While the pro athletics and coaches earn the headlines and multimillion-dollar contracts, it's the youth and high school coaches that are stars on the local level. Being a coach allows you to stay involved with the sport you love, mold young lives and become a pillar of your community. Regardless of whether you would simply enjoy coaching your child's youth league team or have dreams of winning world championships professionally, you will need to put in the time and work.
Step 1
Study the sport. No matter what sport you would like to coach, you need to enter your quest with as much preparation as possible. Even if you played the sport and believe you know everything there is to know, there's always something new to learn -- whether it's a recently developed strategy, a new way of teaching fundamentals or some tricks pertaining to motivating your players. Go to games and watch successful coaches, taking notes, examining their mannerisms and gleaning as much information as possible.
Step 2
Ask around about openings. Even if you would like to be a professional coach, you will need to start somewhere. Check with local youth league and high school coaches to see if they have openings on their coaching staffs. Attend big sporting events, where coaches often mingle and exchange business cards. Don't be too shy to introduce yourself to established coaches. Because when it comes time to hire assistant coaches, they will often look first to those they know personally.
Step 3
Carve out a few different niches. Once you've found your first coaching job, continue to learn and work hard to develop your expertise in general, but also in specific facets of the sport your coaching. Football coaching staffs, for instance, have separate coaches for offense, defense and special teams. Some basketball teams have coaches that specialize in coaching big men, guards or shooting technique. The more parts of a sport you can successfully coach, the more opportunities you'll have when it's time to move up a level.
Step 4
Learn what makes players tick. Rather than simply rolling out a basketball or a bag of baseballs and letting them go at it, pay attention to how your players respond to various types of interaction and instruction. For instance, NBA coaching legend Phil Jackson has been known to hand out books to players, choosing ones that will appeal to their respective personalities and bring out the best in them. That's not to say you have to hand out books, but coaching is part psychology, and the better you are at relating to players, the more success you will have.
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