"Get After It!” has been a battle cry for my teams for many years, so it seemed fitting to title this column “Gett’in After It.”  “It” is something personal for everyone, simply, it’s doing one’s best during on the court but actually it’s more than one’s best, “It” is finding what it takes to succeed – giving more than you thought you ever could give.  This concept can be applied to anything . . . so I’ll try to apply it here each month.  Feel free to send any questions or topics to the website for discussion.   In most cases I’ll try to keep this targeted towards coaching any age group.  Regardless of the age group or setting (recreation, AAU, or school), coaching be rewarding and very challenging.  What exactly a coach is and the role they play differs in many opinions, so I thought sharing my idea of what a coach is would be an appropriate start, and I’ll start with one word – Leader.          

Leadership is sometimes difficult to define, but I’ll draw on my military background and define it as an art of influencing and directing people to accomplish a goal.  I like this definition because it leaves room to be flexible.  As a coach we must be flexible because we deal with different personalities of players and parents, who together must achieve our goal of  . . .?  Well, that differs too doesn’t it?  As a coach, my overall goal is to be a positive influence on players.  My objective is to help them see and reach their potential as a player and more importantly as a person.  To achieve this, a coach must recognize different needs of different players (and actually different parents too, but that can be a topic in itself).  Coaches must be teachers, dictators, and mentors, all depending on the situation.