Matthew Ibrahim - Coaching 101: Power of Language and Communication

Matthew Ibrahim talks about the importance of involving the athlete in the process and how it can help both the coach and the athlete achieving their goals.

Transcript :

Involving the athlete in the process, don’t make the athlete the process. I am going to repeat that because I think it bears repeating : Involve the athlete in the process, don’t make the athlete the process.

This is important, we have an athlete coming in for an assessment ; you do your Xs and Os, you do your checks, you check off all the boxes, you do your range of motion, you do you performance testing, your jump height. You do all of these anthropometry measurements, whatever it may be that you do from an assessment protocol, from an assessment standpoint as the coach and that’s great. We have it on paper, we go to the drawing board and we build the program. That program technically is the process for which we hope and we want to see the athlete perform on and that we will coach them on.

However, we can not make the athlete the process, they need to be a part of the process, to be involve in the process. If the athlete knows why they’re given an exercise, if the athlete understands why you as the coach believe that he can achieve a certain weight on a given exercise, or why you are saying to the athlete : Hey we are going to bump it up 10 pounds. If the athlete is involved in that process, that allows them to have a better ability at understanding of what is going on and also a better appreciation and respect for for that program. Also they’ll actually want to be a part of it. It won’t feel as much as you the coach handing them the program : Alright let’s do the program, and you coach them. You are not builing rapport there, you’re not building buy in, you’re not building trust, you’re not building a strong athlete to coach relationship ; which fosters long term athletic development, which is what we are all trying to achieve here… regardless of the athlete’s age, skill level, ability or sport of choice.