Some coaches would croak before admitting a mistake. They want their athletes to think they’re infallible.  

Other coaches, of whom I am one, feel that the ability to admit mistakes is a coaching necessity. We want our students to see us as “honest” rather than “infallible”.  

The best way to get forward movement in sport (better known as, “improvement”) is by getting things “right” the first time.  But no coach is perfect. And one thing that separates a good coach from a poor one is that when a good coach gets something wrong, he or she puts a finger on what caused it, fixes it, and then gets it right the next time. 

But…some mistakes are worse than others because there’s no next time!

I made one of these “no-next-time” mistakes with an exceptional athlete at the American championships one year…and It was a doozer!

I had a young girl who came to my club at age nine, as I recall.  She had talent that was both wide-ranging and deep and had a wonderful attitude. I mean, she was an absolute joy to work with. In her first year, she found success as a jumper, making her way onto the podium at the national championships, as I recall.  

But two years later when she was eleven, we had added the hurdles to her stable of events. The hurdles are what we call a “technique event”.  There’s a lot to learn to be a hurdler, and some of those things are flat-out difficult.  But she worked hard and learned technique quite well. 

However, she had one quality about her that made her a perfect fit for the hurdles:  She had the innate ability to attack a line of hurdles with what you’d call “reckless abandon”.  I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with a rather large group of very good hurdlers in my career, each of whom had his or her own unique style.  Some were smooth and others not so smooth, but this gal went at a hurdle race the way a football fullback rips through the line of scrimmage, knocking tacklers aside like bowling pins.  She didn’t “run” the hurdles so much as “attack” them.  And she was really, really, really good…as good as I’ve ever coached. 

So, this year when she was eleven, with two years of hurdling under her belt, she was ready to make her mark. She had reached that point in her progress where she no longer had to “think about” what she was doing…but could simply go out there and compete like mad.

The American championships that year were held at UCLA.  She had other events, but her hurdles were her most promising.  And it was in her heat race that we learned how amazingly good she had become.

 I have a picture on my wall that I took as she cleared the last hurdle in that particular race, and she was running away with it.  The goal in a heat race, of course, is to qualify for the finals, and she did. But she had done more than simply “qualify”!  Following that heat race it was announced that she had BROKEN THE AMERICAN RECORD!  She had just run the fastest hurdle race that any American girl her age had ever run!

Enter me… the coach of the national record holder… and my mistake!

One rule of coaching that every coach should chisel in stone is this: Don’t wait until the day of the most important game or contest to introduce something NEW to a student! Your time to teach new things is during the 364 days of the year that precede the championship day. The coach who throws something new at a student in the final hours or minutes is asking for trouble!    

Got it?  

Well, I asked for trouble.  Here’s what I did:  

Following her great heat race in which she broke the American record, I sat down with her to help her prepare herself for the upcoming finals.  Coaches are always searching for just the right thing to say at such moments, but I, being particularly ineloquent, have generally found that, for myself, the “right thing” to say is either nothing at all or a simple word of encouragement.  

But…on that particular day at that particular championship meet, like a fool, I didn’t keep my mouth shut.  My student’s national record heat race had been a beauty, but she had been a little slow out of the blocks. So it seemed to me that it might be helpful to her if I could fix her attention on reacting to the starter’s gun a little faster in the finals.  

But I went beyond a quick word of advice.  

Instead, I gave her what amounted to a college course on starting.  Among other things, I took her down closer to the starting line, and we watched the starter start a good number of races.  My purpose wasn’t to teach her to anticipate the gun, but only to give her some idea of this particular starter’s rhythm and consistency.  This all seemed sensible to me.

But I was throwing something new at her at the wrong darned time.  When ablaze with tension, the mind of an athlete is a strange place where strange things happen.

To make a long story short, in the finals, with her attention now fixed on getting out of the blocks fast, she jumped the gun!

And the penalty for jumping the gun was disqualification! She was out of the race!

Perhaps the most difficult task any coach faces is knowing what to say to an athlete who has just made the mistake of his or her life.  It is one thing to go down to defeat because you have been outclassed, but another thing entirely to be sent away from the starting line for a mistake. 

It’s devastating! 

I don’t remember what I said to her as she came off the track.  All I remember was that she was broken-hearted and in tears, and she blamed herself.  

But it had been my mistake that had caused her mistake! 

Some people would probably say that my advice to my student was good advice that day and that I had not made a “mistake. I wouldn’t agree with that, though. 

Nerves can do strange things to athletes, and a coach needs to be always aware of this fact.  The hours and minutes before the most important contest of the year (and perhaps of a lifetime) are a time when athletes are especially vulnerable.  If you say the right word at the right moment, you can occasionally work wonders. But my advice is this: If you’re not sure what to say, then don’t say anything.  And especially…don’t say something new!    

Sports are rather heartless undertakings.  There are no do-overs, and serious mistakes can be terminal.  In my entire coaching career, if I could have one day to re-live and one mistake to avoid, it would be this one in which I said the wrong words at the wrong time to this girl who now owned a national record but no national title.      

*****

I have one final thing to say about this matter of the coach’s place in the heat of a competition.  In my opinion, certain sports have allowed coaches to insert themselves too aggressively into sporting contests.  They stalk the sidelines screaming and stomping their feet and lambasting athletes for their mistakes, and pulling their strings as though they are puppets.

There are times when your advice is necessary, and you should give it. 

But your job is to teach your students to pull their own strings.