Using Good Leadership Skills to Coach

Using good leadership skills to draw the absolute best out a player just makes good sense! Most sports require an element of skill and the better a player is at that skill the better they are at the sport! However, there is no substitute for a very motivated player. A player so motivated that they stand out from all others. They actually play above their own set of skills! That is what good leadership skills can do for a coach!

Every player is motivated by something! Finding out what that something is and using it to draw the best from a player is the job of a coach. As an example I am a girl's fast pitch softball coach in my spare time. Do we have the best talent in our particular league? Absolutely not! Do I expect to win regardless of that fact? Absolutely! Why? Because I intend to figure out what each girl is playing for and using that to motivate them to strive for more!

This past weekend when I called a girl to the side and told her how proud I was at the dedication she is showing to the sport. I did that on purpose. Yes she is dedicated! But I wanted to feed her a bite size piece of motivation. To let her personally know that her coach was noticing the effort she was putting into the sport! This little bit of time invested into letting her know will bring back huge dividends. She will apply even more effort to refining her skills. Three months ago I was not even sure if I wanted her on our team. Today she is the number three hitter and playing great!

Having Good leadership skills does not necessarily mean that you need to be standing out front waving on everyone to follow you! It can be but they should be following you anyway! On the other hand it can be quietly going about tapping into everyone's abilities to bring out the best! This takes a keen sense of trying to understand each player on the team! Noticing the smallest of things on each one of them and then letting them know.

On the other hand if you continually compliment without correction then they become indifferent. Or if you compliment something that really doesn't deserve to be complimented it can be destructive. It removes the entire meaning of your words. Therefore, make sure you make your words meaningful! If they missed a ball that they could have caught let them know, but teach them how to do it better next time. End the talk with some inspirational words like together we are going to show that little round ball whose boss aren't we?

Yes you do need to tap into your good leadership skills to draw out the best in your players.