I became the Hanover Flood head coach suddenly. I had signed on as an assistant coach when halfway through my first season the head coach got a new job and moved away, leaving me in charge of the team. Full of enthusiasm and transformative big ideas, I set about teaching the Flood the finer points of advanced Ultimate strategy, excited to share my love of the game. We sucked.
Most of a year later, as I began planning for the next season, I changed my approach. Since then, the focus both on and off the field has been on building a team community. I stopped tolerating the type of competitive interactions typical of the high-school sports scene, and made clear in no uncertain terms my expectation that teammates would respond to mistakes with support and positivity.
Coaching, for me, is about the community rather than the sport. It’s an opportunity to build a space and a set of connections very different from a normal classroom, but rooted in the same values - self-improvement through communal labor.