As a young athlete, something you should always be looking forward to is going to practices and games to be able to see your friends and your coaches, but what happens when you lose your love for the sport because of something as simple as your coaching staff? As I grew up, my coaches have been supportive of me throughout all of the things I chose to do while pursuing my career in softball. Throughout your life you’re going to deal with people that you disagree with and people who make you feel bad, but when is it time to put an end to it?
A genuine relationship and respect between you and your coach is needed when trying to have success on and even off the playing field, the most successful athletes wouldn’t be able to get as far as they did without helpful support from their coach.
Sophomore Haktan Erel has played on the volleyball team for two years and has found that success would not have come as easily without a solid coach to rely on.
“It’s the most important thing [coaching],” Erel said. “Someone could be really talented and good at whatever they’re doing, but if they had a bad coach, it would send them down the wrong path and they would end up in the wrong place. If you have a really good coach, you’ll become a better athlete no matter what”.
Not to mention, the biggest deciding factor in liking or disliking your coach is their coaching style, which can very much determine if you see eye to eye with your coach. Being in high school is a few of the most important years of your life, where education comes first, and then finding yourself comes second. As your years in high school go by, you develop more and more. It may be almost impossible to try and find yourself while also battling the contradicting opinion of your coach, which can really impact the mental health of a player.
The influence of a coach not only affects the player’s athletic performance, but also the mental and emotional performance. As a player, you play for many different things, one of them being your coach. It may be almost impossible to want to play for your coach if they aren’t as supportive as they need to be. Track coach Josh Williams said that “I coach my team how I would wanna be coached. I’ll always push them to give an honest effort to work hard during each and every practice, and I’ll hold them to a high standard of doing that because I know if you consistently work hard over the course of time, you’ll end up getting the results you want. To me, that’s what I try to get out of kids every day.”
Being coached under a strong leader has been a road to flourishing and thriving as an athlete, and without a strong figure to fall back on and look up to, athletes find themselves struggling and in a deep hole. If there is one thing that should be taken away from this, it’s that if you are searching for true success, you need to have a sturdy foundation to rely on.
