The effectiveness of coaching - Research Paper Example

cooperative of all team-players need to learn how they can best benefit their team, and for that, there are coaches: A fatherly figure, a mentor, a team-motivator and an inspirational leader, all combined into one, all at the source of the integrity and unity of a team. Great coaches have been known to drive mediocre teams to blinding success and successful teams to record-breaking levels of it. But how do they manage to achieve this, and how important exactly is a coach for the team? This question is answered through the examples of some of the greatest coaches of our time.

Consider for example, Vincent Thomas Lombardi, or Vince Lombardi as he is better known, who is best known for being coach to the Green Bay Packers during the 1960s. When Lombardi first stepped on to coach the team in 1958, the team was going through one of its worst spells in history. Lombardi found a dispirited, disheartened team who had almost no support from the angry Green Bay and community and who owing to its abysmal state was in dire financial conditions as well. When Lombardi accepted to coach the team, he taught the team the first lesson that any coach primarily teaches his team – that it was not the statistics that determined the success of a team, nor the players that ensured it; rather it was the abilities of the players, developed through training and perseverance, and the mind-frame behind those abilities that drove a team to victory or success.

Through punishingly exhaustive training sessions and incredibly motivating coaching, Lombardi was able to drive the team to a success point not achieved by perhaps any rookie coach in history. Lombardi made it a point to incorporate a religious aspect into his coaching, earning him the title of The Pope. After the Packers lost the first Championship game under Lombardis coaching, which was to be his first and only championship loss as coach for the team, Lombardi motivated his team and told them that it would indeed be the last of