Coaches: We Are Not Ready For What is Coming. Here's How to Prepare.

Coaches: We Are Not Ready For What is Coming. Here's How to Prepare.

Yesterday on January 6, 2021, I had the news running from 1:30 pm until well into the night. As a college coach, I've had many thoughts during this pandemic and time of social unrest that ranges from wanting to desperately get out on the field again to seriously contemplating if I even want to go back.

There has never been a time when more people in our profession have collectively felt so lost or directionless while serving as real-time witnesses to watching our traditional support beams in athletics gradually vanish.

Not as the Fearless Coach, but as a human being, admittedly I almost gave in last semester where it felt like the hits just kept coming. The one and only support I had for my program in my team administrator was lost when she was moved to another department. Simultaneously, I had a steady stream of struggling athletes with what felt like serious insatiable needs 24/7. Practice shutdowns every other week, testing confusion, disciplinary issues for team culture and don't forget, an entire other life outside of athletics that most fail to acknowledge that coaches live.

All of us are reading the same feeds, the same college athletic news and predictions while clicking on the same dreaded headlines. Weeks ago the news was focused on predicting the roll-out of a vaccine and suddenly there was light at the end of the tunnel as it appeared to be the beginning of answers in education and athletics to the formidable questions posed by COVID-19. However, please allow yourself a moment to put aside your frantic spring scheduling calls and budget spreadsheets to put this chaos into perspective.

For almost a year now, your staff, department, school and athletes have been living in an alternative isolated universe of limitations and unknowns. By sheer nature of being coaches, we are wired to think positive and plan for the best of outcomes which can be a double-edged sword.

The other day I had a colleague across the country text me to let me know that her spring schedule was just approved and that it was "looking good". As someone who is perpetually on the thought track of how we can be proactive and be one step ahead of the game, this time period and particularly the dumpster fire of 2020 has been elusive in the quest for positive breaks. I thought to myself, so what now? Yes, there is a vaccine and despite having some initial quarantine requirements varying by school and state, we should be in good shape as long as we can get the athletes back out and playing, right? Wrong.

If you are a coach in the college space I am urging you to take this piece into consideration for the sake of your own sanity, your mental load and the cruel reality for our athletes.

Make no mistake, our people typically employed to support coaches are just as confused and directionless. While most in leadership are winging it, the lack of answers continues to pile up. This inventory is taking a toll on us and the clock is ticking for the return of our athletes to campus if you are not a winter sport who remained over break.

If you are a coach or an admin thinking that the light at the end of our tunnel is shining through just bright enough to grab us out of this pandemic and our political and social unrest, it's likely you haven't been paying attention.

I am not sharing any of this to dash any faint glimmers of hope, nor do I want to be the icing on the bad news cake starting off for 2021. However, I do want to be realistic. If you thought this was as simple as outlasting pandemic and election results, think again.

After yesterday, messaging to ask if your team is "doing ok" after they've been scrolling endlessly through their feeds isn't going to cut it. If we are not recognizing the challenge ahead of us then we are wasting precious time that could be spent on working to tackle our opponent that will be back this spring with a vengeance - and I don't mean COVID-19.

I am referring to our inability to work together and communicate properly with these two facts weighing on us.

Fact: Every single one of us has been through trauma.

Fact: All of us have been involved in this circular race of chasing an unobtainable sense of normalcy.

Last semester, I worked tirelessly to identify my purpose and ways I could keep my athletes engaged as they sat in their dorm rooms having meals delivered while perpetually questioning what they were doing even trying to live their life on campus. I was barely swimming and sometimes drowning in the daily stick-and-move schedule that pandemic forced us into.

Even though it's likely you felt the weight of this challenge too during fall semester, have we really acknowledged how this is going to affect our programs moving forward? We did our best to slog through a fall semester full of disappointments, delays and confusion. We sat home watching thousands of college football and basketball players take to the field or court while our own athletes were considered too much of a risk to compete. This was all maddening, but also quite sad.

Some may argue that those who took to the field and court have more privilege while others, including me, could argue that college sports boldly demonstrated that they care even less for those athletes making the institution money by having them compete and risk their health. As grown professional adults, if we are struggling to make sense of this fragmented business we are all a part of while witnessing this take place under our watches, imagine how your 18-22 year olds are processing all of this. If leadership won't change its approach, can we as coaches still change ours? We can, but not without acknowledging the following:

  1. Our coaching staffs are experiencing and will continue to experience trauma.

Despite being the most overlooked demographic in the self care arena, coaches in athletic departments are human beings who are experiencing pandemic right along with their athletes, support staff and admins. Conversations are open and alive in the NCAA on the topic of supporting athletes in transition back to athletics, but not so much for the people who are actually at ground zero. Failure of administrations to prepare for this or even attempt to have dialogue on what their staff needs most, is a recipe for our hardest spring semester to date.

If you are an administrator or a leader in higher education, before reaching for that virtual guest speaker's email for your athletes upon return, you may want to invest some proper think-tank time into gauging your own staff's temperature on their challenges. Trying to triage the athletes from a resource and support standpoint without checking on your coaches is a grave misstep.

2. Our athletes are experiencing and will continue to experience trauma.

As a coach in the current pandemic we all know that coping skills are at their lowest for the generation of athletes we serve.

We have to be open to dialogue on not only their current state, but how they are processing what they have been through in the last year. As coaches, we cannot do this alone. We are not therapists. Prior to scheduling your first chalk-talk or strength and conditioning session , seek out support from your mental health resources for your team in a joint effort to help them process everything from the number of daily deaths they are see flashing across their phone, to the social justice climate and everyday fears that have been stacking up over the last year. If you are short on resources or are dealing with a system that is reactive rather than proactive, there's always the option to set aside time for the team to just talk. This is completely free and only requires you to listen.

Prior to getting them back out onto the physical competing landscape or training, set aside time to offer them a consistent and reliable chance to empty out any accumulating mental inventory.

3. Our athletic departments are wholly unprepared for the onslaught of issues our programs are about to experience...or already are.

Working from home, odd hours, shifts in family dynamics and new ways to function and attempt a work-life balance have been thrown into the mix for all of us. Assuming that the offices of athletics can immediately return to normal when many industries around the country and the world are forever changed in the way they do business, is foolish. This is less about adapting to wearing masks and being 6 feet apart then it is re-teaching people how to function in an environment that hinges much of its success on relationship building. This foundation of relationship building is severely impacted by our COVID-19 circumstances.

Additionally, we have an entire class of first-year athletes who have been exposed to college athletics in a watered-down, shortened and limited schedule version while returners are being wildly let down by their expectations in comparison of what used to be.

Assuming that one group will just adapt naturally by accelerating their level of commitment to be thrown into a non-traditional season as "their season", while the other will just seamlessly return to normal, is also on the naive spectrum. This is no different for your staff in terms of a broad range of reactions that rapid re-assimilation will have on them.

Coaches who punched it 24/7 and logged a ton of hours prior to pandemic may have suddenly discovered value and reward in giving a little more to their personal lives and families.

How will that balance affect their team? Will these coaches be supported in their new discovery or have consequences?

On the other side, you will have coaches who return to work wanting to hit the ground running only to be stifled again by delays and cancellations. This is another avenue for major stress on your programs that must be addressed.

4. Communication and recognition is at its lowest and this must change.

For a little under a year, at the forefront of most departments has been the ongoing conversation about budgets and basic survival. If students are not able to safely walk through the campus doors where does that leave us?

A natural casualty of this centerpiece conversation is that pandemic has found leadership in many departments largely neglectful of communication and proactive development within their staffs. Unanswered questions leads to speculation and speculation leads to mistrust in your departments. As we begin the new year, I am urging athletic leadership to come back to a crucial element of operating a team and communicating vigilantly with the coaches and support staff who make this all work.

5. Winter sport athlete challenges are largely being hidden away. We are not seeing the full picture of chaos coming this spring.

Across the country, college winter sport athletes at all levels are being stuffed into hotel rooms or single dorms for 20 hours a day with Netflix, iPhones and Zoom as their only contact. Under these circumstances they've also been expected to be at peak performance for the remaining four hours in order to sink buckets or shoot some puck. This is pure insanity driven by financial co-dependence on March Madness and it's truly eye-opening.

Shut downs and delays due to positive tests or efforts to mitigate spread are not front page news in every instance. Many schools opting to push pause on their seasons are simply announcing schedule changes and date rearrangments. Athletes at lesser known institutions or lower divisions are being sidelined, tested, retested, isolated, quarantined and are recycled repeatedly through this process.

If the powers that be at the NCAA are not sitting around in their depleted offices at least attempting to think of newer, more creative revenue streams that do not involve putting athlete's lives at risk for the sake of the dollar, than we are in a much deeper and darker hole than any of us imagined. The old recipe of placing this responsibility solely on a small percentage of the athletic population is outdated and has been exposed.

6. As we are trying to make these fall and spring championships happen we must ask ourselves who we are really doing this for.

We've heard about plans to move fall championships to the spring. We've heard about condensed seasons, seasons with limited travel or those without out-of-conference games etc. All of this is new territory that may not initially feel like it's complex to navigate but, I implore you to be mindful of our athlete population who are most certainly creatures of habit with staunch expectations on what a real season looks like to them. The amount of virtual meetings to iron their feelings out and manage those expectations is a season all by itself.

The magnitude of pressure that band-aid scheduling will place on support staff including your athletic trainers, facilities, strength teams, maintenance and your coaching staff is beyond measure. Facility conflicts with shared spaces, practice times with major COVID-19 limitations and athletes on a revolving loop with quarantines, temporary shutdowns and outbreaks...will all be waiting for us upon return.

We must re-wire our thinking now, before we get back into the rat race. No coach is currently able to meet the expectations of their athletes and ultimately that disappointment will fall squarely on our shoulders when dissatisfaction comes knocking. We will all be asked to do our best at a time when none of us are capable of our best.

7. We must all reframe what winning looks like and we must do it now.

The quicker we stop longing for normal and think about how we function in the new normal, the healthier we will be moving forward.

While we cannot predict what will happen we can acknowledge the chaos that has ensued on college athletics and agree to be mindful of these factors when considering all of the old standards and bar measurements we used for success. I am begging each and every one of you, for the sake of your health and sanity to immediately reframe what winning looks like.

Winning this year looks more like your entire team staying healthy than it does by counting your W's in a condensed season you threw together to satisfy your seniors or department.

Winning looks like our athletes being able to process and accept where our programs are on the spectrum.

Winning is to move forward in a way that continues to choose healthy over unhealthy rather than solely chalking up experiences to strictly happy or unhappy.

Winning may even be something as simple as two consecutive days of practice in your pods without being shut down. Start small.

Talk to your team in advance about the new "winning" and create goals completely separate from their normal reference points that include games or competitions. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can offer our teams a chance to win even if there is no opponent. Let us also be mindful that none of this even matters unless your administration is singing off the same sheet of music. So...

Administrators, I am urging you to take your coaches' voices and perspectives into consideration. I call on athletic directors to be clear and consistent in what your goals are for the spring and moving forward. Simultaneously asking your teams and staffs to focus on winning while also trying to achieve peak mental health and balance slashing budgets is going to be a crushing triad for coaches.

Your coaches are built for challenges but, if our ultimate goal is to serve athletes and develop them we must all take a step back and recognize we are still navigating a global pandemic and a divided country.

The new normal must be about teams and departments as a whole working to strengthen our own coping skills, redrawing the lines of success, reinventing the definition of winning while acknowledging everyone involved in the process as struggling because let's face it - we all are.

Did you like this post? Tweet @TFCoachCarlson #BEFEARLESS #ReframeWinning

Kris Herman

Williams College Head Softball Coach. Coach of Head Coaches | Empowering Leaders to Enhance Winning Teams with Clarity, Insight, and Consistent Support

3 年

Coach, thanks for your voice and passion. Coaching coaches has been something we've needed in the "old normal" and this year has clearly, as you make known here in detail, illustrated how much this layer of "leader" needs help. Taking it up a notch, administration needs help as well. At least coaches have others nearby to commiserate and strategize with, many ADs are living on an island on their campuses. Let's keep talking and not fool ourselves that anything "new" will automatically be better with the passage of time.

回复
Janice Kruger

The Side-Out Foundation and Club Director

3 年

Thank you Becky, so well said!

Tania Santos

Physiotherapist and Owner of Active Physical Therapy

3 年

Thank you for so accurately voicing coaches/ team-healthcare-worker’s concerns. It’s refreshing to begin to hear grounded solutions and ideas to get everyone on the team onto the same page. Adjusted new normals must always follow change so positive growth can occur. Sending out grounded braveness to all.....

Cortnee W.

Sport and performance Counseling

3 年

Absolutely! Thank you for writing this. As an Athlete therapist I am seeing a surge in athletes of all ages feeling overwhelmed by the unknown. Coaches too are doing their best with this uncharted territory but also trying to hold it together themselves.

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