch on very quickly if the environment is “Coach = Monarch and Player = Subordinate”. Step back and analyze how much talking you do in games and training sessions in relation to the players contributing. Ideas, opinions, even complaints must be shared fluidly and constructively.
What will they want when they get there?
Every coach has an opinion of the ideal training session, the perfect game, the quintessential teachable moment. But the players will have far different and possibly opposite views of these utopian situations.
You don’t have to get your tongue pierced for an image where they will listen to you better. All you need to do is to consider their life - listen to them, challenge them, believe in them. That will gather the respect you need to truly work with them.