The Importance Of The Coach/Parent Relationship

“But there’s nothing wrong with a healthy partnership between parents and coaches — nobody is right all the time. But with parents holding the bulk of the power, any high school coach who only gripes about parents and views them merely as an obstacle or outright enemy, or who unwittingly gets put in the middle of long-standing parent-on-parent battles (oh, it happens) without trying to figure out what’s going on, is going to be a coach who ends up fired or quitting. It’s hard to manage these relationships, and hard to take the first, positive steps to do so, but it’s going to be a lot harder for high school coaches who just figure their record is the only thing that does the talking.”

This was the final paragraph in a blog post at Forbes.com, written by Bob Cook on easily high school coaches, even successful ones, are being fired at the request, or demands, of the parents of the program.  He referenced a couple of coaches who had turned around programs and set records but were either non-renewed or quit do to pressure from parents.  You can read the full, original article here.

A big complaint in the coaching world is that parents would prefer to see their kids score 20 points in a losing effort on the basketball court than see them struggle and score 4 in a winning team effort.  With mentalities like that being reinforced at home and being heard in the stands, it can put unnecessary pressure on coaches to spend unnecessary time in thought on substitution schedules and playing everyone as much as possible, even if it goes against their beliefs and coaching philosophy.

While coaches can’t allow parents to run their program, it is important to build healthy and positive relationships with your parents so that you do have their support, and then you all can help these athletes move to common goals, which should include team success and individual growth.

As Bob stated earlier, with parents having such a voice and power in today’s sports culture, the coach who refuses to build positive relationships will eventually be out of a job.  But if you can be proactive and have a process or a system with how you handle parent/coach communication, it can really help your players, your teams, and your sanity.

References
Why Even Successful High School Coaches Are Deemed Expendable.  Forbes.com.  Retrieved on April 20, 2017.