| Coaching |
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I remember once when one of my sons told me that he didn’t really believe coaching made any difference. He felt the better athletes would always win. He has since changed his mind! The great wrestler Dan Gable, maybe the best America ever produced, struggled when he first became a coach. He did things so instinctively that he had trouble teaching his wrestlers how to perform certain moves and why certain techniques worked. Like everything else Dan had done in life, he committed himself to excellence. He became as good a coach as he was a wrestler. His success at the University of Iowa parallels the success of John Wooden the great basketball coach of UCLA. Dan proved coaches can get better! Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it”. What a great promise but it is also a scary promise. What if the child is trained in the wrong way? We can and must be trainers, coaches, who address both the athlete’s physical needs and his spiritual needs. Training only one side is a formula for heartache. |
