The Village Chief
Over 30 years of coaching youth sports, written down so the next coach does not have to learn all of it the slow way.
It is not really a book about sport
It is about the village: the players, the parents, the assistant coaches, and the person in the middle trying to get all of them pointed the same way for a season.
Most people who end up coaching a youth team did not train for it. They volunteered, got handed a roster, and worked it out under pressure. This is the book Steve wishes somebody had given him on the first day.
It is not only for the first day, though. The parts of the job that stay hard do not get easier with experience, and a coach who has been at it for years should still find something here worth taking away.
The last thing he wrote in it was about making a permanent positive impact in somebody's life, and then: “How cool is that?”
If any of this sounds familiar
You just got handed a team
You said yes at a meeting and now there is a roster, a schedule, and fourteen sets of parents.
You have coached for years
And the parents are still the hardest part of the season, every season.
You run the league
And you would like your volunteers to start somewhere better than nowhere.
The worksheets are free
Everything the book asks you to run, already written out: practice plans, meeting agendas, and the preseason paperwork.