Leadership in Coaching: More Ike and a Story with a Red Card

Though they will be sequential, not everyone joins stories at the same point–not everyone remembers things the same way. So–it’s important straight off the bat to understand my admiration for Dwight D. Eisenhower. I’ve mentioned him in another musing on leadership as well. I mean, the guy was at the head of the military coalition which took down Nazi Germany then helps shape NATO’s initial direction, then serves as president and keeps the Cold War from going ‘hot’ multiple times.

All right, I’m writing other stuff and when I need info from Eisenhower’s wartime/presidential chronology, I inevitably come across quotes…and here I am, a moth to the flame:

“Humility must be the portion of any man who receives acclaim even in the blast of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.”

If you are coaching, how can you show humility? My thoughts again return to a coach’s response to a newspaper after a match. When things go right, you give full credit to the players. When things go wrong, you accept full blame for the defeat–and then STILL make sure to highlight the positives of the athletes. These are young people, not professionals being paid millions!

I also think a good coach shows humility in interactions with a team. Coaches don’t have all the answers, so when confronted with a question–don’t bluster through it; instead, admit the lack of knowledge. No one is perfect. And of course, then you can model good behavior and work ethic by going to find the right answer to share with the team–it’s ALWAYS okay to find out new stuff.

Sadly I think it’s easier to find negative examples–a lack of humility. A post on a coaching forum helped trigger this blog post. It was about player flexibility in cases of injury. We had a match four seasons ago where our best outside hitter had a 102 fever, sick in bed. We had a setter who sliced her hand open when a glass shattered while she was doing dishes, and we had two kids collide, requiring a check for concussion…followed up by a player bleedingand the match requiring a delay for a uniform switch. *WHEW* Anyways, we moved a setter to outside (she played it as a fresh-soph in HS), moved our libero to right-side, ran a 5-1 rather than a 6-2, plugged in a different libero which meant a different defensive specialist at a different spot. The kids stayed flexible, worked hard, and we beat a top-10 team with that lineup.

That is context. Now the relevance to humility. The opposing coach got mad. He was yelling at players, yelling at me, yelling at the officials. It was enough that he received a red card after commenting that the officials were penalizing his team for being better trained and taking pity on my team (of note, we were ranked in the top 20–so not like we sucked, y’know). Afterwards, during handshakes, the coach informed me we got lucky and that if his girls did what he said, they would’ve won. Sure, pal. Whatever. Take the defeat with grace. It’s a long season.

And…it didn’t end there. We were hosting the tournament which meant I was ‘tournament manager’…a detail which had not mattered in the first dozen years of me coaching but became important. The other coach’s team played the next match as well. He spent the pre-match warmup time yelling at his players. They came out and got blasted by an unranked .500 team. In the deciding set, he didn’t like a call and decided to protest. The officials made me come over. They explained the call, what he was protesting–it was a facility ground rule that was explained to each coach on arrival as well as in the captain’s meeting (don’t forget they had just played us with the same two officials)–so the protest was rejected. The R1 correctly determined the player was completely off the legal playing surface. At this point, he pointed at the R1 and said “I’ve won a national championship, so I damned well know the rules better than you apparently do.” Really.

Right there, it’s not about the game, it’s not about the kids. The coach has made it about himself, the antithesis of leadership–and humility. It was sad to watch because this wasn’t just a moment of anger–everyone has those–this was the culmination of nearly three hours of tantrum…and it still wasn’t the end. The coach picked up ANOTHER red card the next day and loudly ordered his players not to shake hands with those officials at the end of the match since they were so incompetent…it’s the only time I’ve ever been contacted by officials to say ‘if that coach comes back, we’re not working the tournament’. (My response was–still work, just eject him immediately…easy-peasy) –and when he stormed out of the gym, two of their athletes came up to the officials and apologized (I was standing there) for the head coach’s behavior. Players apologizing for a coach.

So–there’s an example of exactly what NOT to be.

That leads to the questions to ponder: Does Eisenhower’s comment on humility fit you? If not, what can you do to make it fit?

The last thing that comes to my mind on this–humility is a bit of a paradox. If you are humble and give others credit, inevitably observers will give the humble person credit–so that by staying in the shadows, the coach winds up well-lit and well-known anyways.