5 Books for New Coaches

...or any coaches really

Here are a few books that I think new coaches should read:

Coaching Better Every Season by Wade Gilbert
This book is first for a reason; it is a bible for any coach of any sport. Gilbert provides high-quality actionable items that any coach can use to improve their craft and organization. If there’s one book to read from this list, it would be this one.

Catch Them Being Good by Tony DiCicco and Colleen Hacker
A classic coaching book for a reason. DiCicco and Hacker tell stories about how the USWNT coaches dealt with player psychology, management, and communication during the 1999 World Cup. It gives a broad, but good, overview of how to coach well.

Youth Development in Football: Lessons from the world’s best academies by Chris Sully and Mark Nesti
Not really a book about coaching, but Sully and Nesti give good insight into what the world’s best football development academies are doing. While such organizations could never be recreated like-for-like in America, it does give some good ideas about how we can shape football programs here in the US.

Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor
While this book is centered around training dogs, Pryor actually examines fundamental principles of behavior modification that apply to all aspects of life. It provides good background knowledge about how coaches can use different reinforcement methods and strategies to achieve their goals.

Principles by Ray Dalio
This book has absolutely nothing to do with coaching but it does provide a good framework for how to approach decisions, and more importantly, how to create high-performance collaborative environments.

I’ve often found that sometimes the most unexpected things can have the most profound impact on my coaching. Kobe Bryant encapsulated this idea once so I thought I’d end with his quote:

“Once you know what it is in life that you want to do, then the world basically becomes your library. Everything you view, you can view from that perspective, which makes everything a learning asset for you.”