By: Dr. Matthew Raidbard
Follow your dreams, and keep following them
All I ever wanted to be growing up was a college basketball coach, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to live that dream for twelve years. During that time, I got to travel the country, coach my team in some of the biggest and most storied arenas in the college sports world, and work with so many great coaches and student-athletes.
But, sometimes, life throws you curveballs, and you are forced to adjust your dreams on the fly. I have had to do that a few times during my career, and I assume I’ll have to do it a few more times in the future, but that doesn’t mean that the next chapter in your life isn’t as meaningful as the one that embodied what you originally set out to do.
Meeting life’s challenges head on
Since my college basketball coaching career came to an end, I’ve tried a few different professional paths, but I keep coming back to my two loves: sports and coaching. I pursued a career in college coaching to be part of a team and have a positive impact on the student-athletes I was lucky enough to coach. But after my coaching career ended, I struggled to find other ways to positively impact student-athletes.
Becoming an athletics administrator has given me the opportunity to once again be a part of a team and have some impact on student-athletes, but I didn’t quite feel the same impact as an administrator as I did as coach. It took me a few years before I realized how I could once again have a strong impact on student-athletes without stepping back onto the coaching sidelines, and that was by writing this book and helping coaches become better and more effective leaders, effectively coaching vicariously through whomever reads my book and applies something that they learned in their leadership practice.
Why is leadership so important for coaches?
Every decision that athletic coaches make for their athletes and team is an act of leadership and affects every team member. Some leadership decisions are seemingly very small, especially considering that coaches must make many difficult and potentially huge decisions during a season; however, every leadership decision is important. Whether the coach is a volunteer parent, coaching their child’s youth sports team, a part-time high school coach who is also a teacher, or a full-time college or professional coach, a coach understanding the impact of their leadership choices is crucial to the development of their athletes and team.
The leadership choices coaches make can have a potentially profound impact on their athletes, particularly when the athletes are young and just learning how to be coached and experience sports. A coach gently taking an athlete aside and talking with them one-on-one about a mistake can have a huge positive impact on how that athlete responds to the coach in the future.
By contrast, another coach yelling a correction at the same athlete from across the field or court in front of their peers can, over time, cause the athlete to become upset or embarrassed and lead to the athlete experiencing negative feelings for the coach, team, or sport. This may seem like an inconsequential example, but these two leadership behaviors, repeated over the course of a practice, game, or season, can be the primary or determining reason why an athlete has an overall positive or negative experience.
An excerpt from Lead Like A Pro: Effective Leadership Styles For Athletic Coaches
“Being part of a team means giving a part of oneself to something that is bigger and greater than any one individual. Winning games is an amazing outcome of collective team and individual effort, but so is having other meaningful experiences as a team. These other shared experiences should be emphasized and valued by coaches so that the team can be nurtured to make each other better and learn from one another. Coaches are leaders, and they are asked to do so much more than simply design game plans and run practices. Assigning coaches so many hats to wear might not always be fair to them, but it is an opportunity for coaches to have an amazingly positive impact on their athletes in ways that without these additional roles would not necessarily be possible.”
Thoughts on leadership
There are many reasons why I wanted to write this book, but chief among them was that I wanted to help athletic coaches be more intentional and thoughtful about their leadership practice. Coaching is an extremely difficult job to succeed and have longevity in.
I was privileged to be a college basketball coach, and even though there are leadership decisions I made and behaviors I modelled for my athletes that I would like to go back and change, ultimately, what I learned from those decisions and behaviors has shaped my current leadership practice and made me a better and more thoughtful leader.
About Matthew Raidbard
Matthew Raidbard is a college athletics administrator, leadership coach, writer, and researcher. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree in history and classical studies from Indiana University, he decided to pursue his dream of being a college basketball coach.
His first college basketball coaching job was at Western New Mexico University, where in addition to coaching he completed his master’s degree in Educational Leadership. After leaving Western New Mexico, he served as a men’s basketball coach at Dartmouth College, Florida Gulf Coast University, and Chicago State University.
While working at Chicago State, he completed his doctorate in Educational Leadership, with his dissertation focusing on determining the best leadership style and behaviors for athletic coaches to practice.
From his dissertation research, he realized that coaches at all levels of sports were being asked to take on increased leadership responsibilities for their athletes and team without sufficient opportunities to receive leadership education and training. His research also uncovered that a significant gap existed between the leadership style and behaviors that athletic coaches thought they were practicing and the leadership style and behaviors they were actually practicing.
These findings were the inspiration for his book, Lead Like A Pro: Effective Leadership Styles For Athletic Coaches, where he helps inform coaches about leadership practice, and teach them how to align their perceived and actual leadership styles and behaviors, allowing them to become more intentional and effective leaders.
Lead Like A Pro: Effective Leadership Styles For Athletic Coaches is available now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million.
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