The myth of the “un-coachable player”

“He/she just isn’t coachable.” I have uttered these words many times in my coaching career, and I have heard them spoken by my coaching peers many times as well. Back then, this label of “un-coachable” was branded upon those players who didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid that I was selling as a coach. This could mean that the player in question didn’t want to prescribe to a set of tactics I was teaching, or maybe he/she didn’t want to play in the role I assigned to him/her. I reflect on my use of this term—and its proliferation in our sporting culture—and I cringe because under the pretense of player development resides the inescapable truth that “coachability” is code for conformity. If you are coachable, then you are doing what I, the coach, tell you to do; and if that is indeed true, then two further suppositions must be exposed. First, as a coach, I know what is right (coach-centered thinking), and second, that to develop as a player, you, the player, must do what I say (again, coach-centered thought). Welcome to America, where the coach is always right…

I recently completed a coaching course put on by FC Barcelona, one of the biggest soccer/football clubs in the world. In their course material, they explicitly say that the role of the coach is NOT to tell a player what to do; instead, the coach’s job is to be an interlocutor between the complexities of the game and the mind of the player. In this context, it is the player who decides what to do, and it is the coach’s job to encourage the players to think about why they perform a particular action and whether or not they felt said action was successful and/or could be improved. In the words of Wayne from Letterkenny, I suggest you let that marinate.

How could the American coaching paradigm be so off? My first guess is that our sporting culture evolved out of military culture, with American football being the best example of our sport-as-warfare heritage. The holy triumvirate of American sport—football, baseball, and basketball—all place the coach, like the military leader, at the center of the sport while reducing the player to a subordinate role. I do not claim to have an intimate knowledge of American football, or even basketball for that matter, but why do players need the coach to tell them what to do? Perhaps that question is the topic of another post entirely…

I write all of this to make a simple point about coaches—you aren’t that important. Players need to learn how to think, and that can’t happen if you don’t allow them to think, try, and fail. Instead of being the team pariah, an “un-coachable” player should be held up as an example of someone who is trying to think on their own, who questions and probes, and who ultimately develops the capacity to think critically about the sport, themselves, and their role on the team.

The next time you consider labeling a player as un-coachable, I encourage you to think critically about how that player makes you feel and about your relationship to such things as power and identity. After doing that, please encourage that player, and all of your players, to be as un-coachable as he/she sees fit. Maybe you are the un-coachable one.