What Stage Are You As A Coach?
A while back one of the greatest coaches of all time, Don Meyer, came up with the 5 Stages of Coaching.
Here they are:
Survival: don't know what you don't know.
Striving for Success: you want folks to recognize you can coach.
Satisfaction: you relax, better set another goal, be the best & want to get better.
Significance: making a difference. Changing lives hopefully for the good. People want to study your program. Very apt to get fired for the wrong reasons. Folks get jealous.
Spent: No juice left, can't do it anymore.
I've been coaching about 22 years and only recently have I felt like I'm transitioning from Stage 3 to Stage 4. I'm hoping that I can spend the next 20+ years of my coaching career in that stage. It seems to me like that is the most rewarding stage.
I don't know about anyone wanting to study my program or folks getting jealous. And I sure hope I'm not fired for any reason. But as a coach it doesn't get any better than making a difference and changing lives for the good.
One realization that I have come to recently is that my "job" and my "purpose" are really two different things. If you look at my coaching contract at Stan State it basically says my job is to:
Compete for conference championships;
Graduate my student-athletes;
Fundraise money for our program.
I not only accept those three things are my job I do them enthusiastically. I have a burning desire to win. Graduating my student-athletes is so important to me that I attend every single graduation every year. Sometimes that's a long day or couple of days. And fundraising is critical to running a D1 level program on a D2 budget.
But if you asked me my purpose for coaching none of those things would come up. My purpose?
Develop People
I want every player who enters our program to feel like being on the Stan State women's soccer team helped them move closer to becoming the person they want to become. My goal isn't to be their coach for the next 4 years. It is to be their coach for the next 40 years.
For me that's the true reward of coaching and really of life.
