My Worst Coaching Day

When my kids were playing youth soccer, I became a licensed coach. I figured that if I had an opinion about what was happening on the field I ought to at least show up and help with the practices before shouting from the sidelines. Hey, parents, read that last line again. If you don’t coach the team during the week you don’t get to coach them on weekends! BTW, leave the refs alone unless you want their job. You can sign up here .

When my oldest kid was thirteen, I was the assistant coach on his recreation-level team. It was a pretty decent team with a few players that would go on to play travel ball, and even a few that would play in a very competitive high-school system. Our goal was to help players be their best and push them to achieve more. Although we loved winning games, that wasn’t the point. (I still do this with my business clients, but now winning matters more!)

Most of the kids had a great attitude about their sport. They wanted to win, of course, but they also enjoyed the hard workouts and getting better at their skills. One kid, though, was an outlier. He didn’t really want to work that hard, doing the bare minimum at practice, and was disappointed that he wasn’t a starter. He seemed to enjoy being on the sidelines commenting on the games more than contributing to them. The problem being that he was a consistently negative kid.

Every time we’d go down a goal or the other team would make a good play, he was quick to lament. “Oh, jeez! Now they’re going to score… See? I told you… now we’re going to lose.” This happened every game, even if we were ahead. I spoke to him several times about the negative attitude, but nothing could shake him. It was like pessimism was his superpower. And it affected the other players. Somehow the constant barrage of negativity had an impact on play, and not in a good way. The thing about performance in sports or any other arena is that people who believe they are doomed to failure usually are.

One fateful morning late in the season we were up against the number one team. Since we were in 3rd place this seemed like a pretty good matchup, and we were holding our own. The play on the field was pretty even, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to Kevin. Every time the other team’s talented striker would touch the ball Kevin was sure it was going to be a goal. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t?) encourage our equally talented defenders. For some reason, that never occurred to him.

This was really getting under my skin on the sidelines. It seemed like every week I needed to have a talk with Kevin about his negativity and how it was bringing the team down. He just didn’t seem to care. In his world, everything was lost before the first kickoff. But this week he was particularly negative, and I’d had enough. “Kevin, drop the negativity, please.” That was the first one. “Kevin, knock it off,” was next. ?Now I’m not really sure exactly what I said to Kevin on the 10th time, but I do know the parents could hear it, and I do know that Kevin’s dad came over and grabbed Kevin and took him home.

This was not my finest moment as a coach. I never intended to drive a kid off the field, and to this day it pains me that I failed to reach a person I was trying to coach. It doesn’t matter that he was a negativity bomb that dragged the whole team down, it bothers me that I couldn’t reach him.

I was the reason Kevin left, and I apologized to the head coach and to other players for Kevin departing. Funny thing was nobody was upset. The team, minus the negativity anchor weighing them down, went on to win the league and place well in regionals. Turns out the best thing that could have happened was to remove the negative influence.

So many businesses suffer from their roster of Kevins: people who don’t believe in the success of the company. Kevins cripple the culture and spread negativity. They infect your workforce with defeatist attitudes that keep the company from being great.

I haven’t lost another player or coaching client that way, but it still haunts me how negative Kevin was. Worse, it bothers me how ready his parents were to remove him from a place where people were trying to help him think more positively. ?

There may be people in your life or your work that share Kevin’s superpower of pointing out the worst in every situation. These people thrive on telling you the reasons your idea won’t work. They chide you for having aspirations. They tell you that you are reaching beyond your grasp, and if you listen to them long enough you will believe them.

Surrounding yourself with people who believe in you and what you are doing is the key to success. Henry Ford once quipped, “Those that believe they can do something and those who believe they can’t are both right.” Having that reinforced by the company you keep makes all the difference.

Need help with fostering a winning culture? Bob Dixon is a?leadership coach ,?a strategic consultant , and Certified High Performance Coach at Arete Strategic Consulting. He is a combat veteran with over thirty years of military service and a passion for helping people be more awesome.

He is the author of?Leadership Insight: Challenging What We Think We Know ?and dozens of articles on leadership and national security