Hayden Mitchell

Mood board and bro chatter

Always be gassin’ up your bros.

I read today that the essay is an attempt. A trying out. A way of placing a thought in the world before you have fully settled it, turning it around and upside down in your mind for a while, and seeing what it reveals to you.

And you put it out for the reader to assign the “meaning” of the words to their own life.

So I like this description. This delivery system if you will. Because, as I’ve said many times before, I don’t write to hand people a clean set of answers.

The essay began with a question that has become harder for me to answer as I accumulate more experience and knowledge.

What can a coach actually give?

We know how to discuss programming, biomechanics, exercise selection, tactics, tech, adaptation. Yet, we remain far less certain when we begin talking about teaching, attention, trust, freedom, character, love for the game, and the environments through which another person develops.

And yet we claim those things all the time. But a claim falls well short of honest work.

Billions go their entire lives without really questioning themselves because it’s more convenient to echo the thoughts of others and assume identities and ideologies that were never really theirs.

So this was an attempt to sit with these contradictions. And an admission that I have coached the plan instead of the person, spoken when silence would have revealed far more, and mistaken my own certainty for wisdom.

The full essay, “A Coach Had No Inherent Value,” is now published on Coaching Considered (link in bio).

If it caused you to question your own practice, share it with someone you would trust to enter that question with you.

My brother in life, you don’t have the answers to someone else’s existence because you train folks for a living.

You have built a life around training. It’s your workplace, part (often all) of your identity, maybe even a place where you first learned to belong inside your own body.

You know what to eat, where to go, what to do when something hurts, and who to ask when you do not know.

And all of that lends itself to advantages you may not have noticed. And advantages accumulate.

The Matthews effect lives here too. Got a little money, a little free time, someone who taught you how to lift, a safe street to walk, farmers markets instead of fast food, a good experience in PE instead of years of humiliation. A coach who saw something in you.

Each small advantage makes the next one easier until the life you slowly built begins to feel like proof that you are simply more disciplined than everybody else.

But all too often you confuse familiarity with virtue.

So, what looks like laziness from your vantage point may be someone working two jobs.
It may be caregiving, chronic pain, deep depression, food that costs too much, no decent grocery stores nearby, no childcare, no safe spaces to move, or a lifetime of living in a body people somehow felt entitled to judge.

People carry histories you’ll never see while they stand in front of you.

When I taught I brought my kids’ worries and struggles home with me.
Most nights their lives followed me all the way into my bed.
I understood sleep and knew what it did for health and performance.
Yet I couldn’t sleep and trust that I tried it all, so knowledge and the desire and effort to change was never the missing piece.

Responsibility and agency matter.
But you can speak to both without contempt.
You can help people find the door they can walk through.
You can make beginning feel less humiliating.
You can recognize when the thing in front of you exceeds your education and help find someone better equipped to carry it.

This is part of coaching too.

No need to turn someone’s struggle into the opening hook of your sales funnel.

Slow down. Learn something about people.

My brother in life, you don’t have the answers to someone else’s existence because you train folks for a living.

We have built a life around training. It’s our workplace, part (often all) of our identity, maybe even a place where you first learned to belong inside your own body.

You know what to eat, where to go, what to do when something hurts, and who to ask when you do not know.

And all of that lends itself to advantages you may not have noticed. And advantages accumulate.

The Matthews effect lives here too. Got a little money, a little free time, someone who taught you how to lift, a safe street to walk, farmers markets instead of fast food, a good experience in PE instead of years of humiliation. A coach who saw something in you.

Each small advantage makes the next one easier until the life you slowly built begins to feel like proof that you are simply more disciplined than everybody else.

But all too often you confuse that familiarity with virtue.

So, what looks like laziness from your vantage point may be someone working two jobs. It may be caregiving, chronic pain, deep depression, food that costs too much, no decent grocery stores nearby, no childcare, no safe spaces to move, or a lifetime of living in a body people somehow felt entitled to judge.

People carry histories you will never see while they stand in front of you.

When I taught I brought my kids’ worries and struggles home with me. Most nights their lives followed me all the way into bed. I understood sleep and knew what it did for health and performance. Yet I couldn’t sleep and trust that I tried it all so knowledge and the desire and effort to change was never the missing piece.

Responsibility and agency matter. But you can speak to both without contempt. You can help people find the door they can walk through. You can make beginning feel less humiliating and more inviting. You can recognize when the thing in front of you exceeds your education and help find someone better equipped to carry it.

This is part of coaching too.

No need to turn someone’s struggle into the opening hook of your sales funnel.

Slow down. Learn something about people.

I’ve spent more than half my life involved in sport, movement, and performance.

And I also taught social sciences in Title I inner city schools.

Because of those experiences and a somewhat different education than other stakeholders, coaches, and educators in sport and physical activity, I think about these “problems” with an eye for its historical significance and future societal consequence.

The way a society introduces children to movement, play, competition, cooperation, excellence, failure, and belonging tells us something about the kind of society it is becoming.

Because, children eventually become adults.

Players become coaches. A few of mine have and I am filled with so much pride for who they’ve become and the love they give.

Students become teachers.

And parents raise children who one day become parents themselves.

This carousel is drawn from the opening of a much longer essay I published yesterday on Substack.

It is the beginning of a series that I imagine will occupy me for quite some time.

If you’re interested in coaching, physical education, youth sport, or simply the role movement plays in a good human life, I’d be grateful if you came along for the journey.

The link is in my bio.

I’ve spent a lot of my life in environments that chase excellence, trying to help young people become as good as they can possibly be.

And I still believe in that.

But over time, it felt incomplete. A good orientation, but never a great one. Because it doesn’t serve enough of us.

For every athlete who makes it, there are thousands who don’t.

So, what happens to everyone else? I am everyone else 😉

Do they leave sport and movement feeling capable, curious, and connected to their bodies?

Or do they leave feeling like they weren’t “good enough” to belong?

Questions that shape how I see coaching, teaching, and development now.

I’m not arguing for some egalitarian utopia that can’t exist by removing competition or pretending winning doesn’t matter.

It does and it always will.

But if the only stories we celebrate are the exceptional ones, we teach many children that their story doesn’t count.

And that’s super problematic to me.

Movement is one of the ways we learn how to become a person. It doesn’t always have to be connected to outcome and objective performance metrics.

Movement can teach us how to deal with frustration and persist, explore and express ourselves, how to feel what it’s like to be in our own body.

We have narrowed that experience by building institutions and policies and systems that look a lot like factories where we celebrate what is efficient, measurable, outcome-driven.

But childhood itself is anything but that. Kids aren’t meant to sit still all day and then asked to “do their job.” They’re meant to move, create, be a little chaotic and weird, try things that don’t work, play because it’s awesome, move because it’s hard, make things, imagine things, and discover what they really enjoy.

That’s the ecology of childhood.

And if we get that right, everything else has a better chance of falling into place.

We don’t need to tear everything down, but we can widen the lens by celebrating more stories, creating more entry points, and protecting time for movement, art, music, play.

Maybe we build more adults who still move and play and feel at home in their own body.