During my eight years of school sports, I dealt with quite a few coaches, but I never realized how difficult their jobs are until I started working with my youngest brother, Brett, and his horse Chief.
As the biggest horse fanatic in my family, I’ve always been the one pushing my brothers to work with their horses and try to improve. Until the last couple summers, most of my urging fell on deaf ears, but when Brett decided to make a run at a high point belt buckle last summer, he also decided to try and listen to some of my coaching.
While we worked with Chief on seven different horse show events, I realized that coaching might look like fun, but its really a lot of hard work.
Throughout the summer, we changed our strategies for different events in an effort to place as high as possible in each one, and the need for constant adjustments forced us to consider all kinds of things that would be affected by one little change.
We talked about several different changes we could make to fix a problem, but always had to keep in mind what else would be thrown off by the potential change and then decide if the change was really a good idea.
In the past two months, Brett has changed saddles, saddle pads, tiedowns and bits on his horse in an attempt to make faster barrel racing runs.
So far, we are liking the changes, as he’s made several really nice runs since then, but after each one, we are evaluating what worked and what didn’t work in an effort to continue improving.
That’s exactly what coaches are doing in practices and during games, and of course, not every adjustment works as planned.
While plenty of us on the sidelines and in the stands like to second-guess decisions made by coaches — especially when the plans go awry — its hard to say what we would do if we were the one in the huddle.
At the same time that I’m coaching Brett and Chief, I’m also working with my two barrel racing horses and trying to figure out how to make the best run possible on each of them.
Each horse has his own style of running and his own preferences for exercising during the week, warming up and cooling down after a run, so much like a coach must change their wording and tone from one player to another, I have to keep in mind that the horses will respond to the same cue in different ways so I must to tailor my cues to the horse I’m riding at the moment.
Coaches do the same type of thing when they’re explaining a play to six, eight or 11 players at a time, and of course, every player won’t always get the same message.
With all these variables, there are bound to be broken plays and others that just don’t work like they were supposed to. The miscues are just part of the action and the unpredictability is a lot of what makes sports fun to watch.
As we begin a new season of sports, I’m looking forward to seeing what the talented coaches at Pratt, Skyline and PCC and their teams can accomplish on the field and on the court, but no matter what, every coach has my respect for doing a tough job and making it look like fun.
Pratt, Kan. —
