A Story about the Value of a Good Assistant Coach

So the story goes–

There’s a farmer on the East Coast where storms come in and hit all the time. Farming there sucks, it’s hard work. The farmer needs help, places an ad, and interviews a dozen men and each time, they refuse the work saying it’s too hard for the pay. About to give up, he interviews a thirteenth man. He’s thin and a bit old and asked if he can work the land properly, the man says “Well, I can sleep when the wind blows.”

Weird answer–but he was willing to work and the farmer had no other choice but hire the man. It turns out the man worked decently, seemed to know what he was doing. Then, finally, in the middle of the night, a storm came in off the ocean–a doozy! The farmer panicked, ran to his employee to get him up to take care of everything and found him completely asleep. The farmer woke him and said “A big storm’s coming! We’ve got to tie things down and get the animals to shelter.”

The employee took his blanket, pulled it up tighter and said, “Nope, I told you I can sleep when the wind blows.” The farmer had no time to fire the man, rushing out to do the work himself. Instead, he found hay covered in tarp, chickens in the coop, and everything loose tied down, already squared away for whatever the storm could do. Now the farmer understood what the man meant–and he, too, returned to bed, finally able to sleep when the storm winds blew.

For me, this hits home. In 25+ years of being a head coach, I’ve never had a full-time assistant and because the job was part-time, the turnover was regular and constant. Of course, some of this is because I was trying to hire young people capable of growing as leaders–and if you do that right, they are going to want to move on to run their own programs. So while I’m complaining a bit, I’m also proud of the success those assistants have gone on to enjoy elsewhere in life–coaching or otherwise!

Because I’ve never had an assistant for long or an assistant capable of being around for all practices, for recruiting, etc…it fed into my Type-A/controlling personality. I’m not a control freak, but I DO insist that work be done right until it’s done–not just until wanting to do something else. Basically, I’m the farmer up above. See it?

I’ve only ever had the luxury of an experienced assistant coach once.

So if you find one or develop one–I guess I’m left wondering “How do I sleep when the wind blows?” With a fable, it’s easy for the farmer to just go to sleep like his farmhand, but I’m living in real life. It doesn’t seem quite as easy. Hell, I know it isn’t. I’ve tried to do this previously…and had the assistant each time (twice as a HS coach, twice with college) cause problems that wrecked seasons. How do I avoid this?

Once again, I sit, I write, and I wind up with a dozen new questions I need to consider…and no answers to the thing that made me write in the first place. The one thing I can conclude is that, while coaches always want concrete answers, the human side of coaching is really an art more than a science–each and every case different. Regardless–the objective is going to be developing my assistant just as WE work to develop the young people in the program.