let CHAMPIONS play

The following is an excerpt from my book Coaching Champions For Life:

Teach your players what to do, trust them to execute it, and be prepared to accept the outcome with dignity and class.
 
Good coaches are good teachers. They teach the fundamentals of their sport through progressive building-block methodology. And they teach by modeling appropriate behavior and habits for life skills in general. Some coaches put so much emphasis on the former that they forget that the latter is much more important. For example, a coach whose coaching methodology is to yell and yell louder in attempting to get his players to master the fundamentals of playing the sport is doing a very poor job of modeling how to appropriately handle adversity.

“They may forget what you said. They may forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”
 
Very few athletes will have the opportunity to be a professional in their sport. The most important thing they will derive from good coaching along the way is high self-esteem by accomplishing things individually and/or as a team they may have initially thought were not possible. However, building an athlete’s self-esteem is very difficult if the coach is micro-managing every step and thought of the athlete every minute of the game.

Let the athletes play.  Practices are for the coaches to teach.  Games are for players to demonstrate what they have learned.
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