You never know what impact you might have as a coach until you go through something and look back at it. Sometimes you make mistakes as a coach, but hopefully you are the kind of coach that is always seeking to learn.
Our XC team won a major championship this year. Our top 5 runners:
1 - We recognized this athlete was highly fast twitch reliant. She was on a reduced mileage plan compared to the rest with faster paces, long intervals at threshold when others were doing tempo. She ran two minutes faster than she did last year.
2- Had two weeks off for a rolled ankle injury. She had no means at home to work out aerobically so we found a beat up elliptical machine and brought it to her house. She worked out on it every day 30 minutes - 1 hour until she was able to run again.
3- Talked her into distance learning at home for the last two weeks prior to the race. Her class that she would have been ended up in quarantine. She would not have been allowed to race had she not listened to us.
4 - She had two bad workouts in a row and a bad race. We directed her to get tested for an iron deficiency and her ferritin was an 8. Three weeks later she bounced back to be our number 4 runner.
5 - She had the first half of the season off due to health issues. We helped her through them, kept her on the team and held her back in training when she wanted to do too much too get caught up that would have resulted at the very best a poor performance.
Every year looks like this in some way. In this example without our guidance, instead of 1st place, we would have been lucky to have cracked the top 10 teams.
Also, when you coach someone, to be effective you have to be somewhat of a life coach as well. Sometimes athletes are too pressured from parents, college recruiters and end up running poorly because of that. Sometimes a pet or family member dies, they break up with their significant other, getting bullied in school, you notice an eating disorder, abuse at home, depression, etc...
You have to be willing to be like a parent sometimes. They bring all of this to practice and competitions. You have to know what to say to them, be willing to care enough to listen, and point them and parents if necessary in the right direction when it is something you are not qualified to deal with.
The other really important thing that is almost never mentioned is you have to give your athletes the skills to be autonomous because you can give them all the advice in the world but you can't get on the starting line with them. As an example, the team that has the coach that gets in the huddle prior to the race is never the team that wins the meet because that coach was too involved in training making every little decision for them. When the race doesn't play out exactly to plan, they will fold.
These are the things they don't teach you when you take courses on how to coach cross country or track.