Job Preservation

A conversation with a
friend the other day reminded me of how many S&C coaches are into job
preservation. Instead of doing the best job that they can and letting the
chips fall where they may they are always looking over their shoulders and
doing the bare minimum to preserve their jobs. It is especially prevalent in pro sports where
the monetary compensation encourages this. They work hard to get the jobs, get
a decent salary and then sit in their office or their pristine weight rooms and
wait for the athletes to come to them to train. They design benign programs that
do not challenge the athlete because they are fearful that if anyone were
injured they would be blamed. The athletes would never improve with those
programs, but they won’t get hurt either. They live in mortal fear that someone will
question their program. They are beholden to the trainers and the team medical
staff because they have not kept up on the research and current practices. The
excuse for not learning is that they are too busy working to learn and
implement new ideas. If they do learn they gather together with their cronies
in a professional organization and pass around the same old worn out ideas, in
essence mutual intellectual masturbation.

Frankly, when I look across
the spectrum of professional sport and see that many teams have head and
assistant S&C coaches as well as two or three interns, then I see players
from those teams going off to performance centers where they have no
accountability to the club that pays their salary, that reflects on the quality
and expertise of the teams S&C coaches. That should not occur! Frankly the
S&C coaches are encouraging this by not providing the best programs. Why is
it so hard to give 25 major league players an individual program for each day?
How many teams do that? You would be surprised. How many teams allow personal
trainers to work with their players at the clubs facilities? (Probably less
than before, but it still goes on).

In some of the
situations I have seen the S&C coaches work harder and create more stress
for themselves by focusing on job preservation, than if they just focused on
doing their jobs. I told one guy to stop talking about and worrying what everyone
else in the league was paid and just do his job and then his pay would
increase. My advice to those of you thinking of going into high profile
positions or if you are there now is that make sure you define the parameters
of your job. If you can’t do the job to the best of your ability then don’t
take the job. Rather than compromise my beliefs I have walked from two high
profile sports jobs because they took away my ability to do the job to the best of
my capabilities. I could never be satisfied with just preserving my job. Each
morning you have to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you can be better
today than you were yesterday. You owe that to yourself and those that you work
with.