Building Greatness-Leadership & Softball

Coaching Stress

(a) My coaching stress during the season was high.  Hitting responsibilities were solely mine and that produced a lot of pressure.  Even though, overall, the hitters performed significantly better than last year, it was still a lot of pressure.  Coaching stress differs from academic stress and relationship stress because, in coaching, you have to worry about two other coaches and eighteen different players.  There are a lot more people to worry about in a short amount of time that is the season.  With academics, you only have to worry about yourself; and, in a relationship, you are only required to worry about yourself and another person. 

(b) During the season, I developed three strategies that helped me handle my stress.  The first was to refrain from worrying about what I could not control.  I could help my hitters, but I could not control the umpires.  This attitude empowered me and made my hitters more successful because we focused on the tangibles of the game.  The second point of emphasis was not to worry off the field.  When I walked through the door of my house, the softball part of my brain turned off.  I felt relaxed and able to breathe without thinking about softball.  The last thing I did was talked to my head coach about the frustrations and stresses I was experiencing.  I discovered that she sometimes shared the same stresses and we then came up with some solutions.  The last technique was mentioned in the “Coaches are People Too” article.  Stress is a significant part of coaching and it is imperative to find ways to manage it.  Because stress can often feel overwhelming, dealing with it directly makes it much more manageable.

Ethical leadership and coaching go hand in hand.  Through sport, we can teach life lessons that remain with our athletes even after they graduate.  If sport is a teaching tool, then ethics must be the cornerstone of those lessons and should be engrained in our students by the time they leave us.  While winning is gratifying at the time, the wins during a collegiate career fade with time.  What remains forever are the life skills your coaches taught you, especially about hard work and ethics, that made you a better person.  In a world where winning often takes precedence above everything, it is important to instill in our athletes a sound ethical foundation so they make correct choices in their personal and professional lives.  As coaches it is of utmost importance that we strive to produce good student athletes and ethical human beings because someday they will be leaders in their own right and we want them to be able to resist negative temptations.