Coaching a college sports team can be a rewarding experience for a coach, it can also be quite stressful and challenging if you do not understand what you might be getting your self into.
When you make that career decision to coach at the college level you are about to take on a wide array of responsibilities.
You Will Be Responsible For:
Representing your school in an appropriate way while trying to succeed as a team, all of the players on your team, handling all of the extra requirements for your international players such as visa concerns, organising holiday accommodation, transport, language barriers and much more.
You will also have to monitor your athlete’s academic status and maintain eligibility requirements, safely transport your team when on a road trip. This often requires you to drive a bus for long distances to unknown locations.
Other areas of responsibility include being in compliance with NCAA rules, organising and conducting team practices, administration issues, attending school events and meetings, co-operating with the media and providing results, attracting alumni support, scheduling matches and tournaments, recruiting athletes, scholarships, intra-team issues, facility management and maintenance and the list goes on and on.
Being a college coach can be very satisfying and rewarding from the other more traditional roles as a coach (eg. Club, High School or YMCA Coach)
You will develop a bond with your players but will also experience the pressure of being successful and having a winning record. College sports programs seek titles, whether they are Conference, regional or National Titles. These are often used by coaches and schools in helping to recruit the best players. Obviously a top athlete will want to go to a successful program rather than one that fails to win year in and year out.
A successful program can often be the deciding factor for a lot of students when deciding between schools. Many students have chosen schools primarily because of the success of their football or basketball teams ands want to be associated with a winning school for bragging rights. This pressure to succeed in the big sports often falls onto the coach and their staff. The life of a college coach is not a very secure one.
The Best Ways to Prepare For Being a College Coach Are:
Experience playing the sport you want to coach, playing on a college team when you were a student, spending several years working as an Assistant Coach under an experienced Head Coach in a successful program, find a mentor.
Many schools require coaches to have a Masters Degree or college degree at minimum.
You will also need to build a good resume, acquire leadership skills while going through school, study in advance and get a good understanding of the NCAA rules and regulations, have a plan to present to your employer, understand your style of coaching and the leadership style you will follow, do some research to see if coaching at the college level is viable for you from as financial perspective, know that many coaches work for minimum wage, be prepared with an extensive list of coaching drills to implement into your programs.
Some of the benefits of Being a College Coach Include:
Gaining valuable experience in leadership and coaching large numbers of athletes, it can be very rewarding when you succeed as a team, you can progress from a smaller school to a larger one that is more challenging a lucrative, you will develop a bond with your athletes, you will have a support system in place from the sports program, you can often negotiate accommodation into your contracts.
Other benefits include getting discounts on tuition for yourself or family members, some of your living costs are paid by the school, you can make a lot of money from running summer clinics and camps, you can find financially lucrative positions, you feel a sense of belonging, experience the fun of being involved with young motivated athletes with possible desires of being professional athletes once their college years are over, you have sponsors providing you with free equipment and clothing, you will gain respect from athletes and peers, you will develop other skills of recruiting, managing, administration and promoting.
When choosing a college you will want to research the following areas as they will help you decide if the position is right for you:
Salary and benefits
Job security
School location
Family issues
Accommodation availability
Scholarships available to you for recruiting the best players
The report amongst the other coaches
Training facilities (fitness centre, sporting fields)
What division are they in (Division 1, 2, 3)
Do you have to share the playing courts, field with other teams?
Will you have an assistant coach?
How much money is in the budget?
Can you afford to take the team on long trips over spring / fall break?
Does the school have a high standard of academics?
Is there room to progress or climb the coaching ladder?
What is the reputation of the Athletics Director? Is he / she easy to work with?
Do you have your own office or do you have to share?
What is the condition of the playing facilities?
Do you have to do your own maintenance on the facilities?
Coaching a college team is fun, rewarding, financially lucrative at the highest levels, challenging, can be stressful, requires working week-ends and odd hours, lots of organising, dealing with many issues and much more. It is a personal decision for each individual and the best advice is to gain experience as an assistant coach before plunging into the position as a head coach.
Remember – you have to love what you are doing, if you don’t love coaching and your sport then it can end up being a miserable experience! It’s is up to you to do your homework! David Horne is a former professional tennis player who has created several online sports web sites including Global Sports Zone which is the Ultimate Sports Directory for all sports fans! You can also visit the global web site for Tennis Coaching at Global Sports Coachingmortgages Spain

Practice makes perfect, that is what my old Gran always used to claim.  What she did not mention, is the significance of practicing things going how you would like them to go, rather than considering what to do if it does go bad.

How often do you ask what is the worst that might happen?! For athletes though, it is crucial that they concentrate on achieving, on being the winner, first time, each time. Being a bit off form at the vital moment is just not a choice.

So the very first thing I tell athletes who come to see me in Berkeley for help in improving their performance is to practice success. From an attraction standpoint, we all know that you are going to attract more of what you are targeting, so it is important to focus in success. Scientists at first assumed the neural nets existed only in the brain, but we now know that they are definitely a network thru your complete body.

This mean that if as an example, you concentrate on running, as you are laying in your bed, you’ll be turning on and accessing the muscles in your legs. It is sort of likely that they’ll twitch unconsciously as you consider moving them. This was famously observed by Milton Erickson, the person principally in charge of bringing hypnosis to the clinical arena.

When Milton was a kid he was struck with polio and left paralyse.  As he sat in a chair, aching to be outside playing with his brothers, imagining running in the long grass and kicking the soccer, he spotted that his legs had started to swing in the chair! NLP uses a systems called anchoring.

In this, the mind creates a link between a strong feeling and an external trigger. This could have negative and positive implications for our athletes. For instance, there could be negative anchors (triggers that make a bad feeling) associated to past failures which are set off whenever the athlete is performing or due to perform.

If the trigger for the bad feeling can be established, then the negative anchor can simply be removed. If an athlete needs to connect into resourceful feelings, for example calm, focus or power, an anchor can be made with a trigger of, squeezing their fingers for instance.

An easy way to become the best at what you do, is to find some other person who is the best at it, and learn how they do it.

If you suspect that Tom Brady is the best passer the world has ever seen, it is feasible to model the way that he looks, feels and behaves to make the results he achieve. When the method has been removed, it can be installed in some other person using walk thru, metaphors or hypnosis.

Hypnosis offers a deep state of relaxation which can be prolonged to maintain calm and ease uneasiness, as well as installing positive enabling ideas ,eg having the ability to focus and concentrate without effort.

At a deeper level of understanding, NLP can be employed to uncover an athletes values and reveal and resolve any conflicts here. This implies that their focus is on defeat, making it likely this is the thing that’s achieved. In fact, if sports or athletics is your life, it is not the taking part which counts, but the winning.