Being the coach to a school sports team can be an immensely rewarding experience. Being involved in influencing young lives, driving them to excel on the field and off it, to achieve greatness and to inspire them to seek success. There are a few challenges in the lives of high school coaches, which is distorting the romantic idea of sculpting young minds into perfection.
Parents
Sadly, but birth parents are often a tremendous challenge in the lives of high school sports coaches. The personal investment of parents with their children and their sporting careers can often lead to conflicting ideas regarding a coach’s approach to the game plan or their child’s abilities. Some parents can quickly revert to anger towards the coach if they consider the amount of game time given to their child isn’t according to their perceived ideas of their child’s abilities. Parents can add tremendously to a team’s morale, or they can be a destructing force making the coach’s life a misery.
The Player’s Attitudes
Dealing with high school students is synonymous with dealing with a variety of different attitudes. Some not as pleasant as others. Your best player may make it a habit to show up late for practice bringing down the entire team’s sense of punctuality. Some may consider it their right to play certain positions and others may make a big deal if they are reprimanded. Conflict can rise to a level where the team becomes thoroughly divided. Therefore handling attitudes successfully and productively will always remain on the list of challenges in the high school coach’s guidebook.
Budgets Can Choke Your Success
Every school has a budget available for sports and sports facilities. This is, however, only a section of the budget of extracurricular facilities and every department head wants their share of the budget pie. To be able to deliver a proper practice session, proper equipment is needed, and this costs money. Coaches are also often confronted with extra expenses which need to be covered. Uniforms are expensive and so is going on a tour. Parents aren’t always keen on paying the extra buck, and therefore coaches are ever faced with finding creative yet lucrative ideas to fill the gaps where budget fall short from realizing a dream of a great sporting team.
Personalities Will Clash
Being a coach doesn’t only mean that you have to deal with every very unique personality in your team, you also need to deal with parents, other coaches, sponsors, department heads and many more. Conflicting personalities are bound to cross your path, and you need to be able to restore harmony when this occurs to be able to achieve the set goals and staying true to the team.
A Demanding Position
With all of these challenges which coaches needs to face, it can become a very time consuming and emotionally demanding position to be in. Often losing out on personal time with family over weekends and evenings. You need to manage this to remain in a place of having a balanced life.