Short and sweet post today.
We were talking this week at one of the Coaching Life Group meetings and a middle school basketball Coach put this one out there — he said that he’s heard from some of his co-workers at the school that they don’t come to the 7th grade basketball games because he’s too “boring” as a Coach. It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? That the job of a man coaching 12 and 13 year old boys isn’t simply to teach them to play and guide them through the game, but he’s also expected to entertain the spectators.
Chances are the co-workers making the comments probably didn’t mean for their words to be taken so literally, but there’s something here. American sports fans have developed such a consumer, me-first mentality that we want the people who are mentoring our children to simultaneously put on a show for us. We have gotten so used to using sports as a primary means of entertainment that we have trouble switching out of that mode, even when the setting calls for it. It’s almost like we’re losing the ability to just relax and enjoy watching our children or our students play a game. Collectively, as a society, maybe we’ve already lost it.
It’s pretty clear to me that 7th grade basketball teams don’t exist for the amusement of fans, and you could apply that same idea to the vast majority of youth and school sports programs (if not all of them). So why would anyone spend any time worrying about whether the Coach is boring or not? I don’t get it.
Coaches, you are there to coach your kids, not to ham it up for their parents or other spectators. If that’s not good enough, too bad for them.