Coaches & Leadership
You were hired to coach a sport. But the people you’re coaching are not sports.
They’re human beings who happen to be competing in your program right now. And what you do with them in this season is going to affect them in ways that outlast the record, the standings, and the highlights by decades.
That’s either a weight or an opportunity, depending on how you hold it.
Read this passage slowly.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?
James 2:14–16 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
James’ argument is about faith expressed in action. Words without deeds are empty. The care that doesn’t do anything for the person it claims to be about is not actually care.
Applied to coaching: the coach who says they care about their athletes as people but never demonstrates that care in anything beyond game performance isn’t actually coaching the whole person. They’re coaching the performer and calling it more than it is.
Coaching the whole person looks like specific things. Knowing enough about an athlete’s life outside the sport to ask a real question about it. Noticing when something outside the sport is affecting how they show up and creating space for them to name it. Investing in the athlete’s development as a person — their character, their thinking, their values — with the same intentionality as their technical development. And caring about what happens to them when the season ends and the relationship that justified the coaching no longer exists in the same form.
The coaches who have the most lasting impact on athletes are almost universally the ones who cared about the whole person. Who coached the sport and invested in the human. The athletes remember the coaches who saw them — not the ones who only saw their performance.
What deeds demonstrate the care you say you have?
The coaches who have the most lasting impact are the ones who coached the sport and invested in the human. Athletes remember the coaches who saw them.
What specific things do you do that demonstrate to your athletes that you care about them as people, not just as competitors? Where are the gaps?
Concrete inventory of actual behaviors. The gap between what coaches say they value and what they actually do is usually visible here.
Coach the sport. Invest in the human. Both. That’s what lasts.
This devotional works well as an annual reflection for coaches — at the start of a season as a frame-setter, or at the end as an honest evaluation.