Coach ,

I listened to an interview with Urban Meyer, and he said, “You can only develop people as far as they trust you.” The words are impactful when it comes to a people-oriented task like coaching. It’s critical for us as coaches to develop relationships with our fellow staff members, and most importantly our players.

Today we will look at insight from 5 coaches in regard to developing relationships.  

James Franklin - it starts and ends with relationships

Let start with James Franklin, head coach at Penn State. For Coach Franklin, it is simplistic. Everything starts and ends with relationships. Every decision made in the program is based off of how it will affect relationships. Coach believes that a true coach, true friend, true teammate is honest and tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. He shares his insight in this video (click on images to play video)

Mack Brown - trust and respect must be the basis

Mack Brown has been coaching for a long time now, and one thing he understands clearly is that trust and respect are easy to say but hard to do.  You have to put effort into developing these two important characteristics of a strong relationship. He preaches to his players and coaches that you control your integrity, honesty and gratitude. He wants his staff to treat people right and always treat the players like they would their sons and daughters. He explains trust and respect in this video: 

Geoff Collins - Love your players or get out

In any transition the football piece is secondary to the relationships. He makes sure the student-athletes know how much that he and the staff care. The players’ goals, hopes and dreams becomes the coaches’ goals hopes and dreams.

Nothing can be built without earned trust. They live it every single day. He believes all coaches must love their players or get out. Watch coach give the details in this video:

Dave Aranda - develop human systems first

For Coach Aranda it is person over player. He develops the human system 1st and the player system 2nd. It has a distinct order in development: the person, the relationship, then the player. Watch below as coach explains how this time with COVID has helped him realize this clearly:

Brian Polian - relationships are the reward

Coach Polian has reflected a lot over the time he was unable to work with jhis players. He studied the relationship side of coaching.  He has come to the conclusion that relationships are the reward. It's not the money, the trophies, the success; it is the fellowship we have that is part of the great joy of our lives. And the best part...relationships lead to winning.

Coach explains this powerful idea here:

We have spent so much time over the last year developing our systems. We can’t forget that we have to put the most time into the most important assets in our programs - our people. 

Learn from these coaches and their lessons and continue developing the relationships.

Always be growing!

Coach Grabowski