The Anonymous Coach: Lessons from the Bleachers

The Anonymous Coach: Lessons from the Bleachers

Anyone who has attended a youth sporting event, from Little League to AAU, has seen those parents . You know the ones. The yellers, the fighters, the “Ref, are you BLIND ?” parents. Maybe you are one of those parents. Maybe you are sitting next to them on the bleachers. Or maybe, like the Anonymous Coach, you are walking up and down the edge of the court, trying to keep your cool and help your players get through the game. These are the stories of the parents and players the Anonymous Coach has encountered in his many years of coaching youth basketball. There have been plenty of those parents. There have also been parent cheerleaders and parents who never attended a single game. And there have been parents who truly believed that their children were God’s gift to basketball and any evidence to the contrary was solely the coach’s fault. All of these parents were good people who wanted the best for their kids. But they didn’t always know how to make that happen, and the results were sometimes maddening, sometimes heartbreaking, and sometimes downright hilarious. The Anonymous Coach grew up in North Carolina. A sociologist by nature, basketball has always been his passion. He graduated with his BA in Sociology in 2000 and has spent the last twenty years as a basketball coach and trainer. He has worked with preschoolers all the way to college-aged athletes and professional players. In the beginning all he wanted was to be a great coach and make his children great athletes at any cost. He now knows that price can be really high in more ways than one. He is now using the successes and failures of the parents he has dealt with to guide him in coaching and training his own kids.