Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
When a team isn’t doing well, the first person to feel the strain of that is the head coach.
That’s true at every level — from elementary schools to the professionals.
If you have ever coached anything, and you were worth half a grain of salt, the pressure put on by parents, fans and the media pales in comparison to the internal pressure a coach feels in that situation.
In other words, most coaches don’t need to be reminded by us on the outside that things are going poorly and they don’t really need our diagnostics of why that’s happening.
They know, and they know much better than we do.
Why do I say that?
Because they live it every day.
People outside the program aren’t at practice every day. They aren’t in the locker room. They don’t see attitudes and practice effort.
We ask the players, “How did practice go today?” And then we accept the response we get as clearly as a Christian accepts the Gospels.
The problem is that the players’ views might possibly be skewed in their own best interest.
Not that they are lying or anything. But they see things from their own perspective much more easily than someone in a neutral position (like a coach).
Which, again, is a very normal stance to take. We all have that self-bias built into us.
A coach’s primary job is to teach the people under them the skills and art of their craft to make them better. For a head coach who starts by teaching their assistant coaches, who then teach the members of their team. It should be one, unified message from top to bottom.
The next part of that is to put each person on that team in the best position to succeed.
That requires the coach to be good at analyzing the group that is assembled under them and casting a vision for the overall group, and then for each person in it.
That’s the part where outsiders and insiders can fray apart.
When you aren’t in the middle of something every day, you just cannot know with the same certainty as someone who is.
Take all of that and put it together and what do you get? You get a two-pronged methodology for modern-day coaching.
The first part is that the members of the team must be completely committed to what the coach is trying to get them to do. If they are not, it does not matter one bit how brilliant that concept or plan might be—it will fail.
Conversely, a coach who has a less brilliant vision for their team but has the complete and total support from its members can achieve incredible things.
Warsaw Football has won at least six games in each of the last 10 years—the last eight of those under Bart Curtis.
His “flexbone offense” features very few passing plays, is very methodical, and has a simple goal of gaining at least three yards on every play.
It is not glamorous, but it works.
And a big part of why it has worked in Warsaw is because of the first team that Bart Curtis put on the field.
Those kids didn’t know how this new way of operating would fit together, but they believed that it would. They understood that it would mean being a “wide receiver” was code for being an “outside blocker”, not a pass catcher.
Kids sold themselves to it that first year, and they have continued to do so.
That happened because the coach convinced them of what was possible if they believed.
The other prong is that the coach must do everything possible to involve as many team members as they can in as much of the day-to-day operation of the team.
When members “check out” on their team, there is a significant risk that they can hurt the team more than help it. Coaches have equated this, on occasion, to a body that is diagnosed with cancer.
It starts with one cell being malformed. Then another. And it starts to grow and grow—all undetectable beneath the surface.
The more people feel a part of the process, the healthier the team is going to stay. It also means when the team hits a rough patch, the body of the team will fight the bad cells and keep going.
In 2025, it is true that a coach’s best trait is being a good communicator. Good communicators get more out of their people.
Notice that I don’t mention sports in any of this. Of course, these things are true in sports. But you can apply them to business, to non-profit organizations, and to families all the same.
So, then, the question that begs an answer is this one: “How much does coaching really matter?
The answer is: “A lot!”
But good followers also make good leaders better.
