Go Sports Life

Coaches perform a variety of functions to maintain the team as a unit and facilitate the completion of the team goals. Descriptions of the tasks coaches are expected to accomplish are broad, but quite unspecific. Often their duties vary greatly from institution to institution. Ordering equipment, arranging schedules and transportation, counseling players, administering the budget and constantly evaluating players are but a few of the aspects of the coach’s job.

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An essential ingredient of coaching leadership is the ability of the coach to “pull” his/her athletes through the barriers of stress that accompany the intense work required for successful performance. Of course, we know from our physiology of exercise and training that the discomfort associated with the preparation of the athletes for sustained activity is difficult.

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Today the sports section of a local newspaper hardly is the place to look for role models, no more than sitcoms that make adults look like weaklings in dealings with their families. In these days of two-career couples and the failure of the traditional family, we as coaches have the responsibility to educate our players on what it takes to become successful leaders and adults.

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Leaders are made, not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile. – Vince Lombardi

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You really could open an interesting debate with respect to teaching sporting skills to kids. I did last week during a presentation I gave to area basketball coaches. Some trainers and coaches have decided that the skills required to achieve a certain task should be taught from the beginning. Others believe in the concept of motor patterning – allowing the young athlete to find their own style of achieving a task. The debate gets even trickier when you factor in the varying nuances and therefore objectives of different sports. For example, in basketball, if the ball goes in the hoop, it doesn’t really matter how it got there.

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We have all seen it, heard it, read it. Soccer isn't a "real" sport. Soccer is boring. Soccer is only for geeky gym class kids with pocket-protectors and thick glasses. Soccer is a foreign game for hooligan, drunken psycho-fans. Soccer is just plain un-American. Just before the 1994 World Cup, Mike Barnacle of the Boston Globe described soccer as "a mindless sport where hordes of incomprehensible athletes run aimlessly in a circle until everyone is dehydrated and, finally, some guy uses his skull to score a touchdown." Where did this anti-soccer sentiment come from? It surely didn't materialize out of thin air. On the contrary, many of these argument are recycled year after year. Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post even tried the same joke in a June, 1994 column that he had used before the 1990 World Cup ("Can the Sweeper perform any domestic chores?"). No other sport is privy to such consistent degradation in the mainstream press. Tom Weir wrote in USA Today in December, 1993, that "hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control." What is it about soccer that generates this degradation? In fact, most anti-soccer arguments have little to do with soccer. Whether its Dan Barreiro in the Mpls. Star Tribune inviting foreigners to World Cup in the U.S. with, "Bring us your tired, your poor, your hoodlums!" or Bernie Lincicome from the Chicago Tribune suggesting soccer's only value in the U.S. is to serve "in junior high gym class as phys ed credit for kids who are free to use their hands to push their glasses up their nose," what is often called "soccer bashing" is really based on century-old notions that branded football as the manly, American games, while soccer was either a sport for immigrants or a sport for fitness.

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