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Remember why we coach
By Coach P | October 14, 2007
“In the end, the extent of our own success will be measured by the accomplishments that we have help create in others.”
One of the easiest things in the world to do is to get wrapped up in ourselves. Everyone’s favorite topic is “ME”. Keeping the focus on others is, generally, a much harder task. This is also true in coaching. Sometimes it is easy to get so wrapped up in ourselves and our careers that we shift the focus off of our players and onto ourselves. How is my team shaping up? What do the anonymous people on the chat sites think of me? The truly successful coaches,the ones that people look on as the “greats” never seem to have lost sight of this. Our job is not to make ourselves great. It is to strive to make our players great…and not just great as players, but great men. Listen to Bill Walton talk about John Wooden sometime. The message you will hear from Bill Walton is “Coach Wooden made me what I am today.” He tends to speak much less about what Coach Wooden did for him as a player than he does about what Coach Wooden did for him as a man. Bill Walton never turned out to be a clone of John Wooden in the way he lives his life, but Coach Wooden made a tremendous impact on his life. In what, right now, stands as a 38 year career, my father has probably coached a couple thousand young men. It seems like everywhere he goes he runs into someone he coached and they always seem to come up and speak. For just a few, brief years during a very impressionable period in their lives, he had an impact. We won’t all go down in history as having won a ton of games and championships. All of us won’t have great TEAMS that everyone remembers. Every coach can’t end a career as a perpetual winner, but we all can leave a legacy with the INDIVIDUALS we coached. How will your individual players remember you? What will your legacy be?
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