Sports Coaching Lessons

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Pages: 6

Presenting facts. Jason is 30, single, and an injured minor league baseball player continuing to transition and find his way after not returning to sport. He started playing baseball at the age of 12 in the small, central Alabama town of Lanett. In his sophomore year of high school, he decided to set his sights on becoming a professional player, but also remain a multisport/position athlete. He graduated high school in 2006 with a baseball scholarship to a nearby community college (Southern Union in Wadley, AL) where he pitched for 2 years before transferring to Troy University, a small D1 school in Troy, AL. After one season at Troy, he was picked up by The Arizona League Giants, a minor league, rookie league baseball team in Scottsdale, …show more content…
Clarification phase-Relationship. I have known Jason personally for two years. While I was attending Auburn University in pursuit of a 2nd bachelor's degree in 2016, I wrote a fictional paper (titled “Following a legend”) for a sport coaching class that used Jason’s scenario as a coach who won the state championship by returning to sound principles and values as expressed by legendary coaches like Coach John Wooden. Flattered by my paper, Jason and I began discussing how we could work together to actually create such a program for a local private school team where he was their new coach. I worked out with the team at their gym a few times and several of the players worked out along with Jason at my home. We did a session of P90X plyometrics in the middle of July in my hot and humid garage. I then bought a stack of Wooden’s playbook, a pocket size book about the Pyramid of Success that is also a Christian devotion book. We were set to start a study with the team in January of 2017. However, Jason never followed through with the plan despite me trying to initiate movement. The team’s season started off slow in February of 2017 and then an incident with an athlete terminated his coaching and teaching career at this school. An arrogant and mouthy athlete repeatedly talked back to Jason and the end result was Jason losing his temper and slugging the kid. The school’s headmaster immediately terminated Jason. I always wondered if this incident could have been …show more content…
My first session with Jason was a 36 minute phone on 23 May 2018 while I was driving home from Texas. Our discussion was about the informed consent, small talk to catch up on life, as well as an overview of his minor league career, his injury, and the ongoing transition outside of sport. He loved baseball as a high school athlete. The pure enjoyment of baseball ended when he played at Troy State University as a pitcher. The pressure to perform and keep his scholarship sucked the life out of the sport. In the minor leagues, the pressure was elevated even higher. He has accepted his injury and moved on. He is at peace with the process and does not have a desire to return to the sport as an athlete. He currently does not have his goals nailed down or documented. I briefly gave him an introduction to goal setting and I used the acronym GRIT (Goal setting, Regulation of self, Imagery, and Self-Talk) to discuss the basic framework of sport psychology interventions. In addition, I discussed the VIA character strengths and the benefits of aligning one’s strengths with their goals. Jason is open minded and ready to learn ways that can help him get his feet back on solid ground and advance in a positive direction. He seems positive and motivated with no display of any mental illness. However, he has admitted that he has so many interests that he can’t focus on one thing for too long. I discussed the benefits of rock climbing as