Try this.  Ask someone what a coach does.  Ask them who a coach is.  You’ll get words like teacher, instructor, motivator, mentor, guide, and words like that.  No doubt these are all true.  And yet, the best coaches are great communicators, and great communicators need to be great listeners.  

The excellent book Lead For God’s Sake by Todd Gongwer tells the story of an outstanding high school basketball coach who is guided on a season-long journey of self-discovery.  The end result of the journey is a coach who has made the leap from selfish to others-focused, partly as a result of learning the importance of listening to his players.  In the story, one of Coach’s players comes in to quit the team.  Coach flies off the handle and lets the kid have it for being selfish and not thinking of his commitment to the whole team.  As it turns out, the young man’s family life is a mess and his parents are beginning divorce proceedings.  When Coach learned the truth (weeks later), he realized that he’d blown a chance to be a stabilizing force in the player’s life.

How many times have I been that coach?  Maybe not quite to that level of insensitivity, but still I have a career filled with missed opportunities to connect with my players.  I made the comment two days ago to someone that I think I can count on one hand the number of meaningful conversations I had with players on the way to/from practice.  How many hundreds of practices did I coach, all the while missing most of my chances to speak to players like people with lives, interests, families, dreams, etc.?  It would have been so easy, nearly every day, to ask a young man to tell me something about his life.  I could have used any of these:

“Tell me about something you read recently.”

“What’s something you like about living in Naples?”

“What’s your middle name and do you know why your parents picked it?”

“What kind of job would you like to do someday?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“How old were you when you learned to ride a bike?”

I could do this all day.  Any one of these questions would have, at the very least, opened the door to thought and conversation.  There’s no downside.  And we never know when a little conversation opens the door to a life-long relationship. 

In the fall of 1990 I had one of these conversations with Coach Rob Garvie.  We were outside the bus after a JV football game, and Coach Garvie was asking me questions about my family….cousins, aunts, uncles, the whole deal.  Where did most of them live?  Were any of them competitive athletes?  I don’t know, maybe Coach Garvie was just trying to figure out what kind of bloodlines and genetics I had going for me.  But I know this, as I continued on through high school, college, and into adult life, Rob Garvie became one of my best friends.  Through the years, we’ve had many long talks about a wide range of subjects.  We even wound up coaching on the same staff for a few years.  That was a blast.

Point being this: I had a coach who talked to me like a human being rather than an athletic commodity, and who listened and respected my ideas, no matter how immature or poorly formed they were.  Now, nearly 22 years later, the two of us have become and remained good friends.  I have no idea what the score of the 1990 JV football game was (although I’m certain we lost), but the relationship I have with Coach Garvie is worth infinitely more than the score of a football game.

In the next post, we’ll continue the theme of listening.