Steve Kerr Shows It's More Than One Way To Skin the Cat In Coaching

“For some coaches, they love getting into the bunker of the season. They crave a darkness of everything and everyone. Yet, Kerr doesn’t see the profession as a way to grind everyone down. He coaches to elevate everyone, and maybe that’s made easy with Curry and Durant and Thompson. Still, Kerr has always been true to his disposition: fiercely competitive, relentlessly self-deprecating and smart with everything he’s done in the game.

He’s truly a product of his coaching mentors: Gregg Popovich, Phil Jackson and even Lute Olson. Mostly, Steve Kerr is the son of Malcolm Kerr, the American professor murdered in Beirut in a terrorist act in 1984. Kerr loves the game, but he’s always valued it within context of the people it allows him to reach, the voice it gives him for something bigger than the game.”

These two paragraphs come from an article written about the struggles that Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is going through this playoff run.  For years, ‘the grind’ was the norm.  Running suicides, no balls out during the off-season for conditioning, and late hours in the coaches office game planning was what it took so that you don’t get out worked by your opponent.

With coaches like Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll, it is becoming more of the norm to work smarter rather than harder.  As stated, Kerr is as competitive as anyone, he just goes about getting hte most out of his players differently.  Even UConn coach Geno Auriemma has stated that he doesn’t really yell at his girls as much anymore because they can’t handle it.  Nick Saban is an all-time great coach, but so is Dabo Swinney who is often seen laughing, and even dancing, with his team before and after big wins.  

Just goes to show that there are more ways to skin the cat in coaching.  You can read the article in full here.

References:

Steve Kerr'ssuffering is hard to watch, harder to live.  Sport.yahoo.com.  Retrieved on April 24, 2017.