By Katrina Jansen-Buciuni, Editor in Chief
As a coach, you have a very wide variety of players. You have your fast and slow players. The ones who have positivity and the ones who need extra encouragement. The ones who strive for the best, and the ones who need extra help. The leaders, and the followers. The players that set up the play, and the ones who finish it. As a coach, you’re in charge of getting these types of players to work together, and be successful.
Yes, a coach makes and calls all the plays. A coach can express extreme disappointment, then expect motivation from players. A coach can push you that extra mile and see real potential or do it out of pure punishment. At the end of the day, the coach is the one who is supposed to make the team better. So we trust them.
Players make mistakes, but it is from those mistakes that they learn and grow. Making mistakes can also make or break an athlete, but it will make you a much stronger person in the long run, because you grow from them no matter what.
Coaches can be tremendously influential. If you ask a player to recall something of meaning that happened in the sixth grade, they most likely won’t remember. But if you ask about a good sports memory from scoring the winning goal to shooting the last three pointer, you will still ignite their emotion from it. Or that terrible day of practice that just consisted of conditioning because the coach wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of something. The repercussion of these actions truly affect the players that they coach, and these moments can shape their lives.