Culturally Responsive Coaching

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is the idea that students learn better when the material and teaching connects with their culture, their backgrounds, and their experiences.

Instead of just giving students materials to learn from textbooks and worksheets, learning improves when we help make meaningful connections between the students and what we are teaching. When we help make these connections and build relevance between what they are learning and their lives, we can increase rigor, we can develop high-level academic skills, and dive deeper into the learning.

The same can be said and should be said when we are coaching. When a lot of us were growing up, we were at the mercy of our coach. Whatever system he/she wanted to run is what we ran. We didn’t have much of a say-so and the coach was the judge, jury, and executioner.

We are learning in the classroom that helping students connect with the learning increases achievement, and the same is seen in sports.

Instead of only teaching one offense, or one defense or one style of attack, it would do us coaches well to continue learning new ideas so that we can tailor our systems to match our personnel.

We have seen this shift in football with the spread offenses. Football coaches are spreading out their best players, putting them in space, speeding up the game so that their players can do what they do best.

The same is seen in basketball. Steph Curry completely changed the game with his ability to shoot, and what James Harden and the Houston Rockets are doing is something that we haven’t seen before either.

While sustained success is something the Rockets are still looking for, I commend their efforts to put the ball in their best players’ hands and let them do what they do best.

Culturally responsive coaching is not just the system and the style of play; it is how you teach and interact with your athletes every day. It is building a relationship with them, it is getting to know who they are, where they come from, and why they play. It is getting to know their culture, their background, their experiences, and connecting all of that to the game and building life lessons around it. It is figuring out how they learn best and teaching in a way that will help them become successful.

When we are more culturally responsive, we build deeper relationships with our athletes and their families, we build stronger trust, and we can build stronger teams.

As the saying goes, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Being culturally responsive helps your athletes know how much you care about them as people. Being culturally responsive allows us to have higher expectations for our athletes because we know their goals and their strengths.

It improves their performance because it helps our athletes feel valued and empowered. It helps all of our athletes build cultural competence and learning capacity.

It helps everyone understand different perspectives, appreciate others’ strengths, and build empathy.

It can help all of us reflect on our own experiences and identity and see how it affects our attitudes and coaching styles.’

CRC helps create an equitable experience for everyone, even the athletes that aren’t playing as much. It keeps them engaged because the coach keeps an interest in them and is in constant communication with them.

Culturally Responsive Coaching

How we connect what we teach our athletes to the person and what matters to them, what they already know how to do, and how they learn.

- How will they connect with and respond to what we teach and what we do?

- Is this something that they will be willing to struggle through independently or with minimal support, or is this something that they will not care enough about?

- How do we get them to care?