Mother’s Day, Coaching, and Passion

So it is Mother’s Day in the United States today.  Most people will be celebrating.  On a personal level, that’s rough and has been going back to my mom’s unexpected death eight years ago.  Dwelling on what can’t be changed isn’t usually productive; still, reflection can lead to insights (and maybe someday I’ll pick up enough of those to be considered wise…).

(Most of this is a bit rambling–welcome to first drafts and blogs, right?)

My mom didn’t care much for sports.  Wrong generation, so she didn’t really have the opportunities.  My dad didn’t care either (ditto my step-father later), but being a child of the 60s/70s, my mom was the primary caregiver, so her views were the important ones.

I liked sports even when really young, especially baseball…as you can see here or here.  I liked watching football, the Olympics, whatever.  I liked playing them, too, even the ones I sucked at.  Now there’s the thing–I’m not from a sports family.  What’s the reaction going to be of my mom?

Awesome.  She bought herself a glove so we could play catch.  Eventually, we picked up cable TV mainly so I could watch the Cubs every day.  At home, I still have most of the books of my childhood–books on sports, sports biographies.  Baseball cards? Yup–those, too.  Sports games?  Oh, *hell* yes.  My friends would tell you I don’t need the boards for APBA baseball and long ago, I wound up national champion in a Strat-o-Matic tournament.   I. Love. Sports.

My mom encouraged that even though she had nearly no interest (her interest was simply because I, her son, was interested).  She wanted me to follow my passions–whether that was sports, theater, mechanics, programming, whatever a child/teenage/young adult could find appealing.

That’s the real lesson for parenting, teaching, or coaching.  I’m an adult now, much closer to retirement than being a pre-teen.  I get the wisdom now.  As a coach of young people, teaching skills is a secondary consideration for my job.  Winning should be even less of a priority.  Instead, my goal should be for those kids to have fun, to help them find their passion.  You can run with passion, run with it for a lifetime.

There’s a catch coaches forget all the time (and you can see it in various coaching forums)–>a coach’s passion is not necessarily the athlete’s.  A baseball coach may find his athlete has theater as a #1 priority; the basketball coach may need to realize her best player is more interested in pageantry.  When we try and force that athlete to work even harder in the thought that will spark intensity/passion/whatever, we then lose our chance to help kids explore multiple possibilities.  Why do we make kids make a binary choice?

Why can we only have one passion?  I know a professional coach who is a total stud at online Madden football.  I know one college coach who spends as much time fishing as coaching volleyball.  I know a high school coach who doesn’t have kids do anything in the summer so he can go to teacher training sessions across the country and another who winds up taking his players (and other students) to Europe–because few of his school’s students would travel otherwise.  Me?  I like writing, developing games, thinking about baseball–and the time I get to spend with Mrs. Dietz and our kids.

So as a coach–worry less about the serve-receive platform or the launch angle.  Ask “What can I do to help this young person find a spark somewhere, anywhere?”  If we do that as coaches, we make the world a better place.  *THAT* is what youth and amateur sports is supposed to be about.

So, I’m thankful every Mother’s Day for my mom, the room she gave me to find my passions.  She was nothing but encouraging even as I turned 20, 30, or 40.  That’s the greatest gift I ever received.