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Cameron Johns

Mr. Gardner

Hairy Milk Bags

2 November 2020

Do Coaches Matter?

Watching sports is a popular pastime in America and most parts of the world. People

love to cheer on their favorite teams and players. With every team competing for wins and

championships, one of the primary purposes of the organization behind a professional or

collegiate team is to assemble the best athletes in the world, so that they can bring fame and

glory to their institution. Now obviously the players and athletes themselves have the most direct

impact on the results of any given sports match, as well as the success that their team

achieves. However, you can’t have just players, because everyone knows that any team needs

a coach. A coach has a big responsibility to his/her team, which includes preparing their team

for a match, being the leader of their team, as well as the primary motivator. Although they

never step foot on the big stage, they do a lot of behind the scenes work. That leads to the

question: How much does a coach affect the success of a professional or collegiate sports

team?

Before deciding whether or not a coach has a substantial effect on a team’s success, it’s

vital to first understand what a coach does, as well as the behavioral qualities of those that are

considered to be good coaches. According to Cat North’s article “How Coaches Influence

Athletes,” the most important characteristics of a coach are encouragement and leadership,

both for the team as a whole as well as the individual players:

Most people consider a coach’s primary job to be encouraging individual athletes, as

well as the team. Top-notch coaches help produce winning players and teams. How

coaches create an environment of encouragement is the key to successful coaching and

player performance . . . Individual athletes look to coaches for leadership and

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encouragement beyond the sports environment, and this also carries over to athletic

performance (North).

The author states encouragement as the primary role of a coach. This means that a coach must

have an emotional attachment to his/her team and players. The best coaches know all their

players personally, and they are friendly with each other on and off the field of play. A coach will

often give some version of a pre-game speech or a half-time speech that doesn’t address

specific technical game plans or strategies, but puts their players in the right mindset to perform

their best. This is all part of creating the right environment as the author mentions above. The

coach works to bring the right attitude to their team through leading by example. This is why a

coach must be a leader for not only the whole team, but to each player individually as well. The

most successful coaches will have the respect of their players, and the whole team will have the

same mindset when it comes to their respective sport. Lastly, the author addresses that

coaches can have an influence on athletes “beyond the sports environment,” which again

emphasizes the fact that coaches must support players as individuals in order to have a

successful team (North).

After looking at what a coach’s responsibility to his/her team is, it is crucial to understand

the coach-athlete relationship, and whether or not it has a substantial impact on player and

team success. Possibly the most competitive athletic events occur in the Olympics, in which

athletes around the world train for years to compete in contests that could be decided by less

than a second. Former Australian Olympic Rower and current coaching assistant Bo Hanson

describes in a video a study about coach and athlete relationships, as well as his own

experience as an Olympian. The study seeked to find the most important factors for the athletes

that either achieved a personal best, or recorded a podium finish. The five key factors identified

included the quality of the training environment, the support mechanisms behind the athlete,

and athlete self-awareness, but the primary “non-negotiable” factor was the quality of the coach-

athlete relationship. Hanson goes on to explain that there needs to be a mutual trust and
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respect between both coach and athlete, saying that they need to know what is expected of

themselves and each other, how they both communicate, and have the same goal in mind

(Hanson). Now obviously the coach-athlete relationship for an Olympian is on a much higher

level than that of the relationship of a team sport athlete and his/her coach. Team athletes will

often play on multiple teams throughout their career, or in the case of college athletes, will only

play for a limited time, but that doesn’t subtract from the fact that the better the relationship, the

better the results.

The main problem with evaluating a coach’s worth is that their value is in their qualitative

attributes. Unlike how it is with players, coaches don’t have stats about their pros and cons

besides their win records, which reflect on the whole team. One way that statisticians have

looked at determining a coach’s value is by looking at a coach’s win rates over their career (see

Fig. 1).

Figure 2. Chart. CHANCE, 2016. CHANCE. Web. 20 October 2020.

https://chance.amstat.org/2016/11/coaching-tenure/.

The graph above shows the relationship between head coaching tenure and coaching

performance for all coaches in the NBA from the years 1976-2016. On the y-axis, labeled “Avg.

Coaching Win Shares,” it shows how well the team performed that year in the coach’s career,
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with higher numbers being better seasons. On the x-axis, labeled “Consecutive Seasons with

Same Head Coach,” it shows what year the coach was consecutively coaching that team.

Although there is a spike and a dip over season six and seven, the trend shows that the longer

a coach stays with a team, the more long term success that team has. As stated by the

publisher of this graph, the chart only goes up to ten years due to a lack of sample size for

higher numbers. Although this graph is used originally to support the idea that the longer a

coach stays with the same team, the more successful they are, one could argue that the reason

that there is not a lot of data above ten years is because most coaches are fired before then due

to bad performance.

Only in recent years have analysts and statisticians found ways to determine how much

of an effect a coach has on the outcome of a game. At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics

Conference in 2019, Christopher Berry and Anthony Fowler published a report on their findings

after using some incredibly complicated formulas and equations that attempted to debunk the

previous analytical opinion that coaches are important, but they don’t have much of an effect on

the results of a game. This opinion existed in the analytics community primarily because there

was a lack of quantitative evidence to prove a coach’s value, and numbers and statistics is what

analytics is all about. They found that coaches do have an effect on their teams, and they

attempted to measure the extent of that effect across sports. To summarize, they found that

coaches strengthen defensive results more than they boost offensive results, as well as

coaches have a greater effect in collegiate sports than professional. Although they are confident

in their results, the authors conclude by saying, “Our goal in this paper has not been to deliver

an exhaustive or definitive study of coaching. Rather, we offer a method and associated

software that analysts can use to study the effects of coaches on any measurable outcome

in any sport” (Berry and Fowler).

Before extensively researching the topic of coach influence on success, I believed that

the role of a coach was essential, but that individual coaches were, more or less,
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interchangeable. I thought that as long as you had the leader to make sure everyone was on the

same page, then the athletes would be able to do what they do and get the results that they

deserved to get. As a fan of basketball and the NBA, I have seen a lot of coaching changes

occur in the last few years, and I have felt that in most cases the coach is fired because they

can’t capture the respect and loyalty of their team. However, now that I understand a little more

about what coaches do, it starts to become more clear about how difficult being a coach could

be. My opinion is that a coach sets the tone for the whole team, and that any given player may

or may not mesh so well with that coach. This means that a coach could be a victim of a bad

situation, in which a coach and a player may not get along, and management will often side with

a star player instead of a coach. Lastly, I also believe that in order to achieve the best results

and long-term success, it is crucial to find the best possible coaching candidate in the first place,

and stick with them for as long as you can, as data proves that longer-tenured coaches tend to

be more successful.

After looking at the data and personal testimonies of athletes about the role and

effectiveness of coaches in a high-level sport, it’s hard to argue that a coach doesn’t

substantially contribute to the success of an athlete or a franchise. Although difficult to

determine the actual value of a coach because of the many qualitative traits one has, the limited

data we have opens up analytical ways to prove that coaches are not simply interchangeable.

The combination of emotional and statistical factors makes it challenging to find the best

coaching candidate, but it is important to invest in a coach for as long as possible to yield the

most successful results.

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Works Cited:

Berry, Christopher R. and Fowler, Anthony. “How Much Do Coaches Matter?” MIT Sloan Sports

Analytics Conference. http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-

content/uploads/2019/02/Do-Coaches-Matter.pdf

Figure 2. Chart. CHANCE, 2016. CHANCE. Web. 20 October 2020.

https://chance.amstat.org/2016/11/coaching-tenure/.

Hanson, Bo. “Importance of Coach-Athlete Relationships.” Athlete Assessments, 17 March

2016. https://www.athleteassessments.com/coach-athlete-relationship-performance-

factor/

North, Cat. “How Coaches Influence Athletes.” SportsRec. 31 October 2018. Web. 14 October

2020 https://www.sportsrec.com/7910089/how-coaches-influence-athletes