Ask any coach what their proudest accomplishment is. Then ask them what achievement by one of their athletes they’d feature on a resume
For most coaches, you’re going to get a very different answer. In “marketing” yourself as a coach, it’s useful to make things simple for others. To wit, I’ll describe one of my proudest accomplishments and then what populates my resume.
It was 2008 and I’m coaching at the University of Pennsylvania. My niche was designated for coaching breaststrokers, under the perfect coaching logic of “he competed in it, so he must know how to coach it”. I was working with a freshmen from Louisiana named Laura Klick.
Laura was probably the most committed athlete I’d coached up to that point. The type that when you said “jump” you would find immediately levitating off the earth. She was a happy kid with a competitive edge.
We got to the end of the season and were just a few days out from the Ivy League Championship. At this point workouts are much more rehearsals for the big show than anything else. We’re doing a broken 100 breaststroke, Laura’s best event. She touches, here’s her time and bursts into tears.
Beneath the effervescent smile, behind the relentless grit, she’s exposed. At that moment, I knew I had an athlete that was afraid that everything she’d worked so hard for was about to evaporate.
As she walked back, her teammate mocked her. I don’t remember his words exactly, but it was ridicule for showing some emotion. Something like “Why would you cry over a swim meet?”. Things were going from bad to worse, and fast.
I calmly told him to shut it and sat down next to her. We stared out at the pool for a moment and she sniffed up tears.
A week later she was standing on the podium at her championship meet still crying but with a different emotion behind it. I wish I could tell you the magical coaching words that I said that day. The truth is there are none. In this moment, you either have the relationship to make a difference or you don’t.
She wrote me a text thanking me afterwards and it touched me so much that I never forgot it.
Resume Builder
Here’s a sampling of things I lead a resume with:
“First athletic coach in the world to get an advanced degree in Positive Psychology”
“Danish Junior National Team Coach”
“Worked with a 2023 World Championship Silver Medalist”
These are simple statements. They make some sort of sense to people who know almost nothing about coaching, swimming or even sports. I have catalogued them in order to impress you, hoping that the halo coming off them will convince you to hire me as your coach.
It feels much more honest to say you should hire me for Laura Klick, but she doesn’t fit into a single sentence. Even in a paragraph, I couldn’t possibly explain the process of slowly building trust over the course of months so that when the dam breaks for a scared freshmen you can be there. I can’t even fully explain it in this blog post!
Headline accomplishments attract our ego. The funniest part is that they are about being in the right place, at the right time more than anything else. Do you want to know how I got to be “Danish Junior National Team Coach”? I got a job in the country, flamed out over a contract dispute in three months, then took another job that just so happened to be in the town where 2x Danish Olympian Signe Bro grew up. That’s how.
Now before I get accused of being modest, let me clarify. I do think there is great skill in working with the most talented athletes. It is not “easy”, no matter what any jealous people tell you. We all imagine how famous an athlete like Michael Phelps would make us, and almost none of us would have been able to help him win eight gold medals.
But I’d wager that most coaches are far more proud of work with athletes you’ve never heard of. As to why I can only speak for myself in this instance. The answer is more complex than it seems.
They’re Not mAth Problems
I’m getting to the age where I can’t remember who said all the wisest things I’ve heard. Maybe it’s part of a natural transition of becoming a wise person myself. I can only hope that someday people actually think that I said them first.
There is no way around the fact that given equitable opportunities some performers far exceed others. The fact that they do, beyond the resume building, is soothing to your often fragile ego as a coach. I can’t be bad-look how good my goodest athlete is!
If we are engaged in competition, I’ll take the team with more innate ability in a heartbeat. But that would be a shallow, short term decision. One of the reasons is that the most “talented” athletes actually often stunt your growth as a coach. Yes their are challenges with them, but those challenges are often not ones they have in common with most of the people you coach.
Talented athletes are also able to metabolize bad coaching in a way that masks your deficiencies as a coach. They can make terrible decisions look good and convince you that some of your worst impulses are right, actually. Thats why I am often wary of advice from coaches of very fast people. We tend to think their coaching of someone fast makes what they do right, when it’’s actually the other way around. I study talented athletes for what they do, and try to figure out if I can teach someone else what they seemingly came prepackaged with.
Conversely, as you travel down the “innate” ability spectrum, your coaching ability gets tested. Want to hear another of my coaching proud moments? I coached a boy in one high school season from not being able to swim to the other end to a sub 30 second 50 freestyle.
Every day in between those two events, I encountered a novel situation that I had scarcely run into over my coaching career. I had to level up my own coaching on a daily basis in order to do my job.
Athletes are, thank god, not math problems. They are not talent cubes that you feed through your algorithm. Yes they have innate ability, but the measure of your coaching is your ability to show them a path to growth and actually convince them to walk it!
Your highest performer will never be the one that teaches you best how to improve that skill.
Want to level up your coaching or want someone to show you what’s possible with your athlete? Write me.