Article by Ron Cogdill, a seasoned educator and youth sports expert, has spent over 30 years inspiring young minds. As a published author and 7-time national championship coach, he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his writing.
One of the most nagging difficulties parents have in coaching their own child is keeping what happens on the practice field and in the games from mixing with life at home. Sport is your child’s private world, a place to pursue goals of his or her own making, and you, the parent, should enter this world only if you can keep things in their proper place.
Setting Boundaries: A Crucial First Step
If you’re considering taking the leap and coaching your own child, my advice is to first sit down and talk it over. Or better yet… sit down and let your child do the talking – setting the rules and boundaries… and you, the parent/coach, vowing to follow them.
But let me say this: If you think you can actually pull it off, there’s not a doggone thing you’ll ever do in your lifetime that’s more beautiful and satisfying than coaching your own kid!
My Personal Journey: A Father-Son Story
Allow me to sketch my own experience at coaching my youngest son:
The stork visited my wife and me twice in our first three years of marriage, whereupon we notified the big bird that we were through having children and that he should cross us off his list.
That’s when we discovered there was a problem with storks. The stupid birds can’t remember a doggone thing. I say this because several years later, about the time we were through with diapers and our lives were assuming some degree of order, our particular stork had a lapse of memory and dropped a spanking new son on our chimney… and the word “order” left our vocabularies.
Exploring Sports and Finding Passion
Our first two children were already doing every sport ever invented, and as my wife and I ran from one contest or practice to another, this newcomer to our family became like an extra bag of balls we were dragging along. We would be sitting in some gym and someone would ask, “Where’s your little boy?” We would quickly send the search party out and usually find him somewhere he shouldn’t have been and doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.
So anyway, after a few years of this, the time came to give our new son his own shot at sports. He tried soccer, baseball, basketball, football, wrestling, and track, and he enjoyed the heck out of each of them. But none of them grabbed him to the point where he was saying, “This is my sport.”
Through these particular years, I was winding down my coaching career so I could give my family my full attention, and my last hurrah with my age-group track team came the year the national championships were in Orlando, Florida. Our two older children both competed in Orlando, but our youngest was just along for the ride. What I remember of him at that particular meet was when one of the security guards brought him to my wife and me with the admonition to “keep a closer eye on him because he was playing down at the pond at the end of the track, and there were alligators in it”.
Launching a Father-Son Athletic Partnership
Upon returning home from Orlando and with our son uneaten by alligators but my track team now no longer in existence, I decided to ask him if he’d be interested in forming a little two-person track & field team with me as his dad/coach to take a shot at winning himself a national title in the pentathlon.
He said, “yes”. But he gave me no rules to follow, so I laid down my own rules by vowing to keep coaching and fatherhood separate. With that personal rule always at the front of my mind, the two of us set off on what turned out to be a season to remember.
The five events in the pentathlon were the hurdles, shot put, high jump, long jump, and 1500 meters. So for the next seven months, he and I went out almost daily, working together as a father/son team of two, to chase an American championship. His improvement in the five events progressed well, and most practices went smoothly. He listened to me and I listened to him, and I did a decent job of keeping home life and training separated. Our little two-person world was rosy.
But… occasionally a practice session would show signs of going sour, and we would knock heads. It didn’t happen often, but when it did I devised a little coaching approach that worked. I would simply say to him, “Let’s call it quits for today… and try again tomorrow”. So we would fold up shop, and to end a shaky practice on a high note we’d usually swing by the ice cream shop on the way home, still best friends.
I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed coaching more nor had a student who improved throughout a season the way my third child improved that year. After each meet we pulled out the pentathlon scoring tables to add up the points, and we soon realized he was on the trail of a national title. It was exciting.
Competing at the National Championships
The national championships that year were in Decatur, Illinois, and it was hot, hot, HOT! He got off to a good start in the first event, which was the hurdles, but then through the high jump and long jump and shot put, he went into a little funk. There were no disasters, and his marks were good, but at an American championship “good” isn’t good enough. He needed to “nail” an event or two, but couldn’t. And he slowly sank from the lead to something around sixth or seventh.
This brought him to the final event, the 1500 meter. While he rested in the shade guzzling Gatorade and popsicles and anything wet we could get our hands on, his mom and I pulled out the scoring tables and figured exactly how fast he needed to run the 1500 to pull the rabbit out of the magic hat. And here’s what we found: On this hot, hot, HOT day in Decatur, Illinois after a long morning of hellish competition in sweltering weather, he needed to beat the entire field by nearly a half lap in a race that was less than four laps long.
And he set out to do it!
A Parent’s Most Unforgettable Moment
I suppose every parent has one memory of a child so over-the-top great that he or she will remember it forever. For me, this race might well be my own forever memory of my youngest son. And I think it might also be my wife’s.
My job during this race was to shout out his splits to keep him on pace, which I did. And my wife’s self-assigned job was to be a one-person cheering section, though this was a little out of character for her. You see, she is one of those even-keeled mothers who always keeps her emotions in check at sporting events. She cheers but never lets it get out of hand. But on this hot, hot, HOT day at the American championships when her youngest son set out to bury the field, she let her emotions go hog-wild. As his lead widened, she sprinted from one end of that track to the other, running with him alongside the railing with her purse flopping, and cheering like a wild woman. When he crossed the finish line, the second-place runner was still in the middle of the final turn.
He had beaten the field by nearly a half lap, and by my calculations, had won the national title.
But… unfortunately, I, the father/coach, had made a mistake.
Lessons Learned from Near Victory
The scoring tables for the 1500 had been recently revised, and I had been working from an outdated version. And when the official results were posted, our son had missed his national title by a whisker, placing second. But let me say this: Neither his mom nor I nor our son cared a lick that he had fallen short of his goal. His final inspired and inspiring run was as fast as he could have run. He had pushed himself to his limits, and there was no more he could have done.
Upon returning home from Decator, our little father and son team ended when my youngest son fell in love with the sport of pole vaulting. Knowing absolutely nothing about pole vaulting, I contacted a friend of mine who is the pole vault guru here in this part of Oregon, and he took over from me. Not only had my son found a sport that “grabbed him”, but a coach who was fantastic. In high school, he won two straight Oregon state high school pole vault titles with personal bests of over 16 feet. He attended college on a vaulting scholarship and found another excellent coach who had him vaulting over 17 feet.
Reflections on Parent-Coaching
This question of whether a parent should try to coach his or her own child has no single answer. Many people try it, and many succeed. Others aren’t successful. My advice is this: You won’t know unless you try it.
I coached my youngest son through his youngest years as a member of my team, and seven months as a solo father/son duo in quest of a national title, and I would say that this experience was a resounding success. I think he would say the same, though I’ve never asked him.
But our little story doesn’t end there. I’ve now reached what can legitimately be called “old age”, and my coaching days are long gone, but over the past three years my youngest son and I have joined forces one last time in quest of a final goal – this one not to win a sporting contest, but to build his life’s house by his own sweat and effort, and without debt. In our family “house-building” is a sport.
Like two rivers converging, the time will come when sport and life will merge.
Have you ever coached your child? What was the most challenging and most rewarding part of that experience? Share your story.
* The stories in Winning Ways are of actual athletes but names have been replaced for privacy.
