Book Review - Successful Coaching - Part VI of the Story

The last section of Successful Coaching; America's Best Selling Coaching Book gives a brief overview of sport management for coaches.

Pictured Above: Sideline focused on the action.

Sports management involves:

• Planning - what you will do
  
• Organizing - team structure
  
• Staffing - who will be part of the organization
  
• Directing - guiding others
  
• Controlling - guiding the team

The book doesn't cover all the possible elements of team management and focuses on team management, risk management, and self-management.

Team management is broken up into pre-season, in-season, and post-season. The book provides a good set of steps that you need to consider during each of the three parts. The end of the chapter briefly touches on managing relationships with all the people you interact with during a season including administrators, other coaches, parents, and officials.

The next chapter, risk management, is about how to have a safe learning environment. The main audience for this chapter is youth coaches, but I think the chapter makes a few good points about keeping any aged athlete safe.

Finally, the last chapter is about managing yourself as a coach. This is a stay healthy and time management section that consists of common sense items like eat well and get proper rest.

In this section, I really liked the team management chapter, but the other two chapters were unnecessary. Fortunately, they are short chapters.

Overall, I liked the book. Not everything was new, but the material is presented in a linear form with good set of steps to figure out how you should be preparing. I'm not going to call this a must book for Ultimate coaches and captains; however, I do think you'll have a better season by just following some of the advice from the book.

PJ