Let me preface what you’re about to read below with a little history….I grew up in the early-to-mid 80s with my athletic career before becoming a coach in the early 90s. I played basketball and football in high school prior to choosing against a small-college basketball career to be a manager for Norm Stewart’s Missouri Tigers in the late 80s. Playing in those days, being on the staff at Mizzou and then becoming a coach myself, all occurred during a much different time for being an athlete and coaching athletes than the one we are in now.
Now before you jump to the conclusion that this is going to be a “those were the good old days” article I want to make very clear that nothing could be further from the truth. I think in all things related to life we should be looking forward. If something was great at one time, shouldn’t we always be wanting to make it better? We may find out that something that worked “back in the day” IS what we should be doing but it’s my opinion that the effort to always see if there’s a better method should come first and foremost.
In the days that I played sports competitively, I always tell the story about what happened my senior year playing hoops. I had a coach who I had the utmost respect for. He worked hard at his craft, had a long history of success and I looked up to him as a person as much or more than I did as a coach. One day at practice, I was having let’s just say a “non-stellar” time of things. He’d already made this clear to me verbally but at some point, he got in close proximity and proceeded to make a point by jabbing me in the sternum with his index finger. I mention this because the next day he showed up at school with a splint on that finger and it came out that he’d actually broken that finger making that point to me. Now, we’re talking 1985 so my reaction to the whole thing was “I need to get my a** in gear and work harder” when all that went down. Fast forward to 2022. If that would have happened with one of the coaches I was in charge of as the athletic director in my last year in that position and well….you can guess where things would have ended up.
Please know I’m not vouching that my coach breaking his finger on my sternum was right. And I’m not saying that coaches shouldn’t push their athletes in 2022 either. There IS a best way for coaches to coach and there IS a best way for athletes to be coached. And what’s best in 2022 will not be what’s best in 2032 either. I would hope everyone would strive to make tomorrow a better version of today in all things we do.
I would relate a very meaningful day in my coaching career when things started to turn for me. In 2003 my team I was coaching (I was a high school basketball coach for 23 years prior to becoming an athletic director) was coming off a less-than-successful year in so many ways. We were not the most talented team but I can honestly say that I worked very hard trying to push the right buttons that year but looking back, I mostly pushed the wrong ones.
When the season was over, I was in our equipment room a week or so after our last game just doing inventory and there was a knock on the door. One of my players walked in and asked if he could talk to me. Now please understand the background of the two of us; Deonte was a 6-8, 240-pound 16-year-old from inner city St Louis and I was a 6-0 or so 36-year old who grew up in a rural town in central Missouri. Yes, I was his coach and he was my player but we could not have come from more different places in life. I asked Deonte what he needed and I could tell this was hard for him. He said something to the effect of, “Coach, I’m not sure how to say this to you.” I could tell he was hurting so I lost interest in putting away uniforms and turned 100% of my attention to him and prodded him on. He eventually said to me, “Coach, I’m not having any fun playing basketball anymore” as a tear rolled down his cheek.
Now think about this for a second. How much courage did it take for this young man to come to me and say something that he probably thought would anger me and make me think less of him? It took everything. I had two emotions come over me instantly: My admiration for Deonte went through the roof that he cared about his feelings, his teammates and you’ll be surprised to hear this but also how much he cared about ME to say these things. It would have been easy for him to wait until after he’d played his last game as a senior to let loose on me but he wanted so badly to have a great senior year and as we continued our talk in that storage room it was obvious to me that HE WANTED ME TO ENJOY COACHING MORE.
Deonte is 36 years old now. He and I stay in touch and always text on holidays and birthdays. Heck, the night he proposed to his soon-to-be-wife he texted me at 1am sending me the video of his proposing to this lucky woman an hour earlier. He scored a lot of points for us, he grabbed a lot of rebounds for us and went on to honor our school with his scholarship he got to play college basketball and the degree he went on to earn. BUT I WILL OWE HIM FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. He opened my mind as to what coaching can be. People who are being coached want more than to win games, shoot lower scores or swing a golf club better. They want someone who cares about them. My last 10 years or so of coaching were the most gratifying of my life. I credit that young man who had the guts to say the things that needed to be said to me for this. I enjoyed my players and my staff members more than I ever did before and realized that the time we spent together working hard, developing relationships and making memories far outweighed any statistics or marks made in a scorebook.
Now before you think I’ve gone all soft and tipped the scales to all responsibility on the coach, you could not be more wrong. Golfers receiving instruction, speech and debate participants receiving guidance, you name the situation; there is a tremendous onus on those individuals to put the work in and accept coaching for what it is and should be: an honest and sincere effort from the coach to guide you and yes, PUSH YOU to be what you have the ability to be. Sometimes this is uncomfortable. But it seems to me that the number of achievements and where our station in life end up being very low if all we ever do to further ourselves is considered comfortable.
But if you think that these duties of a coach and his/her athlete are two separate streets that run parallel to each other, I would disagree with you. It’s the job of a coach to make an honest effort AND to figure out what makes their athlete tick. It’s the job of an athlete to work their tail off, follow instructions and YES, meet their coach halfway by communicating on their end with the coach as to what will help the coach do their job most effectively.
When I ran a leadership group with our athletes and fine arts performance kids when I was our athletic director, I always saw mouths drop open and surprised looks when I told them at our first meeting: One of my main priorities in this meeting is to help you HELP YOUR COACHES. They had never thought about how creating open lines of communication with the people they were being coached by could not only make themselves but their teammates and thus, team, be more than they ever thought it could be.
In closing, how does this relate to Graves Golf and our members? It means everything. We need you to be attentive to the coaching and resources that you’re receiving that can bring you closer to the Moe Norman model. And what do you need? You need us to have great work ethics and to be personable and flexible in learning what works for you. If you’ve ever sent in a video to our coaches, you’ve experienced this. I know as a former member my journey was never a straight line to success. I had ups and downs but man, I kept coming back for more. And you know what? The coaching staff that endured my 100+ videos I sent in kept coming back at me with great instruction, they never quit encouraging me but pushed me week after week. It’s why being a Single Plane Academy meant so much to me. I never felt like this was a me-doing-my-thing and the coaches doing their thing independent of each other. My experience was always that we were doing this together. It made everything meaningful to me and is why I love the Single Plane experience so much and is why I’m very glad to still be a part of it and hopefully help make you feel the way I did.
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t end with this: Deonte, thank you.
