Coaching by emulating

Last week I talked about becoming a coach and some simple advice on the process. If you're interested in coaching Ultimate and you do what I do with my interests, then you search out information and people to emulate who have success in the area. For example, when I was in love with basketball, I used to read autobiographies for players and coaches in search of what made them great. I, clearly, remember reading anything I could find on Zen Budhism because of Kareem Abdul Jabbar.


Unfortunately, in Ultimate we don't have a huge range of people to emulate (with the exception of a few such as Tiina Booth, Michael Baccarini, and Matty Tsang) and the few we do, we're not likely to have regular access to. This reminds me of two of the autobiographies I read in my basketball days - Pat Riley's and Phil Jackson's.

My feeling with these autobiographies is they may give you some nuggets on how to manage superstars, but as I previously discussed we're not likely to be coaching in that domain. Instead, we might want to be looking to emulate coaches at lower levels.

One article I read was about Pat Summit. She seems like a great candidate to study. She took over the Tennessee ladies basketball team and has built a program that stands supreme in the world of College sports.

The best quote from the article is:
“This job is all about the relationships,” Summitt said, “so obviously that’s rewarding.”

This fits into the ways to coach. The article is a good starting point into summit, but next, I'll have to see if I can find some information on her program and how it was built. I'll see if I can get my hands on "Reach for the Summit" and "Raise the Roof". These two books were written by summit and will give some insight into her ways. Unfortunately, my time is limmitted.

PJ