Coach Mike Brooks Pershing County High School
Picture Courtesy of Mike Brooks
Coaching is Coaching
As a high school, middle school, and youth sports coach, I think the most important thing is treating high school sports for what they are. Winning is great and is the ultimate goal. Winning provides merit to the kids for all the work they have put in and validates all the requirements given to them from school and coaches. However, winning should NOT be the sole focus of sports at this level. Sports should just be used as an avenue for coaches to help build young people into better people and prepare them for the future. Not many people will disagree with that statement.
To me, the best and most important part of coaching is the process of becoming successful more than the success itself. The process of building relationships and trust between coaches and athletes. The process of meeting the demands of each of the sports (in my case, football and wrestling). These demands include weight lifting, maintaining passing grades, failure, large amounts of practice and conditioning time, and other obstacles that show up along the way. The investments are huge. The process of working with teammates to accomplish goals and being part of something bigger than themselves. All of these things are the beauty of youth and high school sports and, to me, the most important part of character development through sports. Successes and winning are the results of overcoming obstacles. It is the overcoming of obstacles that allows for people to improve themselves and develop skills that will be with them for the rest of their lives. Through these processes, many coaches and athletes are able to make lifelong relationships.
One topic I love to speak about with my athletes and practice myself is, camaraderie of sports. Wrestling is a perfect sport to practice this. Countless hours are spent with the same people inside gyms. Through this, many coaches and athletes develop friendships with their teammates and with coaches and athletes from other schools, other cities, and other divisions. When you are competing, athletes and coaches are “enemies” attempting to achieve the same goal. As soon as you step out of the competition, wrestling is just one big family. For the most part at the local level, athletes and coaches have mutual respect for each other that is based on the grit that it takes to endure a season of wrestling. Coaches that I have become friends with are doing the same thing that I am attempting to do. They are using a sport they love as an avenue to impact kids’ lives. A mutual respect is developed from that, and a common ground for bonding and friendships is present. Friendships and camaraderie is one of the best parts of the sport.
Coaching in a small town or at a small high school has advantages and disadvantages. Thankfully, our community (Lovelock) is very sports focused and has been for years. This feeling has continued to amplify over the last 25 years both for the athletes and the spectators. The focus and backing of local sports has enabled us to have high participation numbers, and the athletes have earned tons of victories and successes over the years. The one town, one team mentality, is alive and well and that has shaped our school’s culture for years. The involvement in our schools’ sports, from a young age, has propelled us to high participation numbers. This is a definite advantage to coaching at a small school.
Another advantage is the connection with kids. My assistants and I are the only coaches in town. We begin coaching our athletes at a young age and continue throughout high school. This establishes our relationships and program with the athletes early on and allows them to follow the course of the program in hopes that it will lead to success. That sounds like a great course of action, but it does not always turn out as beautifully as it sounds. We have had many promising athletes, athletes that we have coached for years and bonded with as youth, that have not competed through their senior year. Some of these athletes even had great success. I think all schools face this same dilemma. However, I do not think that all schools have been forming a relationship with some of these kids for 5+ years before they decide to step away from the sports. They step away for various reasons, but it makes it a little more difficult when coaches and teammates have been with the athlete for so long. It hits much harder when the coach has spent countless hours with them and essentially grown up with the athlete.
Another difficult aspect of coaching at a small high school is that in many years we struggle to have enough athletes to fill out the 14 man starting line up. This is the same at many or all schools in our division. Recruiting the kids for such a challenging sport is no easy task. We also have had many successful years in basketball at our high school. With only about 180 total students, and 85-90 boys (not to say that girls aren’t allowed to compete!), it is difficult to fill a roster. We typically have 40-50 athletes out for basketball. That leaves us with about 130 total students to recruit from for our wrestling program. Some years, we have 20 or more athletes wrestling. Other years, we have 6 or 7. The low numbers are frustrating, but at the end of the day, all you can do is coach who you have and impact the kids in a positive way.
One other disadvantage is the training of our athletes. Once we reach competition against our division, this is not as major of a factor. However, our kids are expected to compete in 2-3 sports per year at our school. We discourage our kids to focus on one sport, and it would destroy our sports programs to have too many kids focusing on one single sport. We also do not have clubs and training facilities in the local area. We encourage kids to condition and train sports during the summer time, but they are competing (hopefully) in other sports during the school year. Besides having more available athletes to recruit from, some of the larger schools gain an advantage over the smaller schools because of their easily accessible training facilities. They have many athletes who devote a large portion of their year to a single sport (such as wrestling) and many athletes that have practices and competition throughout the year. Some of our groups will spend a lot of time working in the off season and traveling to area tournaments and camps. Other years, we will have trouble getting any of the kids to participate in extra training or competition. It comes in waves just like the participation numbers.
In the end, coaching at the high school level is about forming relationships with kids and having a positive impact on their lives. I have read articles and reports in the past that showed wrestling as the number one high school sport for coaches and athletes to maintain a relationship post-graduation, and I have experienced this as well. I am still in contact with many of my former wrestlers and look forward to being a part of their lives, and them a part of mine, forever. Moreover, some of the greatest moments and achievements I have experienced as a coach are not getting a kid to a state championship. Rather, it is the kid that is not very talented that had the grit to stick with the sport for 5 or more years, and eventually earned that medal at the state tournament. Those are the stories I will remember forever and tell to future generations of wrestlers, especially those experiencing frustrations. Coaches should push their athletes. Athletes should want to be pushed by their coaches. Coaches, athletes, and parents should NEVER lose sight of the end goal of any sport. A low percentage of kids are Division 1 caliber. However, they will all be professionals in some capacity. Character development through sports is the ultimate goal, but championships are nice along the way.