“You are the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your team right now.”

Great news! Show up, say a couple things, and put the two points in your pocket, right?

Sorry coaches, it's not that easy, but it is that natural. For Cody Royle, the magic of coaching exists in the personality, knowledge, and experience of the human being behind the whiteboard. Every time we're coaching we're performing, so how you show up really matters. 

As coaches we recognize patterns in the game, but we're putting that knowledge to work in high pressure arenas (literally). We're charged with communicating, making decisions, and interacting with players, coaches, and officials during games or practices. 

For Cody, it's important to understand that everyone looks at the game through different lenses. Hockey can get stuck in a myopic view - not everyone on planet earth holds ice hockey as the most important sport in their world. The fact that it's widely known as ice hockey lends weight to that fact. People literally speak different languages and still find a way to improve their on-ice skills - think of Detroit's Russian 5 in the early 1990's. People also come from different backgrounds, which means they might as well speak different languages. It's these differences that make coaching necessary at all. Think about it - imagine every one of your players functioned as intended without any need to speak or communicate. What if they knew where to go because they understood how to read the play and predict what was going to happen?

You'd be out of a job. Coaches connect players with concepts and knowledge, and the result is performance during games. The result is something we don't have control over. We do have control over the process. 

And the players don't function as intended. They make mistakes, the puck bounces, the staff wants more money, the volunteers don't show up. Coaching is leadership, and it's all encompassing. We need help and it's not easy to find.

Thus, coaches deal with stress and confusion just like athletes. 

"Coaches weren't able to go to anyone and identify that because it would impact their future employability."

Cody points out that coaches impact an athlete's ability to perform, which is a tall order when coaches arrive at an event already exhausted and with low mood. This system isn't working, and we need to fix it. We can do that by turning the mirror on ourselves.

My favourite part of Cody's presentation is about learning how to nap - I think I actually have that part down to a science. Every game day I leave the rink after morning skate or morning meetings, I walk tht dogs, I make food, and then I climb into the sheets and turn the lights down like I'm going to bed. Usually this is around 2 or so in the afternoon. No alarm, just sleep, and I'm usually up in 45 minutes and ready to go. Three games a week, and that's almost two and a half hours of additional sleep every week. Not insignificant!

You owe it to your players to be the best version of yourself. Coaching is not a 9-5 job, it's 24/7. That means that when you're working on yourself - spending time in the gym, walking the dogs, hiking, or making time to make memories with your family, you're improving as a coach. But first, you're improving as a person. 

Your players will benefit from it, and so will you. Coaches are human beings, too. 

Check out this snippet from Royle's presentation and view the full video here a membership to The Coaches Site.