Why Accidental?

I was actually asked to write a book for track coaches after I coached my first state championship team in 1983 in New Mexico. While I was flattered I knew that I was so early in my career I had neither the expertise nor the experience to write a coaching book. I'm still not sure that I'm "expert" enough to write a book for coaches but I know that I can certainly write well enough to share my coaching story with friends and family. If others see and read this then I hope they enjoy it but it really is for friends and family. I'm also writing it initially as a blog so that people can see it and read it as each part becomes available.

I'm sure there are as many ways to write a memoir as there are memoir writers and I don't plan to follow any "formula". I'm just going to write as the memories come because every time I think about one thing that happened during my coaching career it leads to several additional memories and while I will try to write in a way that makes sense I won't make any guarantees.

Why do I call my coaching career accidental? Here is the background on how I started coaching and turned it into a twenty nine year journey. My coaching experience actually began as a coach of youth sports for teams that my sons were playing on and as a result of my part time job with the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department where I worked at Rimgrove Park in Valinda, California. The park was actually right across the street from where I lived.

I coached baseball and basketball and supervised the football games on the weekend. While I had no official training other than a track and field fundamentals class in junior college before I went into the Navy, I had experience participating in track and cross country in high school and junior college and learned a great deal from my coaches beyond just training methods. I also played adult softball while in the Navy and I was playing for a team sponsored by the company I worked for. I also played and coached coed softball and coed volleyball for teams from Rimgrove. Finally I was playing rugby for the Coyote Rugby Club during the same time period. Everything that I did playing and coaching adult sports and coaching and supervising youth sports helped lay the foundation for my coaching career.  

While I was participating in and coaching these sports I wasn't thinking of coaching as a career but I was preparing for it by reading any books that I could find on coaching fundamentals as well as the basics of teaching skills for the sports. While I wasn't an expert in any sense of the word I was becoming more knowledgeable. One of the most important things that I learned during this preparation period was that different sports had more in common than I realized. After you learn the basic rules and fundamentals of a sport the actual coaching fundamentals and principles were the same for any sport, individual or team.

This is where my coaching "career" actually began in 1972.

It's surreal now to look back over 40 years and realize that while I didn't know it at the time everything I was doing at this neighborhood part was preparing me to be the coach that I became. Youth sports is where I learned the fundamentals not just of playing the specific sport but the fundamentals of coaching in general. When I was in my final season of coaching in 2005 and I had to deal with a difficult parent it was easier for me to handle because of the difficult parent that I had to remove from the football field and ban from park activities those many years ago.

In 2005 the parent was complaining about the fact that I had removed her daughter from a relay team prior to the regional meet. She was still on another relay and would have a chance to run at the state meet. While it wasn't fun dealing with an irate and unreasonable parent it was simple compared to the first experience I remember as if it was yesterday.

I was in charge of the flag football league at Rimgrove for elementary kids. A young man 8 or 9 was very tentative about contact when he had to block on the line. He was a big boy for his age and would have been able to block fine had he not been so timid. He missed a block that allowed his quarterback to have his flag taken behind the line of scrimmage. The coach who was also this young man's father called time out. He walked to the field, grabbed the young man by the shoulders, turned him to the crowd and began to berate him and humiliate him while he cried. I called the man off to the side and told him that he could not finish coaching the game, had to leave the area and would have to have a hearing to determine his coaching future at the park. Needless to say, he had no coaching future.

My point in sharing this story is just to provide some background for other parent - coach interactions that I may or my not write about in the future. My belief then and now was and is the fact that the child, the athlete, is the most important person in the equation.

My work at Rimgrove provided me with a great deal of experience. I learned about scheduling, organizing tournaments and events, as I mentioned before, dealing with parents as well as athletes of diverse abilities, the importance of communication, the importance of assistant coaches, the difficulties involved in fund raising, field maintenance and management and so much more. The list is endless and while I didn't know it at the time, almost everything I did in my job and as a volunteer at Rimgrove helped prepare me for a career in coaching. I was preparing to be a professional coach long before I knew that I wanted to be a coach. If there is a lesson here it is that you should make the most of every opportunity to learn while you are doing it because you never know what role it might play in your future experiences.

Why accidental? I'll continue down the path of answering that question when I do my next post. There is no short answer but in the effort to not lose your interest I will attempt to be as organized and sequential as possible. No guarantees though.