Mini-Series
The first two weeks have been diagnostic. What is the gap between who you intended to become and who you are. What your athletes see that you don’t know they see.
Today I want to make a positive case. Not for fixing the gaps — you know what those are now. For the full weight and meaning of what you are doing when you coach.
Because I think coaching, done with awareness of what it actually is, is one of the most significant formation callings available to a person.
Read this passage slowly.
And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.
2 Timothy 2:2 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. Paul is describing a generational transmission of formation — the things he received, passed to Timothy, who would pass them to others, who would pass them further. This is not just an educational model. It is a picture of how human character gets transmitted across time: person to person, in the context of relationship, through the demonstration of a life as much as through the content of instruction.
That is what coaching actually is. Not the X’s and O’s. Those matter, but they are the vehicle, not the destination. The destination is the person who comes out the other side of four years with you — how they handle adversity, how they treat people with less power, whether they can be trusted under pressure, whether they know who they are when the athletic identity ends. You are forming that person whether you intend to or not, because formation is what happens in the presence of sustained relationship with a person of influence.
The question is whether you are forming them intentionally or accidentally. The coach who knows they are a formation agent — who chooses their behavior with awareness of its formative impact — is doing something qualitatively different from the coach who is just trying to win games. The wins matter. And they are the byproduct of a formation project that is larger than any season.
You are building people. Some of them will coach someday. They will coach the way you coached them. That is the generational reach of what you do in this room. Coach with awareness of that.
You are forming your athletes whether you intend to or not. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally or accidentally. Coach with awareness of the generational reach of what you do.
Twenty years from now, when one of your current athletes is coaching their own team, what do you most want them to have received from you? Are you actually giving them that right now?
The most important question of the series. Let it land fully. The answer is often the clearest picture a coach has ever articulated of their own coaching philosophy.
You are building people who will build people. Coach with the full awareness of what that means.
Final session of the coaches-only series. It should feel like a sending — a renewed commissioning to the vocational weight of the work.