Zat0pek wrote:
Big whoop.
Arthur Lydiard was a shoemaker and a milkman who didn't attend college and he revolutionized the sport.
The best coach I had in college was a football player, including a very short stint in the NFL, with an English degree.
Here's the thing about distance coaches - there's no one, or even 10, right path(s) to being a great coach. Coaching distance runners requires being well-versed in so many different disciplines that it's impossible define the best route for anyone. A great coach can be not so great in one area but make up for it in another.
If push came to shove and I had to identify the most important traits for a great distance coach, I would say that they are:
1. A very interdisciplinary mindset, having a wide knowledge base across many different areas. Things you need to know for coach can come anywhere - you just have to be able to recognize it as something useful or analogous. They need to know history, science, psychology, even economics, and host of other things. Having too narrow of a view is one of the worst things a coach can do.
2. Wisdom. Good luck defining that one. I can't effectively define it, but I know it when I see it. I'll take wisdom over a Ph.D. in kinesiology every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Educated ≠ Intelligent ≠ wise. Three separate things. All important, but different.
3. Have an inherent curiosity to learn. Students of the sport as well as everything else.
4. Be observant. I heard Wetmore once comment that horses can't talk, so horse trainers have to learn to study the horse and get information from observation and that he thought coaches needed to do the same. I completely agree with that.
5. Be an active listener, including asking the right questions; see #2-4.
6. Care. They have to put the athlete's long-term interests ahead of their own.
The icing on the cake is if, as an athlete, someone swung for the fences and tried to become as great as they could. I care less about the level they reached as I do the level they tried to reach and how they tried to reach it. Experience at a high level is a fantastic added bonus, but history shows that one can be a very successful coach with out it if they have these traits.
I’ll add one more thing to this that is specific to high school coaches. I evaluate HS coaches 50% on how their athletes perform under them, and 50% how they continue to perform after them. If a kid ran fantastic in HS but you wrung everything out of him/her at that level and they didn’t continue to develop later, then you failed in my book. You didn’t coach those kids - you used them to make yourself look good.