In 20 years, they will not remember what you taught them, but they will remember how you treated them. To connect with our athletes, we need to love them. Even more than that, we need to BE love to them. Love is defined in the Bible, specifically in 1st Corinthians chapter 13.
Love is defined in the Bible specifically in 1 Corinthians 13. We need to use those characteristics with our athletes to add value to their lives and their journey. As a Christian coach, we strive daily to be like Christ. If we are to be like Christ, we need to be like love. We need to strive to BE love. God has given us a HUGE opportunity to invest in athletes lives as their coach. If we are to be like Christ and Christ is love, we need to strive to be love to our athletes by adopting those characteristics into our coaching of our athletes.
A Great Coach is Love is a manual to help the reader become a better, more fulfilled, happier, and more influential coach by incorporating the words and ideas of God into a coaching philosophy. More specifically, the author, a volleyball coach, believes that learning to love, and personifying love to players, is the best way to be a well-rounded and successful coach. In this scenario, "successful" does not necessarily mean having the most wins. A successful coach produces the best human beings out of his program. By showing players how to love, and how to be loved, through God, a coach will be successful.
The chapters of the book are structured around the main tenets of love told to us in 1 Corinthians. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of love, and is then tied to a methodology of coaching, and approaching athletes and sports/competition.
The strength of this manuscript is the straight-forward language used to relay the main points the author wishes to make. The ideas are presented in a simple way, each chapter is tied to a Bible verse, and then the ideas are extrapolated out to show how they tie back to different aspects of coaching. The author, himself a coach, uses his own life examples to show successes and failures when trying to adopt these ideas.
A Great Coach is Love is a well-written, informative, and thought-provoking manuscript that will be of tremendous use to any coach who wishes to learn the ways to incorporate God's thoughts on love into not only his coaching philosophy, but also life in general. By following the advice of the author, the reader will not only find "success"' as a coach, but also positively impact those athletes who he instructs, both in and out of sports.