Sherri Coal Part 1 | Ask The Right Questions

Sherri Coale was a high school coach at Norman High School in Oklahoma before becoming a very successful coach at Oklahoma University.  Here she talks about your influences when you begin coaching, how to measure success, how do you want your athletes to feel when they are coached by you, how to ask the right questions, and how to get teammates to buy-into each other.

You Are Most Like Your Loudest Influence Starting Out
She talked about the evolution of her coaching career.  Coach Coale said at the beginning of your career, you are most like your loudest influence.  It could be your high school coach, your college coach, or the coach next door.  You have an idea of what you want to do and what kind of coach that you want to be, but you tend to lean more towards the style of the loudest or the most impactful coach around you.

You have to find who you are and you have to find your own voice.  You are a little of a lot of different influences, but you have to find your lane and how you are going to do things.

How Do You Measure Success?
When you start to find your voice and you start to win, you start feeling the pressure to continue to succeed.  It is important to know how YOU will measure success.  Coach Coale says that her approach to coaching is to try to win a national championship with every desire and to strive for excellence daily, but her measurement of achievement was going to be, 'Am I a better coach today than I was yesterday.'  If at the end of every year we can say that I did a better job this year than I did last year, then we can be proud of the job that we have done.  This keeps the focus on the most important thing, which is getting better and doing the best that we can do every practice, every game, and every season.

How Does It Feel To Be Coached By Me?
She asks every day or after every practice, 'How does it feel to be coached by me?'  We all have good days and bad days, and being aware of this question forces us to treat every interaction with your athletes differently and intentionally because you are always cognizant of 'how does this feel.'

Be A Better Asker
As coaches, we want to tell players what to do all of the time and tell everybody what to do, but they really learn when we ask them questions and they answer.

- What were you thinking there?
- Why did you go there?
- Why did you shoot that shot?
- Did you like that shot?

Asking questions allows you to get to know them better, it allows you to know what motivates and drives them, what their fears are, what their insecurities are, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Using questions instead of statements helps teams form deeper relationships with each other.  That is how you get teammates to buy-into each other.

How Do You Get Them To Like Each Other
In women's sports, it's a big challenge because female athletes are fierce in choosing their friends.  They have very high standards and they are judgemental, so it is an arduous task getting them to buy-into each other.  The best process for doing so is to ask the right questions to get them to open up and get to know each other.