Do the grunt work that really matters. Get your hands dirty. Everyone wants to be in the NFL or coach at a DI school. Whatever happened to paying your dues? It may a generational thing but I feel your earn the right to get to get to those levels. If you are beginning track coach dig up and rake the long jump pit. You don’t enlist in the army as a general. Earn the right to move up and move on.
2 Comments
David Nugent
Agree, the metaphor for the budding athlete, earn the right to move through the development stage into the competition stage. You do not wake up one morning and have morphed into Usain Bolt or Leo Messi.
Steve Michael Friederang
I fully agree. I’m in the wold’s most potentially accountable sport nd see people getting jobs as coaches when their only experience is as swimmers. Big difference, not always recognized by unaccountable hiring committees. When you look at a coach like Bob Bowman, you see a guy who travelled the gauntlet of coaching in this specific sport, working often for free for the best coaches he could find. Then he got “lucky” in working with Phelps. Unitl you turned a six-year-old into a National level swimmer, you aren’t an expert in helping a world class swimmer reduce his form drag through specific dryland training. Just putting a stopwatch in your hand does not make you a leader. But the process of growing toward mastery is not only worth it in the end, it’s worth it every day.