From the Dugout to the Classroom: Why Good Baseball Coaches Have Much to Offer Good Professors

Professors are many things. We are scholars who publish. We engage in service on our campuses and in our communities. But we are teachers first and foremost. We prepare young people to be successful in the classroom as well as in society. Despite what many see as an inherent tension on campus between faculty members and athletic coaches, those of us who teach students in the classroom have much to learn from those who coach student-athletes on the field. Yes, many athletic coaches receive more fame and fortune than most professors. And baseball coaches are certainly better known for their great pregame speeches, intimate knowledge of double-switch substitutions, and keen offensive strategies than professors are for their best lectures and finest articles. But the best coaches are also primarily teachers, and professors have much to learn from them. In many ways, baseball coaches—and perhaps most coaches—are much the same as the professor who teaches English, math, or history, for the best coaches use the teaching principles and skills used by the best classroom teachers.

The Teaching Philosophy of Good Baseball Coaches

Let me explain. Armed with a solid knowledge of our respective disciplines, professors have information to share with our students. If we are interested in improving how we teach and educate our students, then we would be wise to borrow from the coaches’ playbook on how better to impart this disciplinary information to our students. For example, baseball coaches seek to understand how the body operates and how the mechanics of the sport should be executed. Thus, a coach can teach players what to do, how to do it, and most importantly why it should be done in that manner. All coaches teach what to do: “on this play, you go over there and field the ball.” Some coaches teach how to do it: “keep your feet fairly close together and reverse pivot,” but the best coaches teach why: “if you keep your feet closer together, it will enable you to stay balanced, rotate the body faster, and move into the throwing motion even before you get completely turned around!” Teaching players why is the coach’s opportunity to sell the technique to the player, and salesmanship is just as important in coaching as it is in selling life insurance, real estate, or refrigerators. Salesmanship gives the coach a chance to convince the players that this particular technique will make it easier to do the job successfully. Unlike the stereotype of the coach who berates players, the best coaches do not discourage players from asking why something is being taught a certain way, because the why leads to an opportunity to sell the players on a particular method of execution.

While “selling” a player on a particular skill or technique is much less problematic for a coach than for a professor who “sells” a student on a particular theory, ideology, or philosophy, there does exist a remarkable parallel between the two. Think about it: all professors teach what our subject matter is about. We give students factual material concerning dates and important events and people for them to remember. But if all we teach is the what, our students may become well-instructed, but few will be well-educated. Many professors teach how these facts and dates and people came to be important, but they know all too well that facts and skills learned from textbooks can change quickly as more facts and better skills are learned. The best professors teach why these facts and skills came to be seen as important and why asking questions and challenging our own conclusions about the data is vital to being educated. Education involves inquiring, close reading, interpreting, recognizing parallels, and understanding causes and consequences. An increasingly technical world needs people who come from backgrounds that enable them to remain critical and allow them to adjust to changing conditions and information. Good coaches have already figured this out! They know that it is not enough simply to train their players; rather, players need to...