There is a well-traveled, perhaps apocryphal, story about Super Bowl–winning former coach Bill Walsh. As he observed his assistants at practice one day, he was horrified by the amount of screaming directed at the players. According to the story, he gathered the coaches together and offered one directive: “Stop yelling, start teaching.”
It is common to hear athletic directors and coaches proclaim that a good coach is really just a good teacher. As I am a teacher, the statement has always made me happy and proud. It allowed me to understand coaching success on my terms and to demystify a process I have always seen as magical—the ability to unite a group toward a common goal, the synchronous orchestration and choreography of integrating individual goals with group goals, and of course, the achievement of greatness. After 30 years of teaching, I now realize that I may have missed the important message here. It is not just that good coaching is good teaching. Perhaps I should have been entertaining the converse: that good teaching should be good coaching.