013 - Developing Your Coaching Objective

Today’s quick tip is:  Try to start developing your coaching objectives early

I am only skimming the surface here:

When I took the sports science exam, we covered 3 coaching objectives:

1. To Have Fun
2. To Develop Players
3. To Win

More defined:

• To have Fun Kids—Games/activities. Adults—social and maybe a good workout
• To help develop players
  1. physically (Skills and health),
  2. psychologically (emotionally and self-worth)
  3. socially (handling competition and teamwork)
• Winning (out of class objectives—matches, tournaments, practice, private lessons, conditioning, periodization…..)

And this came from the book “Successful Coaching” which is was more for team coaches if I remember right when it talked about coaching philosophy, but it is a number one seller in the US

 The key for you is to decide what your coaching objectives are (Fun, developing, or winning)

So…… One of the most important steps in determining this is how significant winning is to you as a coach.

This may all depend on who you are working with at the time for sure, because your students may be at different levels of their tennis development and have their own objectives.

The development route sounds like the hardest, but it should be included in ALL of the objectives if you want to be a successful coach.

Most any coach will tell you that the development of the athlete is the most important, but have you ever gone out and watched one of those coaches during a match or a game?

Remember the story at the beginning of todays episode.  Very easy to SAY one thing and DO another, especially in a competitive environment.

If it is a combination of fun and development, then working with the High performance programs may not be for you, but working with HS players, middle School players and the younger players may be a perfect fit.

If you want to go the high performance route, and you are just getting started, find a good mentor.  There is a lot more to it than you think and may require a number of different coaching specialists, depending on the degree of winning you are interested in.

As for adults, they usually have an easier time doing most of the dirty work for you.

For example, we had a number of 3.5 levels teams at our club and if you wanted to be a district champion, you wanted to get on one specific team for sure, but if you just wanted to have fun and compete followed by a few jello treats, the there was a team for that too. 

Usually the captains of the “Winning” team made it clear that that was the objective and that the line-up would be decided that way.  The other teams made sure everybody had equal playing time.

Wanting your players to win can be an inspiration or a buzz kill.  Depends on the make-up of the team or class

BOTTOM LINE: Try to start developing your coaching objective first o at least understand how you may have to make adjustments based on the class you are working with.

Coach Mick, USPTA