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High School Coaches Club: Newsletter #66

Giving responsibility away to your assistants

If you’ve coached for a while, you’ve probably spent at least one season coaching alone. I think it’s a great experience for young coaches, an opportunity for them to understand everything that goes into a successful season. However, it can also lead to something many of us have also experienced: difficulty in letting go of some responsibilities.

Kind of goes back to that old saying, “If you want something done, do it yourself.”

Former Major League Baseball player Dave Gallagher posted a great thread (actually, he doesn’t know exactly how to do a thread on Twitter, so it ended up just being a series of standalone tweets, but he’s promised to give a real thread a chance in the future!) on the value of giving away responsibilities. Here’s the “thread” unthreaded:

This morning I’ll use my next several tweets to discuss the importance of head coaches giving responsibility to assistant coaches. Not just throwing BP or hitting fungos. Real responsibility. It can change the culture of your team. Please read on…

ASSISTANT COACH VALUE: My 1st year as a head coach in college I had a young assistant who seemed to have a limited view of his own importance to our cause. He was a catching guy. Happy to throw BP. Players clowned with him. I had no use for that…

Prior to our season opener, I had a short meeting with my young assistant coach. He was a catcher as an active player. I asked him, “Who do you want starting behind the plate today?” His face changed. It was a conference game…

Giving my assistant coach, who worked with our catchers, the responsibility to name the starter made him work harder and pay attention more. I let the catchers (4 on the roster) know he would have that input to the lineup. The clowning stopped…

I let my pitching coach know he would name the starters and make appropriate pitching changes. Why wouldn’t he? He spent so much time with them throwing sides and knew each one better than anybody on the planet…

I learned that by trusting and giving my assistant coaches real responsibility it actually made me better. It narrowed my focus. I put more time into hitting and defense. Our coach meetings became more relevant as we needed each other’s input…

Imagine being a coach attending a coach meeting with zero personal input into results or team direction. Just being told what to do. Is that a job you would want? Not me. The staff should be part of the team. Feel similar emotions in wins and losses…

Lastly, when you make your assistants part of the decision making process as far as making a roster or game day lineups, players are aware and tend to give more respect to the coach. They do less clowning. Practice efforts rise. They’re under constant scrutiny.

We started the season 0-5

As promised, I want to give you updated along the way. We’re now 1-8. This is a new experience for me. But one that I know will make me a better coach when it’s all said and done.

We picked up our first win of the year on the road, after trailing 7-0 heading into the 6th inning and 7-4 heading into the 7th (we won 10-7). That win made us 1-5, and was a huge factor in helping our guys understand that they belong here at the varsity level.

We followed that with a competitive 13-6 loss and a completely uncompetitive 10-0 loss. This past week, a 3-2 loss after leading 1-0 from the first inning to the 6th inning. So we’re still having heavy ups and downs, but we’re trending in the right direction.

Our focus: “Keep climbing.” One of our assistant coaches noticed we were ranked 51st out of 51 teams at the 6A level in Oregon. Nowhere to go. So he came up with our team’s new mantra. Since then, we introduced it to the players, purchased wristbands with the saying, and use it to provide us the discipline we need to keep continuously improve one step at a time, to keep climbing. Eventually, when the season is over, we’ll finally look back down the mountain to see just how far we’ve come.

We’ve also made some changes to how we practice, introducing more competitions and more holistic environments (think more on-field BP with live defense vs. reps from a fungo).

The pre-season games give way to league games this Saturday against the #2 team in the state. Can’t wait for our guys to get out there and show our league who they really are!

An episode you need to hear:

Troy Walker
Lebanon HS (OR)
High School Coaches Club: Episode 65

After 16 years an assistant football coach and more, Coach Walker took over as the head football coach at his alma mater, Lebanon High School, in 2021. As he heads into year two, he joins the Club to reflect on his past, what went well in year one as a head coach, and what the future holds. A true family man, he's a refreshing voice in the sports world.

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As Coach Lee would say, “Lovin’ You,”
Max Price