Coach them Hard, Love them Harder
By Chad Chatlos, Managing Director at TurnkeyZRG
After recently completing numerous college basketball head coaching searches on the men’s and women’s side for clients including Michigan, West Virginia, SMU, Oklahoma State, Washington State, Miami and Clemson, we observed one interesting topic during all of the interviews. Are coaches still able to coach their players “hard?” With the transfer portal and NIL wreaking havoc on rosters for coaches, there is a new dynamic of coaching hard, developing players, having to continue recruiting players on your team so they don’t leave for more money/opportunity and teaching them to deal with adversity.
Coach Tom Izzo at Michigan State has been on the record many times saying that when a player faces adversity at their current school, many of them just transfer to a new school hoping that a fresh start will be easier for them. I couldn’t agree more. In all walks of life, people need adversity to learn, grow and become the best versions of themselves. If we take away that adversity and allow them to run from it, then we are doing a disservice to that person’s development.
During our interviews for the recent searches, we asked coaches if they can still coach players “hard” without the fear of losing them to other schools waiting to court them. The responses were fairly consistent with answers like...
I coach my players hard and can do so because they know I care about them and want what is best for them.
I tell every player when I recruit them that I will be coaching them hard and it will not be easy, but we will get the best out of you.
To be honest, if a player wilts in the face of tough love/hard coaching, we do not want them in our program.
I get buy in from the player and the parents on how we work/coach. That way there shouldn’t be any surprises when we get after them in practice and hold them accountable academically, socially, in the community, etc...
People think that players don’t want to be held accountable and coach hard these days...that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It is like parenting...coaches can’t be “friends” with the players, you have to be a mentor, leader, and have compassion and empathy, but there still needs to be a hierarchy and they know it.
The profession of coaching has never been more challenging than it is today. The coaches that can find the balance of pushing hard while loving the players up are the ones that are having success and will continue to have elite teams.
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ABOUT TURNKEYZRG
Founded in 1996, TurnkeyZRG is a highly specialized talent recruitment/executive search firm filling C-level, senior-level and mid-management level positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. Over the past 25 years, TurnkeyZRG has filled more than 1,400 positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. TurnkeyZRG helps teams, leagues, stadiums, arenas, theaters, college athletic departments, events, sponsors, agencies, media companies, private equity companies and other clients identify, recruit and hire the very best management talent. Turnkey now benefits from ZRG’s global footprint, full array of industry practice groups, data-driven, analytical search tools, and technology investment in changing the way executive search/talent recruiting is done. TurnkeyZRG becomes a tech-enabled disrupter of the prior executive search model. For more information about TurnkeyZRG, visit www.turnkeyzrg.com.