After several years of teaching in high school, I decided to become a full time coach working at SuperKick. Often, people will ask me, “Why did you stop teaching? This question always perplexes me as I have never felt that is what I did. Instead, I looked at my decision to leave my teaching job at a local high school for another teaching job at SuperKick. The only difference was I work in a bigger classroom and teach a different subject. I have never seen my role as a coach and my role as a teacher as different. The two terms mean the exact same thing and should be viewed the same way. In short, the two are interchangeable. One thing I believe has helped me reach players on the soccer field is my education and training to be a teacher. During my time at Ohio State, my professors spent a lot of time talking about classroom management, cognitive development, “best practices”, student centered approach to learning, and assessment. There is not one thing that I learned studying to be a teacher that does not apply every time I step on the field to coach.
It is often said, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” Although some teachers may find that comment offensive and a knock to being a teacher, I never saw it that way. Why? Simply, because anyone WHO CAN had a great teacher along the way, and just because you can, does not mean you can teach (without learning how to teach). Teaching is a skill, and that is why there are so many who study “master teachers” and the way they approach the craft. Being a very talented lawyer, doctor, or athlete, does not qualify you to be able to teach other people to be good at the same thing. These experts would have an extensive knowledge base in their respective field, but would they know how to develop that knowledge and skills in another individual, especially a child? Without the proper training and understanding of how to develop a skill and knowledge in another individual, the answer is most likely, no.
Since I see being a coach the same as being a teacher, what type of training do most coaches get to help them become qualified to be a teacher of their sport? Does simply playing the game of soccer for 10 years as a player qualify you to be a teacher of the game? In sports, that seems to be one of the major qualifications for a coach. How many parents make an assumption that a coach is qualified, or not, based on their playing experience? That is normally the first (sometimes only) criteria used to determine a coach's level.
It is very common to see “bad coaches” be highly regarded as good coaches just because they played in college or at the professional level. No matter what they do as a “teacher”, it is an accepted belief that they must know what they are doing because they played the game at a high level. On the flip side, a person with a much less impressive playing history is often more openly criticized on their coaching level due to their “inexperience as a player.” That does not make much sense to me! If you look at some of the greatest coaches in history, many do not have a very strong playing experience and/or were not the “best” player.
Bottom line, a strong playing history and experience in the game is a great thing, but measuring an effective coach, or the level of coach, has much more to do with their SKILL LEVEL AS A COACH than anything else. Just like becoming a great player, doctor, lawyer, or anything… being an outstanding coach takes practice and an endless pursuit of knowledge, not just about the game, but especially about the players.
In the coaching schools, they are moving away from just seeing if coaches understand different technical and tactical areas of the game (which is important), and are focusing more on the coach’s ability to teach information effectively to players of different ages and ability levels. A working knowledge of physical and cognitive differences in players of various age groups, along with the ability to create and manage a training session, is required. These are the same focus areas for teachers when they are learning to teach. For example, knowing what good “attacking team shape” is as a coach is important, but it is useless if you cannot properly teach it to the players. How do you introduce it, build on it, check for understanding, connect it to other parts of the game, and how do you change all that based on the cognitive level of the player?
For these reasons, when evaluating a coach, I tend to put more emphasis of their ability to teach and their understanding of their players than on their knowledge of the game. Yes, there needs to be an understanding of the game as you cannot teach something you do not know, but the knowledge of the game and the ability to teach it is not the same thing, and one should not be mistaken for the other.
As Horst Wein says, “The tragedy of coaching young players focuses on the fact that many coaches know a lot about the game, but they don’t know their young pupils.” A simple point, but the key to being a great youth coach of any sport, not just soccer. You cannot fully reach a young athlete and maximize your effectiveness as a coach if you do not understand the player.
Picture a teacher in a second grade classroom. What are the characteristics of that teacher? How does the classroom look, how does that teacher speak to the kids, how are new ideas/skills taught, how are corrections made, how does the teacher assess the students’ knowledge, and how does the teacher motivate the kids? Now, think of a high school teacher teaching chemistry to juniors. Are the two teachers very similar?
Now picture a U9 soccer coach and a U16 soccer coach. I bet these two individuals are much closer in terms of characteristics than the two teachers. But should they? In reality, if both coaches are very effective as teachers, they should be as different as the kindergarten teacher and the high school teacher. Unfortunately, this is not the case with coaches. Often the approaches may be slightly different, but not nearly different enough taking into account the cognitive and physical differences of the two age groups. The critical issue with not knowing how to properly teach kids of different age groups is the players will miss out on learning essential skills at the right time or be discouraged because the content or approach to teaching is beyond their cognitive or physical ability (or below it).
For coaches to become teachers, the focus for coach education needs to continue to increase the emphasis on HOW to teach players of different age groups and abilities, not just WHAT to teach. This is the biggest need for coaches of all athletes in any sport. The curriculum for coaches should mirror the curriculum for aspiring teachers. The same tools needed to be successful educating students in the classroom are necessary to be successful as a coach. If you take time to really examine the most successful coaches in history, they resemble master teachers more than what is typically thought of as a coach. The one common thread in all of them is their relentless pursuit to better understand their players’ needs and find the best ways to meet those needs.
So if you think you can, teach.
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