By Carol Brzozowski-Gardner
Carol Brzozowski-Gardner is a freelance writer based in Coral Springs, Fla.,who frequently contributes to Coaching Management.
Coaching Management, 8.6, September 2000, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0806/said.htm
Whether it’s talking on the fly in the hallway or holding a formal meeting in your office, there’s no question that communicating with your assistant coaches is a key component to running a successful baseball program. In order to effectively convey your message to student-athletes, a tightly knit staff that speaks with one voice needs to be developed. The added benefit is that it makes the most efficient use of everyone’s time—on and off the field.
In the often emotional environment of competitive athletics, however, communication can be a difficult process. Skip Bertman, Head Coach at Louisiana State University, says he’s learned much since he began running his own program. “There’s a learning curve no matter what job you take,” he says. “Mistakes can be made.”
So what’s the most effective way to talk with your assistants? What’s the key to running an efficient meeting? How do you allow for sharing of different opinions? Are there things you shouldn’t talk about as a staff? Several head coaches give their advice in this article.
Overall Philosophies
Each head coach eventually develops a communication style of addressing his assistant coaches with which he feels most comfortable. “Brutal honesty” is the approach preferred by Tom Lechnir, Head Coach at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. “There’s not anything that I don’t tell those guys,” he says. “If I feel they’re not going in the right direction with a player, I tell them about it. You can see that they’re not used to that, even though some of them have played for me and know that’s what they’re going to get from me.
“I have a young coach right now,” Lechnir continues, “who’s the first guy to coach with me and has never played for me and I can see that my honesty sometimes startles him. But if we all know what the goals are, it makes it much easier to work to achieve them.”
On the other hand, Mike Martin, Head Coach at Florida State University, believes a head coach must be cautious in how he communicates with his assistants. “Every personality is different,” he says. “You have to be careful in how you respond to certain things. You never want one of your coaches to feel like you’re stepping on his feet. They’re all individuals, so you have to be very careful how you arrive at your destination.”
Some head coaches invest a lot of time motivating their coaches, while others say they shouldn’t have to. For example, Norm Schoenig, Head Coach at Montclair State University, says he spends no time communicating motivational messages to his assistants. “We’re all motivated or we wouldn’t be here,” he says.
However, Bertman believes it’s quite important to direct ongoing motivational comments toward his assistants. “For some people, motivation is very important,” he says. “There are a lot of people who assume that you don’t need motivation because the job itself is good. The truth is that everybody has to be motivated everyday.
“Some people have a means by which they can self-motivate,” Bertman continues, “and that’s wonderful. But most people do not and that’s where people in leadership positions step in and find that method by which to motivate others. Sometimes it is money, but most often it is good words and a pat on the back. Motivation only lasts a short time, though, so you have to do it often and you have to come up with things all the time.”
Dusty Rhodes, Head Coach at the University of North Florida, relates an approach that he found ultimately didn’t work. “Early in my head coaching career, I had several assistant coaches who were my former players,” he says. “A lot of times, I would get on them with the fact that they made the same mistakes as coaches as when they were players. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have told the coach he learned from making the mistakes and now he must try to teach the player not to make the same mistakes. You can’t degrade your own guy. If you do that in the heat of battle, then the players feel like you don’t have confidence in the guy.”
Blending Egos
How do you determine where the assistant coach’s role stops and yours begins? Most coaches feel there is a delicate balance between maintaining a team approach as a staff and making it clear that as head coach, you are in charge. “I tell my coaches this isn’t a democracy,” Rhodes says. “There’s one king and that’s me—because if something goes wrong, I lose my job.
“I give my assistants much more latitude in dealing with the players than I had when I was an assistant,” Rhodes continues. “But I expect them to go through me first. I give them the opportunity to express what they believe, we talk it over, and go from there. But nobody is going to dominate the situation except me.”
Lechnir agrees, adding that if you let an assistant coach go unchecked, his ego can get out of hand. “I feel very strongly about this,” he says. “I have yet to meet a high school or college coach who didn’t think he was the greatest coach in the world. A lot of people put their ego first, which is a mistake a lot of us make.
“You’ve got to be really careful about the one guy who thinks he’s making a bigger contribution than the other,” he continues, “and that’s why I feel strongly in my position that I don’t claim I make any bigger of a contribution than my assistant coaches.”
However, in front of the players, Martin feels that it’s important to present a united front. “You want to be careful of when you disagree,” he says. “As a head coach, you can never create an atmosphere in which a player feels that you are above an assistant coach. You’re only above an assistant coach when it comes to rank, but you are not above them when it comes to knowledge.”
But, Bertman cautions against being too overly concerned with keeping arguments quiet. “We’re in a family situation, not in a board room,” he says. “Tempers can get heated. In a baseball game with people and national television watching, decisions have to be made very quickly and protocol can’t be perfect like the way some guy’s tie matches perfectly with his suit in a board meeting. The kids have to understand that. We’re just people. We’re not perfect and we can make mistakes. It’s much better to operate under that premise than it is to be very tentative because you’re afraid of making a mistake by saying the wrong thing.”
Running a Meeting
Communication, of course, often takes place off the field. Overwhelmingly, coaches say they still prefer to communicate face to face with their staff. They leave methods like e-mails and memos to the corporate world—one coach goes as far as to say e-mail isn’t “human,” while another does not have a computer in his office.
Martin says he would never put down in writing something that has not been discussed verbally. “I do not deal in memos. I do not deal in letters,” he says. “I deal face to face, person to person. I don’t know how else to work. I hate memos. If you don’t have enough nerve to sit and talk to somebody face-to-face, then you need to be doing something else.”
Many coaches rely on a series of one-on-one meetings with their assistants. “If I’m going to talk to the recruiting coach about recruiting, I will talk to him alone,” Bertman says. “He has my attention and I’ve got his. The only ‘meetings’ I have are when something affects more than one person.”
Lechnir advises that a successful, productive meeting centers on the notion that everyone should be allowed input. “There isn’t one area of our program that our assistant coaches are not involved in,” he says. “If we are going to have a meeting, we set the topic and then take input from all of the coaches on each of their areas of expertise. If we’re having a hitting meeting, we certainly have our pitching coach there, too, because he’s trying to learn and develop his coaching skills as well.”
Setting an agenda can also help meetings run smoothly. Martin, who holds very few staff meetings in relation to his more frequent one-on-one discussions, believes in being time-efficient by using an agenda. “You don’t just bring coaches in and start talking,” he says. “We’re all busy—we don’t have time to sit around and shoot the breeze. You’ve got to respect the fact that they are parents, they have responsibilities, and to take up an hour of their day talking about various and other things is not fair to them.”
Taboo Subjects
Although all coaches interviewed touted the importance of constant communication, they also cautioned that there are some issues that shouldn’t be discussed. “Players are going to come to head coaches, sometimes, with personal stuff that’s got to be between you and them,” Rhodes says. “It could be family problems or other personal problems. You’ve got to keep those things to yourself because there’s trust involved. If you ever lose a player’s trust, you’re going to lose.”
Lechnir agrees. “I discuss an athlete’s personal issues with assistant coaches on a need-to-know basis,” he says. “If they don’t need to know, I don’t discuss it with them.”
But if a player confides something that he specifies he does not want to go further, Lechnir does not share that information with anyone. “Typically, our players are aware we all talk about certain situations,” Lechnir says, “so as individual coaches, we will ask them if it’s OK to share the information with other coaches. Sometimes the player will say, ‘No, I would prefer it just stays with you.’ I really think that making sure it does is important as far as developing trust.”
Indeed, handling such situations sensitively can go a long way toward maintaining a positive atmosphere within your team. When you combine that with a framework of efficient communication that you have diligently constructed with your coaching staff, don’t be surprised to find yourself ahead in the game of running a successful program.
Sidebar - Reviewing Performance
It’s one thing for a head baseball coach to gather his assistants together and critique a game. But it’s quite another thing for a coach to assess the performance of individual coaches during their annual review.
Dusty Rhodes, Head Coach at the University of North Florida, uses the following questions as a guideline:
• How much are you going to accomplish with this assistant coach?
• How does the coach fit in the overall picture of what this organization or this university is trying to accomplish?
• Is he doing exactly what you want him to do to accomplish the educational part of the players’ goals?
“The performance is basically based on how he helps the organization,” Rhodes says. “There are a lot of guys who might be great coaches, but they’re not good examples. I want a guy that my players can look up to and say, ‘I want to be like that guy. When I get out of school, if I don’t get a chance to play professional baseball, I want to be a coach because this guy has helped me, not just as a player, but as a person.’”