• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Coaches driven by personal mastery never ‘arrive’

This is an excerpt from Coaching Better Every Season by Wade Gilbert.

Successful coaches are humble enough to recognize that even in championship seasons, they make mistakes that need to be corrected in the off-season. True to form, legendary baseball coach Yogi Berra playfully captured the importance of recognizing and closing performance gaps when he stated, “We made too many wrong mistakes.”¹

The most effective coaches are lifelong learners who are on a constant quest to identify and close performance gaps.^{2, 3} Roger Kingdom, a coach of the Arizona Cardinals professional football team and former Olympic champion, provides a vivid example of how successful coaches approach failure. After the team was badly beaten one game short of reaching the 2016 Super Bowl—what many would consider a demoralizing defeat—he stated, “You win or you learn. We can learn a lot from that game. If we can figure out what we need to work on and improve, then we will be playing in the Super Bowl next year.”⁴

Once end-of-season business is done (see part III of this book), serious coaches get busy building up their coaching knowledge. Just as many athletes use the off-season to rest briefly and refocus on physical training, in the off-season the best coaches devote the same type of energy and effort into learning more about effective coaching. The off-season is prime time for coach development, a sentiment shared by all the best coaches, like World Cup championship soccer coach Tony DiCicco: “The season is over. But the work isn’t over yet. In many ways, it’s just begun because off-season preparation is critically important in determining how your team will perform next season.”^{5 (p. 208)}

The purpose of this chapter is to share examples of the deliberate, targeted activities that successful coaches use to optimize coaching improvement in high-impact performance gaps. The primary method used to close performance gaps in the off-season is personal reflection.

A commitment to off-season training for coaches requires a high degree of initiative and eagerness to keep learning, regardless of how many years a coach has been coaching. This commitment is associated with personal mastery and a growth mind-set, both of which provide the foundation for continuous improvement aimed at closing performance gaps.

More Excerpts From Coaching Better Every Season

---