Why You Should Coach

It's More Than Counting Reps and Giving Beta

"A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment." - Wooden

If you’re reading my stuff, you already have more than a passing interest in coaching. In fact, I’d bet you are already coaching, even if you’re not in charge of a team or a roster of adult athletes. You help friends. Design workouts and practice sessions. Discuss how a partner might better approach sending his project or get ready for a big trip.

There is an unfortunate attraction to the idea of “coaching” by people who just want to climb full-time. They want a flexible job that they can do on rest days from a coffee shop. They want “climbing coach” to be under their name on their Instagram page. They want to be called a coach more than they actually want to coach.

The reason you should want to coach has nothing to do with flexible schedules or ego-boosting titles. You should want to coach because you can’t help yourself. Because you want to fast-forward others’ progress. Because you can’t stand to see others make the same mistakes you made.

Below are a few things you might not have considered in your quest to be a coach, and I want you to read them and understand why each of them is important in your considering coaching as a trade.

1. Teaching encourages others to fast-forward through mistakes. Coaching is not telling others what to do, but creating an environment for them to understand themselves better. It allows you to tell stories that your athletes can relate to, and provides cautionary tales to help them avoid pitfalls. “I used to do burnout laps at the end of each day, but I didn’t get really fit until…”

2. You’re a positive role-model (or you should be). People that focus on others’ problems aren’t all that common. Again, your reading this far into this post says a lot about you…and you probably are doing all kinds of things to take care of yourself and your people already. If you’re spending a lot of time at the gym or the crag, you have the opportunity to do good, to move the community forward, and to change the trajectory of someone’s life.

3. You can help families understand why their kid (or mom, or husband, or brother) loves climbing and why that is a good thing. When I started climbing, most of my days were spent as a “belay slave” to an older climber who helped me understand focus, discipline, and goal setting. He was a schoolteacher and an adult, and helped my parents understand that climbing wasn’t daredevil stuff. By setting a positive example by being an athlete, having a mission, and using the lessons of climbing in life, we can help families of our athletes better understand what this whole climbing thing is about.

The Waning Mentorship

Mentorship, across all domains of life, is dwindling. It’s a simple supply and demand issue. We can learn so much, so easily, so quickly on the internet that we don’t feel the need to seek out mentors. I was one of the lucky ones. I got into climbing and needed a mentor badly at the exact same time that a really driven and high performance athlete needed a climbing partner. It worked out well, and we’re still friends today.

I don’t fail to recognize that literally everything in my life that I love and enjoy came from that relationship. I didn’t need him to teach me how to tie knots and how to place gear. I could have learned that from a book (or these days YouTube). What it turns out I needed was why to do those things. What Steve (mentor) taught me was that having something you cared about above all else really mattered. It got me up in the morning and kept me up at night, and I was feeling bad about it because it didn’t involve making money.

With the majority of climbers coming out of the gym these days, the chance that they’ll get to cultivate a relationship with someone who cares about climbing, the climbing environment, and about them are very slim. But for me, the mentorship made all the difference. What if you, as a climber or cyclist or skier or whatever, could teach one young person about why you love that thing? What if it got them to see the world differently, and they wanted badly to be among the boulders in the hills rather than hunched over a phone, or sitting on a couch, or wondering if it’s even worth it to be alive?

The fact that you’re reading this means you’re the right person. You probably already know the person you could be the mentor for. They don’t have to be a teen in crisis, either. It’s going to be someone that has a spark. That is curious. That can’t seem to break away from a boulder problem. Asks about the mountains. The essential part is that you’ll see it if you let yourself look.

Becoming a Coach

The amazing thing about climbing coaching today is that you can become one with one simple step: decide to do it. All you need is a bit of experience in getting better and an idea how to teach what you’ve learned to others. You could focus on helping people with fear. You could teach about movement. Learn and teach strength techniques. Instruct a group on competition tactics. Or, eventually, learn enough about all of those things to be what I call a performance climbing coach. If you get to this point, give me a call. I have work for you.