Category: Interacting

A situation for you to consider: An athlete comes to you one week into the pre-season and says they are ready to quit the team citing homesickness, the stresses of school and figuring out life in a different city. You are the coach. How do you react?

I forgot to mention: this athlete is crucial to the success of your team this season. Losing him would significantly hinder your chances to make playoffs. Does that change things? Should it?

From the coaches perspective, any number of emotions would fit such a situation including anger, resentment, and anxiety. But what about the athlete?

“I was feeling pretty anxious about everything outside of basketball…The  issues that people have to go through as a student, especially as anyone [who] knows being away from home and just, financial issues, everything else [in] combination is hard to manage…I was feeling more unsettled” Continue reading “Fair Isn’t Equal”

As head coach of the MacEwan University Women’s Basketball team, Katherine Adams is mandated to engage with and give back to the Edmonton community. She does so by running Jr. Griffins, a youth developmental program for young female basketball players. When she mentioned that she needed a coach for her U15 team, I jumped at the opportunity.

From late March to Early June, our team trained regularly and competed against other junior programs run by the various USports universities in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Although we didn’t win many games, I felt we achieved our goals of individual and team improvement with flying colours. My satisfaction with our season was initially based on intuition, that is until I received a handwritten letter (not a text, not an e-mail, a real life handwritten letter) from one of our athletes (pseudonym: Chelsea) after our last game. With her permission, I have attached the letter:

Athlete’s Post Season Letter

Chelsea’s kind words were touching. It was evident that, in her eyes at least, we did something right over the course of our working together. As I reflected on the letter I began wondering what lessons we could pull from this experience to help us grow as coaches. I asked myself: what did we do right and how can we do it again? At the heart of Chelsea’s positive experience with our program was the aggregation of numerous interactions between her, our coaching staff, and her teammates. By evaluating particular interactions against the NCCP interacting competency outcomes, Riess’ work on The Science of Empathy and Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge, I hope to formalize and share some of my learning. Continue reading “Sawubona”