The Croc Show Featuring Missy Mitchell-McBeth

“For sport coaches everything is in the short term, right? Everything is surrounding wins and losses. So where we as a strength coach look at, ‘Okay, I’ve got six years to develop this kid into the athlete they need to be’…the sport coach is like, ‘I’ve got six minutes to win this game or I’m getting fired.’”

Starting from that difference in the immediate imperatives of a sport coach vs. the longer-term developmental perspective of a performance coach, Missy Mitchell-McBeth joins Coach Croc to discuss the frequent disconnect between a school’s team sport coaches and the strength and conditioning staff. Mitchell-McBeth, longtime S&C coach and author of Developmental to Division I: Strength and Conditioning for the Volleyball Athlete, is clear that communication breakdowns cut both directions.

“I don’t think there are many coaches out there that have anything but the best interests of their athletes at heart,” Mitchell-McBeth says. “The real reason sport coaches are *dumb* about strength and conditioning is that nobody is putting out clear and concise information to help serve and plug that gap.”

Sometimes people aren’t ready to listen ever. Sometimes people aren’t ready to listen right now, says @missyMmcbeth. Share on X

What are solutions to serve and plug that gap? Certainly not confrontational attacks or putting them on blast on social media, which is why the D.U.M.B acronym is offered with tongue (mostly) in cheek. Recognizing that coaches are defensive about lapses in what they don’t know—or, what they think they know, but may be misinformed—Mitchell-McBeth shares communication approaches that are more likely to lead to progress and help the long term professional growth of fellow coaches and the athletes across a program.

“Sometimes people aren’t ready to listen ever. Sometimes people aren’t ready to listen right now,” Mitchell-McBeth says, likening the message of an S&C coach to that of marketing for a product, where sometimes it can take 7-8 positive exposures before a customer is finally ready to pull the trigger and buy. She also makes the point that the D.U.M.B acronym can equally swing the opposite way.

“(Online S&C arguments) make our profession appear fractured and fractured professions don’t garner a lot of respect. Going back to the original topic, why are sport coaches so dumb, we could easily flip this into ‘why are strength coaches so dumb’ and get their feathers ruffled over sport coaches questioning them.”

Video 1. The Croc Show featuring Coach and author Missy Mitchell-McBeth.

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