Mini-Series
This series is for coaches only.
Not for your team. Not for your staff if you want them to stay comfortable. This is a space for the person behind the whistle to examine the calling honestly — which means examining the gap between the coach you intended to become when you took this job and the coach who actually walks into the building every day.
That gap is real. And it’s worth looking at.
Read this passage slowly.
“You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.”
Ezekiel 34:4 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Ezekiel 34 is an indictment of shepherds who have failed in the specific obligations of their calling. It is confrontational scripture and I want to use it carefully. The point is not that coaches are failing in the way the passage describes. The point is that the calling of a leader includes specific obligations to the people in their care — and that those obligations can drift without the leader noticing, because the institutional pressures of the role gradually replace the vocational ones.
The coaching vocation, at its origin, almost always includes a vision of development. The coach who entered the profession with a picture in their mind of the athletes they would shape, the culture they would build, the program they would leave better than they found it. Ask yourself honestly: is that coach the one who showed up this season? Or has the record, the administration, the recruiting, the politics, the pressure taken enough space that the original vision is harder to find than it used to be?
This session is not an indictment. It is an invitation to the examination. What did you originally intend? What are you actually doing? Where is the gap? And — most importantly — is the gap one you can close?
Those are the questions for week one. Come back with honest answers.
The institutional pressures of the coaching role gradually replace the vocational ones without the coach noticing. When did you last examine the gap between the coach you intended to become and the one who showed up this season?
Why did you become a coach? Not the resume answer — the real one. Is that reason still visible in how you coach?
This question may produce significant honesty in a safe coaches-only environment. Hold the answers without judgment.
Look at the gap. Honestly. That’s week one. Come back.
This series is explicitly for coaches and should not be delivered to athletes. The content involves internal examination that requires the safety of a peer environment.
Establish the three-week commitment. This is more demanding than a standard devotional series — it requires vulnerability that builds over the three sessions.