What We Coach

In the last chapter, we started with what I believe is one of the most important questions in Coaching Excellence: Who do we coach?

Our answer was pretty simple. We coach so much more than an athlete. We coach a developing human being. We coach a young man or young woman. We coach someone's future husband or wife, father or mother. We coach future leaders, professionals, neighbors, and servants of their communities. Most importantly, we coach an eternal soul made in the image and likeness of God.

If that's who we coach, the next question seems pretty obvious: What do we coach?

I like to answer that question by looking at what I call the four-part athlete. The athlete standing in front of us is physical, skill, mind, and soul. If we really believe we're responsible for coaching the whole person, then Coaching Excellence requires us to pay attention to all four.

The challenge is that coaches naturally spend most of our time on the parts we can see and measure. So let's work from the outside in, beginning with what is most visible and eventually moving toward what is most interior.

We Coach the Physical

The physical nature of the athlete is probably the easiest part to see and measure. Before every great strength and conditioning coach gets mad at me, I'm not saying that coaching the physical is simple. The knowledge required to safely and effectively develop strength, speed, power, mobility, recovery, nutrition, energy systems, and motor development can be incredibly complex. Great strength coaches possess tremendous expertise.

What I'm saying is that the results are relatively easy to see.

An athlete puts five more pounds on the bar. They run a little faster, jump a little higher, move a little better, or increase their endurance. A young athlete begins lifting seriously for the first time and starts by bench pressing 95 pounds. A few weeks later, they're putting 105 on the bar, then 115. They can see the progress and feel the difference, and that creates buy-in.

The same thing happens with speed and conditioning. Take a few tenths of a second off a sprint time and suddenly an athlete believes the training is working. A distance runner watches seconds disappear from a mile time. An athlete notices their body changing and their clothes fitting differently. Something is happening, and when athletes can see progress, they usually want more of it.

That's one reason coaching the physical can be so rewarding. The feedback loop is relatively quick: Work. Measure. Improve. Repeat.

There's another thing I appreciate about physical development: for the most part, it's hard to fake. The weight on the bar is the weight on the bar. The stopwatch says what the stopwatch says. You either jumped that high or you didn't. There are obviously unhealthy and unethical shortcuts people can take, but ultimately physical performance has a way of revealing the truth. Did you do the work? Did you improve? Usually, the evidence is sitting right there in front of us.

We Coach Skill

The second part of the athlete is skill. Like physical development, skill development can usually be seen and measured, especially early in an athlete's growth.

Think about a basketball player who can't make a left-handed layup. As a coach, I can teach the movement, break down the footwork, correct the hand placement, and then begin building repetitions. At first, everything feels awkward. Eventually, the athlete makes one, then five, then ten. Over time, something that once felt completely unnatural begins to feel normal.

Confidence grows because competence grows.

Every sport has its version of this process. A golfer learns to chip. A volleyball player develops a serve. A quarterback learns a new throw. A soccer player improves their weak foot. A runner works on starting technique. A swimmer becomes more efficient in a turn. Whatever the sport, coaches understand this process well: teach it, practice it, measure it, improve it.

Physical and skill development also have something else in common. The better an athlete becomes, the harder improvement gets.

I've always used golf as an example. It's much easier to take someone who shoots 100 and help them break 80 than it is to take someone who shoots 76 and consistently get them to 72. Those last few strokes are hard because the obvious mistakes have already been eliminated. Improvement now lives in much smaller details.

The same thing happens in nearly every sport. Early improvement can happen quickly because there are obvious deficiencies to correct. As athletes become more advanced, the margins shrink and improvement requires greater detail, discipline, patience, and expertise.

Coaches tend to be very comfortable in these first two areas because this is where most of us have received the greatest amount of training. There are books, clinics, podcasts, certifications, videos, conferences, drills, programs, and entire industries dedicated to physical and skill development. If I want to learn more about shooting a basketball, strength training, golf swing mechanics, sprint technique, volleyball footwork, or offensive strategy, there is more information available than I could consume in a lifetime.

Because we have resources and can see the results, we tend to feel comfortable here.

But then we start moving inward, and coaching gets a little more uncomfortable.

We Coach the Mind

The third part of the athlete is the mind, and this is where things become much harder to measure. You can't put confidence on a scale or courage on a stopwatch. You can't look at a stat sheet and determine whether an athlete has finally overcome their fear of failure. Yet those things can influence performance every bit as much as strength or skill.

We've all coached athletes who had the physical ability and technical skill to be successful, yet something continued to hold them back. Maybe they're terrified of making a mistake, and one bad play quickly becomes three because they can't move on. Maybe they're returning from a major injury and their body has been medically cleared, but their mind hasn't caught up yet. Maybe they're constantly comparing themselves to teammates, setting unrealistic expectations, or struggling to receive correction. Maybe they can't separate who they are from how they perform. They may even have all the talent in the world but have never learned how to become a great teammate.

Those aren't primarily physical or skill problems. They're problems of the mind, and coaches have a responsibility to help athletes develop here too.

We can teach athletes how to set realistic goals and create processes that are both challenging and achievable. We can teach them how to respond to failure, distinguish between what they can and can't control, and understand that mistakes are part of growth rather than something to fear. In other words, we can teach athletes how to think.

That doesn't mean every coach needs to become a sports psychologist. Coaching Excellence requires enough humility to recognize our limitations and know when an athlete needs help beyond our expertise. There are times when the right coaching decision is to connect a young person with a qualified professional. But we shouldn't use I'm not a psychologist as an excuse to ignore the mind altogether.

We need a baseline understanding. We need to ask good questions, listen carefully, and know our athletes well enough to recognize when something isn't right. We also need the wisdom to recognize when an issue is beyond what we should handle ourselves.

Coaching the mind requires something that physical and skill development don't always demand in the same way: honesty and patience. An athlete can tell us they're confident, but are they? They can tell us they're over the injury, but are they? They can tell us a mistake doesn't bother them anymore, but does it?

There isn't always a number that gives us the answer. Growth here takes time, trust, and relationship. Because we're coaching developing young people, it may also require partnership with parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, and others who have significant influence in their lives.

The deeper we move into the person, the more relational coaching becomes.

And eventually, we arrive at the deepest part.

We Coach the Soul

The fourth part of the athlete is the soul. It's the most difficult to measure, the most interior, and probably the area coaches feel least prepared to address.

I would also argue that it's the most important thing we coach.

Why? Because it's the only part that's eternal.

Strength eventually fades. Speed slows. Skill diminishes. Even the sharpest mind experiences the effects of age. The soul is different. When we coach at the level of the soul, we're no longer talking about simply influencing the next game, the next season, or even the next stage of someone's life. We're talking about something that has eternal significance.

I want to be clear about what I mean by coaching the soul. I'm not simply talking about adding a prayer before practice, putting a Bible verse on the back of a T-shirt, or having a weekly devotional and checking the faith box. Those can all be good things, but coaching the soul should go much deeper.

The goal is transformation.

We want athletes to begin wrestling with the biggest questions of their lives: Who am I? Who is God? Why was I created? Why did God give me these particular gifts? And ultimately, what are those gifts for?

When an athlete begins answering those questions, something powerful can happen. The soul starts directing everything else.

That's why, even though we're discussing the soul fourth, it can't actually be fourth in importance. The soul should become the deepest aim that gives direction to everything else. The soul begins directing the mind, the mind influences how the athlete develops and uses their skills, and those physical and athletic gifts begin being placed in service of a greater purpose.

The athlete's WHY begins to change.

And when the why changes, the pursuit changes.

From Athlete-Driven to Soul-Driven

Think about all the reasons young athletes pursue excellence. They want to start. They want a scholarship or championship. They want recognition. They want their parents to be proud of them. They want to prove somebody wrong or be better than the person next to them.

Those motivations can be incredibly powerful, and not all of them are necessarily bad. The problem is that they're fragile.

What happens when you don't start? What happens when the scholarship doesn't come? What happens when someone else gets the recognition? What happens when you lose, get injured, or discover that the sport isn't giving you what you thought it would?

This is where coaching the soul can completely change an athlete, because now we can introduce a much bigger question:

• What if my pursuit of excellence isn't ultimately about me?

• What if these gifts were given to me by God?

• What if developing them is an act of gratitude?

• What if competing gives me an opportunity to glorify Him?

• What if my teammates aren't simply people helping me accomplish my goals, but people I'm called to serve?

• What if adversity can form me?

• What if failure doesn't change my identity?

• What if winning is something I pursue with everything I have but isn't something I need in order to know who I am?

Now we're getting somewhere.

Now we're moving toward what we talk about all the time at B3rd Athletics: God first. Others second. Me third. We're moving from an athlete whose pursuit is centered primarily on self toward what I would call a soul-driven athlete.

I believe that change can even have a tremendous impact on performance. Athletes constantly chase that feeling of playing free—the flow state where they're completely present, not consumed with outcomes, and simply competing. But think about how difficult it is to play freely when your identity is riding on every result.

If I make this shot, I'm valuable. If we win, I'm successful. If I play well, people will love me. If I fail, what does that say about me?

That's an enormous burden to carry into competition.

The soul-driven athlete has an opportunity to compete from a different place. My identity is already secure. I know who I am. I know whose I am. I know why I'm here. Now I can compete.

I can pursue excellence without asking excellence to tell me what I'm worth.

That's freedom.

Why Coaches Avoid the Interior

This is where the four-part athlete can become challenging for us as coaches. Most of us are comfortable coaching the physical and skill parts because we've spent years developing expertise in those areas. The mind and soul can make us much more uncomfortable.

I've started to wonder if one reason is that coaching those areas forces us to examine our own.

If I'm going to coach an athlete through fear, eventually I have to deal with my own fears. If I'm going to teach identity, I need to know where mine comes from. If I'm going to teach athletes not to make winning their god, I probably need to examine what losing does to me. If I'm going to ask athletes to trust God with their gifts, I have to ask whether I'm trusting God with my career. And if I'm going to coach someone toward becoming 3rd, I need to look honestly at whether I'm becoming 3rd myself.

That's uncomfortable. It's much easier to correct someone's footwork.

There's another reason this becomes increasingly important as we grow older in coaching. Early in our careers, we may be able to physically demonstrate almost everything. We can run with our athletes, lift with them, jump into drills, and demonstrate skills. Eventually, age wins that battle. Our bodies slow down, and we're not going to move like the 17-year-olds forever.

That's okay.

Because while the physical part of us will eventually decline, something else should be happening.

Our minds and souls should be getting stronger.

With time, we should possess more wisdom, patience, and perspective. Our relationship with God should be deeper. Our understanding of purpose should become clearer. We should become better at seeing beyond the behavior of an athlete and recognizing what that person actually needs from us.

But none of that happens automatically simply because we get older. We have to work on it, just like our athletes do.

Coach the Whole Athlete

So what do we coach?

Physical. Skill. Mind. Soul.

We coach the whole athlete.

The challenge for coaches is not to confuse what is easiest to measure with what is most important. We absolutely want physically developed athletes. We want highly skilled athletes. We want mentally strong athletes. Those are all essential pieces of pursuing excellence in sport.

But ultimately, we should desire something even greater: soul-driven athletes whose minds, skills, and physical gifts are ordered toward something greater than themselves.

If all we do is make someone stronger, we've done something good. If we make them more skilled, we've done something good. If we help them develop a stronger mind, we've done something incredibly valuable. But if, through the sport classroom, we can also help an athlete discover who God created them to be, understand why they've been given their gifts, and begin using those gifts for His glory and in service of others, we've participated in something that can last forever.

That's Coaching Excellence.

Don't just coach what you can see. Don't limit your coaching to what you can measure or what shows up on Friday night's scoreboard.

Coach the whole athlete.

Physical. Skill. Mind. Soul.

And although the soul may be the hardest part to see, never forget that the deepest part of the athlete should ultimately direct everything else.

God first. Others second. Me third.

That's what it means to become 3rd. And that's Coaching Excellence.

-Coach Field