I
have had the good fortune of looking at youth
athletic programs in many different ways over the last approximately 25
years. I started out in Little League
baseball and never had any memorable bad coaching or parent issues. As I became a parent and my daughter turned
4 years old, I gained my first experience as a soccer coach. Even though I had no background in coaching
and with soccer,  I
accepted the challenge. The season went
without a major hitch and I had a great
assistant coach
that filled in for me when I was not able. After
my daughter finished the season, she decided to move
into playing
T-ball. I accepted a position as her
assistant coach and enjoyed this experience greatly.
The next year she turned 6 years old and moved into fast
pitch
softball. I spent the spring and fall
seasons as an assistant coach and had little conflict along the way. When she turned 7 years old, I decided to
accept the responsibility and become a head coach.
Even though we didn’t have very many wins, I had a great
time and
really enjoyed working with the young ladies. I
was fortunate to have excellent assistant coaches and
team mothers
that made the season a success. Then
during the summer, I served as an assistant coach on the All Star team. This gave me an experience of dealing with
coaches that have totally different coaching styles.
Last fall, I once again agreed to become a head coach of
the
softball team. I was able to draft most
of the same players from the spring, but I was not able to get as much
help as
I had the year before. Nevertheless, I
moved on with the season. We once again
won our first game and didn’t have much success after that. One of my assistant coaches was real
friendly towards the beginning of the season, but was becoming less
supportive
as the season wore on. This became a
problem and finally caused a blow up to happen. In
searching for the articles to put on this website it provided
some great information on how this could have all been avoided. If there were more proactive things done, we
could have talked out our differences before it became a problem. These two totally different experiences in
coaching softball have showed me the spectrum of results that can
happen. Finding the right assistant
coaches then
mixing them with the right philosophies can make a huge difference in
the
results. It may not produce a winning
season, but it increases the probability of everyone enjoying the
season.
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