So quite a while back now, years actually, I wrote something about the end of my coaching. Life goes on and I decided to pursue officiating but in the end, the hassle of that led me to realize something about me.
I'm a coach. Now that probably sounds weird or cheesy--many of you are reading this via a coaching forum, but I've always felt coaching was something I could exist without. I tried it, I denied it, and it turns out--I was lying to myself and the one thing in life you'll never do successfully is just that--lie to yourself.
Interestingly, I also realized--I would've been happy to coach regardless of sport. I could be quite happy doing track, baseball, Scholar Bowl, soccer...it's the coaching, the teaching, the work and time developing young people, I missed that, so I applied for a couple jobs.
One of them turned out to be interested in me--wondered why I was interested in a small town and rural area (having lived in a town of 300 for 20 years...pretty much everything's big, y'know?). I got to talk with the team, the assistant, the A.D. *VERY* little of that conversation was about volleyball. That fact made me like it all the more. The emphasis was on development and growth, making an effort at mental well-being as well as physical, so that it turns out, I got offered the job and said yes.
July 1. Today, 2024. That's the start date, all official-like though it'll be the end of this month before I've got an apartment in town, before I have to live apart from the Mrs. for a bit...we've done it before and it's not like active-duty military families don't deal with this all the time. I just wanted to write this because it's weird to have a 'beginning'.
Huh? Weird to have a beginning?
Yup. I'm not 21, right out of college, a normal starting point. I'm not 35 with enough $$$ saved to start something as a businessman--I've already done that repeatedly. This time around, I'm much older--my own children will be older than everyone on the team. I find myself with some nerves and the questions "Can I do this?" "Do I know enough to succeed?" I wonder about the saying, old dogs, new tricks. I'm old. Can I learn new tricks?
Getting older, there's comfort in knowing what you know and that that is good enough--because that knowledge is more than young people have and it lets you relax. Learning new things takes energy, it's hard, and you start to wonder whether there's benefit in it. I mean, if you do a doctorate when you're 60-65, why? No one's going to hire you as a professor...so why do it?
And it turns out--it isn't just coaching that is part of me. It's learning. It's doing something new (as long as it doesn't involve a lot of that new-fangled technology magic those young whipper-snappers are using nowadays) and the rush that comes with that--knowing that it's even better as a coach when you win doing that.
I was hired because of what I've done in the past--that what I've done, I can duplicate. As far as administrators, pretty reasonable logic, but as I've waited for 1 July 2024 to get here, I realize I want more than that--I want to be 'new', I want to find better ways of doing things, I want to see what there is still left to learn with coaching.
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