Dads, How To Coach Without Overstepping

How to coach without overstepping?
What does it mean to coach? A John Wooden book I have is titled “You Haven’t Taught Until They Have Learned.” As a dad coach I have lost my patience many times because my sons did not use a move from their training while competing in a tournament and it resulted in a catastrophic loss.

Upon reviewing the film with them I would point out where their mistake was, and lose my cool. I would say harsh things like,”What’s the point in teaching you these things if you are not going to use them?” The problem with this tactic is the loss was my fault just as much or more than the boys’.

The deal we have is I will do the coaching and they bring the effort. As far as anyone could tell my boys did their part. They went hard in training. And they went hard in competition. Therefore I had to take a deep breath, detach my emotions from the situation, and then redirect the post match analysis at myself. Where did my training curriculum fail? What weaknesses in my boys wrestling game did I create? And now how am I going to fix them?

It is my responsibility to make sure my boys have learned. It is not enough to show a skill to an athlete, as a coach you need to make sure they understand and master it. It’s a common mistake to underestimate the number of physical and verbal repetitions are needed to be able to execute a move in a tournament match. The wrestler may look proficient and execute the movement on a compliant partner in practice, but their is a huge gap when it comes to being able to hit it on someone who does not want you to do it in competition.


What is overstepping?
Expecting your wrestler to perform at level that his training has not prepared him for.


Wrestling is unforgiving. You will not find a short cut. You have to put in the time. There is a rule I use to remind myself of this concrete fact, it’s called  the “10,000 hour rule”. Malcolm Gladwell discovered some very solid math when doing research for his book Outliers. He discovered if you want to be the best in the world at what you do it is going to take about 10,000 hours of beating on your craft. Which on average takes 10 years to complete.

In my experience in the competitive sports world I agree with his finding. You may see some early success in wrestling, but if you are winning all of your matches, then you are in the wrong tournaments. There is always going to be somewhere at a higher level than you. Someone who has put in more time training, has more matches, and has put forth tremendous effort the entire way. Asking a wrestler with 3 years to defeat a 10 year wrestler who has won everything is unreasonable and overstepping. It won’t happen.

So, when your wrestler loses. Take a deep breath. Detach your emotions. Analyze the variables. Figure out which variable is highly correlated to the loss, AND you can do something about it in the near future. For example, if your wrestler lost due to technique, don’t get mad at the boy during the tournament. Just take notes, then go back to the training room and fix the technique in the coming weeks. If your wrestler lost because he is a second year wrestler, and his opponent is a ten year wrestler, then just be patient. Your boy will be the ten year wrestler some day.

What’s even more daunting is to learn overstepping in training. It really does take a trained mind and eye. A seasoned coach knows how much is enough, he knows what he could do when he use to train, he knows what the best in the world did with their training, and he knows what beginners can do in training before they break mentally and physically. You might say that’s impossible,  and you are right, even the seasoned coach doesn’t know exactly to the rep, minute, and pound, due to the fact that every individual can handle different quantities of work. BUT, his educated guess is a million times better than the rookie dad/coach. This is where the rookie dad/coach has to eat some humble pie, do a ton of research and training himself, and or let the veteran coach do his thing.

Alright, dads of wrestlers, here’s the bottom line: coaching our boys is a grind, just like the sport itself. It’s on us to make sure they’ve learned, not just been shown, and that means owning our part when they hit the mat and come up short. Losses sting, but they’re mirrors—showing us where our training fell apart, where we misjudged their readiness, or where we forgot that 10,000-hour rule. Take that deep breath, ditch the emotional baggage, and get back to work. Fix the technique, tweak the reps, and be patient—your boy’s ten-year mark is coming, and you’re the one paving the way.

Overstepping’s easy; coaching smart takes guts and time. If you want to dig deeper into this—how to train without breaking them, how to analyze without yelling—I’ve got an online seminar this Thursday night at 8pm eastern time. 
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Find it here:
https://www.champions-path.com/store/p14/cp-seminar.html
Drop in, bring your questions, and let’s figure this dad-coach thing out together. See you there.


-Coach Dane Whitted