What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Setting the Table
A youth soccer coach runs a tight practice: drills on schedule, water breaks timed, a clear progression from warmup to scrimmage. The team is improving, and parents comment on how organized the sessions feel. One evening a normally enthusiastic ten-year-old drags through practice, and the coach, focused on the drill sequence, assumes it is fatigue and moves on. It later comes out that the child's parents are separating and nobody at practice noticed anything beyond low energy. The coach feels terrible, not because the sessions were badly run, they were not, but because being excellent at running practice had nothing to do with actually seeing the kid in front of him. The same pattern shows up with volunteer assistant coaches, who show up reliably and never hear a word of appreciation beyond a brief nod at season's end.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Seeing skill development and being cared for as separate goals
A coach can run technically excellent sessions, well-sequenced drills, sound feedback, clear progressions, while the person on the receiving end still feels like a project to be optimized rather than accompanied. Genuine care means noticing what is happening beneath the performance, the distraction, the fatigue, the fear of failure, and responding to that, not only to the technical gap in front of you.
A coach interprets a drop in effort purely as a discipline problem rather than asking what else might be going on.
Before addressing a performance issue, ask one open question about how the person is doing outside the session.
Treating assistants and volunteers as part of the culture you are building
Head coaches often reserve their warmth for the people they are directly developing while treating assistants and volunteers as logistics to manage. But those assistants interact with participants constantly, and if they feel unseen themselves, that indifference passes straight through to the people they are helping. A program's culture is built by everyone in it, not just the person running the whiteboard.
A lead coach is warm with star performers and curt with the volunteers running warmups and equipment.
Thank one assistant or volunteer by name after every session, not just at the end of the season.
Choosing and developing coaches for empathy, not just expertise
Programs often hire or promote coaches based purely on technical mastery, assuming relational skill will simply follow. But a technically brilliant coach who cannot read a struggling participant's emotional state will lose that person long before performance data shows a problem. Developing coaches for empathy means training and evaluating it directly, not treating it as a trait some people happen to have.
A program promotes its most technically skilled coach to a leadership role without any evaluation of how they treat struggling participants.
Include a question in every coach evaluation about how they respond when someone is visibly struggling.
Keeping attentiveness alive across a long season
Attentiveness is easiest in the first weeks, when energy is high and the group is new, and hardest in the final stretch, when fatigue and competitive pressure take over. Coaches who sustain genuine care treat it as a standing practice, a regular check-in ritual, revisited deliberately through the whole season rather than a preseason mood that fades once results start to matter more than relationships.
The clearest tension shows up right before a big competition, when performance pressure crowds out relational attention almost automatically. A coach preparing a team for a championship will focus every minute on technical preparation, because that is what the moment seems to demand. But participants who feel unseen under pressure tend to perform worse, not better, since anxiety compounds without an outlet, so coaches who protect even brief moments of genuine attention tend to see it pay off in the performance itself.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which participant on your roster would say they feel genuinely known by you, beyond their statistics? - How does your program treat its volunteers and assistants when nobody important is watching? - What ritual of attention could survive even your highest-pressure week of the season?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Include a question in every coach evaluation about how they respond when someone is visibly struggling.