DU MASC: A Coaching Lead

All coaches know they need to be experts in the science and art of coaching. Coaching, that is guiding, teaching and leading athletes to undreamt of performances, is far from easy. 

Getting to know athletes as people, first; building the “whole” athlete as a quality person; developing positive relationships; and… knowing the best X’s and O’s; the most up-to-date sciences; and using technology, data and numbers are today, all critical to the best coaching. 

Sadly, coaching as science and art is not enough. For lots of reasons. In fact, it’s not close, unhelpful, and not going to help your athletes achieve their athletic dreams. Or your coaching ones. That’s how DU’s MASC helps.

 
From the science perspective, no athlete lives or performs in a lab, or is a robot, machine or widget responding seamlessly without some sort of intrinsic human response. And so scientific knowledge is distorted hugely, when it is applied in the real world. 

And from an art perspective, well, while we can appreciate the sentiment that there are “real-world unknowns” in coaching, the sentiment implies there is nothing proactive coaches can do, to better understand what is best. 

Let’s pause for a moment. All coaches know there are huge unknowns, and as such they can either: a. learn from the best, or copy what the best do; b. experiment, trial-and-error and learn from experience; c. try really hard to intuit and sort of “will” better performances. 

The problems are however, that “what works” for one is unlikely to work for someone else; that “what works” is a glass ceiling as we never know it couldn’t have worked better; and if success was as simple as copying, more coaches and athletes would win. 

Not only that, but while experimenting/trial-and-error and intuition is always important, with no direction or guide, success is going to take a very long time. 

DU’s MASC leads because we provide guides for the unknown real-world spaces. We are used to hearing our alumni say, “wow, that sociology really makes you think differently”. And it does, but it’s not sociology per se, that helps our coach students think differently. 

Social theories form, not just sociology, but psychology, philosophy, history and indeed, all sciences too, including physiology, biomechanics, motor skills, nutrition and so on. 
Collectively these theories explain the real-world, those hitherto coaching unknown spaces, in far deeper, far broader, and far more rigorous [than intuition and experience] ways. 

Used in addition to the best sciences that we also teach, coaching then becomes “science-and-theory”. And coaches learn not lip-gloss and pretty words about what should happen, but guide for the unknowns, a tool-kit for relationships, a GPS to navigate the vast open ocean-like real-world spaces: and ways of turning the “should-happens” to “did-happen”. 

For the bottom-lines in coaching will never change, ever. Sport is social. So learn social to do better.