Management Lessons from Youth Sports
By Dan Coughlin - Author of Find a Way to Win
A few weeks ago I completed a really enjoyable five-year experience of coaching my son’s recreational soccer teams. I was an assistant coach and a head coach for Ben’s soccer teams from kindergarten co-ed soccer where we used nerf soccer balls in indoor soccer through fourth grade all-boys soccer where things were starting to become a bit more like competitive soccer.
If you’ve ever been in this situation, you probably have seen a number of parallels from this experience to that of being a business manager. I encourage you to coach a youth sports team even if you don’t know that much about the sport. You will learn a lot about yourself and about human dynamics in scenarios that are hard to duplicate anywhere else.
Relationships with Players/Employees
In the end, being a youth coach is extraordinarily fun to do because of the relationships with the players. It is truly priceless to watch kids literally go from holding hands during a game to working as hard as they can at practice after practice. As the memories wash over me of the multiple personalities and situations I encountered with the kids, it brings back nothing but smiles. Being with kids, at least for me, was pure fun. It was about trying to help them improve and encouraging them along the way. As they got older, it was about trying to teach