InSideOut Coaching: How Sports Can Transform Lives by Joe Ehrmann & Gregory Jordan

Author:Joe Ehrmann & Gregory Jordan [Ehrmann, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Community

A TEAM WITHOUT WALLS

After determining my purpose for coaching, I wanted to create a community that could support the Sports Social Contract I envisioned. But I knew I couldn’t accomplish this alone. Again the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to mind: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” I would need a community of like-minded administrators, coaches, parents, and players to weave together this transformational vision. Dr. King’s words fit an InSideOut coach’s philosophy perfectly: It would take a “staff” of allied coaches to support the vision, values, and virtues of a transformative sports program.

So, I started with a community of two, Biff Poggi and I. We were two aspiring transformational coaches feeling our way through the creation of something radical: a community built on King’s garment of “mutuality,” a team in which school administrators, coaches, parents, and even the groundskeeper and trainers all committed themselves to one another for a common good. In 1994, we started meeting at the coffee shop, the deli, and our dining room tables (in retrospect we ate as much as we dreamed!). We recounted our lives and sports histories and were honest with ourselves and each other about the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of our lives and sports journeys.

As we communed, our coherent narratives meshed and a vision for transformative coaching became clear. We started this InSideOut journey a full two years before Biff was named head coach at Gilman—and they were two incredible years! We started two youth basketball teams and called them Building Men for Others. We coached them according to the virtues and values that we were making the core of our coaching philosophy. It was a great success, and the boys, their parents, and Biff and I enjoyed it immensely. We knew that if ten- and twelve-year-old boys were responding to our messages, we could achieve the same effect at the high school level.

Both age groups saw one thing clearly: I love Biff and he loves me. Our players got to see, feel, and witness authentic masculine relationships. My younger brother, Billy, would be Biff’s age if he were alive, and I see a lot of Billy’s boyish charm in Biff. Biff has an innate ability to connect with young people, mold them, and make them believe in themselves.

I remember Coach Simmons once posing the question, “If I gave an artist a block of granite and asked her to carve an elephant, how would she do it?” He soon answered the question himself by saying, “An artist with vision would take her chisel and hammer and chip away everything that did not look like an elephant.” Biff, like Coach, has an eye to the inner landscape of boys and has been chiseling boys into men for a long time. He, too, is an artist.

We knew we had to chip away the previous concepts about sports and coaching to create a caring community where everyone was included, committed, and accepted.

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