Sensing that one of her young players was on the verge of
bursting into tears, Devin Brown approached her with a big smile
and an optimistic message.
“Don’t worry about it,” Brown said, resting
her arm across the little girl’s shoulder after the
team’s loss on Saturday. “It’s only our third
game.”
As the coach of a local recreation girls’ basketball team,
consoling her players is merely part of the job description for
Brown, a sophomore at Pierce College. For most college students who
double as coaches at the high school or youth league level,
offering encouragement is one of the easier aspects of coaching.
Gaining the respect of the players and their parents is one of the
hardest.
For Brown, it can be a struggle at times to command that
respect. When working with girls who haven’t yet begun high
school, she is often confronted by parents who feel they are
entitled to some sort of influence on the court. Brown mentioned
that during games, parents sometimes yell at their children,
drowning out her instructions and creating confusion among the
players in the process. While this sort of occurrence may be
typical within youth sports, Brown feels part of the problem is
unique to student-coaches like herself.
“If I was 10 years older, I wouldn’t have so much of
a problem,” Brown said. “Since I’m a young
college student and especially a girl, it’s looked down upon.
(Parents) don’t realize that I might know more than
them.”
Convincing parents that the coach knows best is only one of the
dilemmas. Making players realize who is in charge is frequently an
even greater one.
With sometimes only a couple of years separating them from their
players, student-coaches have to balance their roles as an
authority figure as well as a friend.
At the high school level, most student-coaches only have time to
fill an assistant’s role, and consequently fit into one niche
more than the other.
“I’m thought of as more of a friendly person who
gives instruction,” said Spencer Fivelson, a senior at UCLA
who coached lacrosse at his alma mater, Windward High School.
“The discipline is left up to the head coach.”
That sentiment is shared by many student-coaches. Mick Levine, a
junior at UC Santa Barbara, has been an assistant coach for the
wrestling team at San Marcos High School for the past three years.
Because of his age, he has been more likely to help his players
with math homework or talk about the college experience than serve
as a disciplinary figurehead.
“They respond, but when it comes to barking stuff out and
rounding everyone up, the head coach does more of that,”
Levine said of his players. “I’m seen as more of their
friend.”
A learning process
Balancing the position between friend and teacher isn’t
the only adjustment student-coaches make. Taking off the uniform
and stepping onto the sidelines causes these students to view their
sport in a new light.
As players, many of the student-coaches were consumed by winning
and were frequently willing to lash out when their teammates
slacked off in practice. In wrestling, the structured weight
classes caused Levine to expect even more. But as a coach, those
expectations changed.
“As a player, you want everyone to cut weight,”
Levine said. “As a coach, you realize who you can pressure
and who you can’t.”
Accepting beforehand that his team might not have a wrestler for
a particular weight class has made losses more bearable for Levine
as a coach. For Brown, the sting of a loss on the basketball court
is nowhere near as severe when she is coaching.
“When I was a player, I was very competitive and it was
all about winning,” she said. “Now winning is not the
most important thing.”
The magnitude of wins and losses changes in large part because
of the impact coaches can have. Standing on the sidelines, it may
be tempting for student-coaches to jump in and renew their role as
an athlete. They quickly learn why their own coaches may have been
so animated from the bench back in high school.
“You feel a lot more helpless because you can’t
directly affect the game,” Fivelson said. “You just
give them the tools to succeed, but they have to implement
them.”
Building blocks
It’s instilling those skills that makes coaching so
rewarding for many college students. Despite the constant
challenges and intensive time commitment, they thrive on being
teachers in their favorite subject.
That’s what draws many of them into coaching in the first
place, and while they may not pursue it as a profession, Brown,
Fivelson and Levine were all quick to point out the value they
believe it will have in their eventual careers.
“If you can work with kids and their parents, you can work
just about anywhere,” Brown said. “It’s great for
development of people skills and learning to deal with
criticism.”
In some situations, the criticism and disrespect from parents
and players is worse than in others. But in all cases, the coach is
the one who is looked up to and depended upon, and this is what
student-coaches see as most applicable to their future.
“It helps build responsibility, since a lot of other
people rely on you,” Fivelson said. “You build morale
and help everyone come together, which you need for any field that
deals with people.”
Still in college, these student-coaches may not know exactly
where their careers will take them. But during this brief period of
time, they’ve already been on quite a ride.