What Makes a Good Coach-Athlete Relationship?

Get this right before anything else and set yourself up for success

The coach-athlete relationship—like any relationship in your life—lives and dies in the quality of its communication. Remember, dear reader, that “quality” can be low or high. If you get this aspect of your sporting life right, you set both yourself and your coach up for success. Get it wrong and—again, like a friendship or romantic relationship gone sour—you set yourself up for discomfort, regret, sadness, misunderstanding, anger, and a whole lot of other negative outcomes. Today we’re going to walk through the five qualities of a good coach-athlete relationship (note that I’m talking about the relationship, not the *coach—*you have responsibility here, too) and then highlight three maladaptive thought patterns that appear in relationships of low quality. We’ll close with some suggestions for your next coaching search.

1. Communication and Honesty

2. The Coach is the Employee

3. A Good Coach is an Honest Mirror

4. Accountability Runs Both Ways

5. Repair After Rupture

You ready? Let’s go.

Communication and Honesty

Remember when I said that the coach-athlete relationship lives and dies in the quality of its communication? There’s a reason this is the first thing to talk about. If you want to thrive as an athlete, both you and your coach need to commit to being honest with each other. You need to be honest about your goals, even the ones you might not tell your friends and loved ones. After a few months, your coach might be one of the five people in this world that know you the best because of this fact. If you don’t communicate openly with them about your goals, however, your job cannot do their job effectively. The goal will eventually come out on race day, as you do something different than what was agreed upon, and then your coach knows that you kept something from them, and you’ll have to go and do section five, repair after rupture, and that’s never a fun process. Your goals aren’t the only thing you’ll have to be honest about, though—you’ll have to be honest about your workouts and what happened in them, what’s going on with your body and, if you are female, with your cycle (and male coaches, if you are not conversant in this subject…what is this, 1950? Get it together). A great coaching relationship is a partnership, a collaboration, and you cannot have true partnership where truth is omitted.

Your coach, too, needs to be honest in return. They need to let you know if your goals are realistic, how and why you went wrong in a workout or race, what they feel and think is the best way forward for you, and—crucially—owning it when they screw up, because they will screw up, which we will get to in just a little bit. Both of you need to be able to communicate with each other honestly, clearly, and safely. You can be honest and clear, but if you are screaming at each other that does not count as productive communication.

The Coach is the Employee

It surprises me how many athletes and coaches lose sight of this, perhaps because the coach is, putatively, in a leadership role. The coach, however, is the one employed by the athlete. While the coach is not subordinate to the athlete, they fill a role more like a trusted consultant. The athlete is the one who sets the destination by picking an event and articulating a goal. It’s the coach’s responsibility to navigate to that destination, but the athlete can choose a different course (or a different navigator) at any time. The coach serves at the pleasure of the athlete, and it’s important to keep this fact in front of both of you, because if you lose sight of it we run into one of the most problematic ways athletes get in their own way: wanting to impress the coach or, even worse, not wanting to disappoint them. We will talk more about this below.

A Good Coach is an Honest Mirror

A trusted consultant and advisor plays one important role in particular for an athlete: mirroring their strengths and weaknesses back at them. Bad coaches, consultants, and advisors result in naked emperors, which is never fun for the emperor in the long run, your attitudes about royalty nudity notwithstanding. Joking aside, though, a good coach will reflect the things you say and do back at you, whether your actions are productive or unproductive. If your coach says things like “What I hear you saying is…” or “What I see you doing is…” then you have found a coach that understands education: the point is not to do the learning for the student, leading them by the hand. The point is to guide the student or athlete by showing them what they are doing and letting them decide if those choices are for good or for ill.

Accountability Runs Both Ways

When either of you messes up (and you will both mess up) you need to be able to own it. Your coach might prescribe a workout that leaves you injured or hurt. They may write a program too ambitious and lead you to burnout. They may forget that you have a life outside of triathlon. On your side you might ignore the guidelines to a workout because you “felt good at the start” and ended up hurting yourself. You might deviate from the carefully drawn race plan your coach laid out. You might skip check-ins and leave your coach twiddling their thumbs, waiting for you. You might get overwhelmed at work and go AWOL, leaving your coach confused while your training schedule fills up with red boxes (ya’ll know you can disable that “feature,” right?).

Mature adults know how to say “I messed up” and—the hard part—not append an excuse or explanation to that statement. “I’m sorry but” is not an apology. It’s a lack of accountability dressed up as an apology, and that is an ugly outfit indeed. If either of you do this you will rupture any trust you have built up thus far, and this whole enterprise is built on mutual trust. It has to be. You’re entrusting your coach with your athletic dreams and they, in turn, are trusting you with their time and expertise, neither of which are insignificant.

Repair After Rupture

And finally the ability, after apologizing, to repair. An apology has two parts: a statement that acknowledges what you did and how it may have hurt the other person, like “I’m sorry I got your training load wrong and you ended up sick,” or “I’m sorry I didn’t follow the plan you wrote for me—that must be frustrating.” The second part of the apology is a commitment to doing your best to avoid the wounding behavior in the future: “I will do my best to make sure I’m giving you a training program that meets you where you’re at,” or “I will remember that you put a lot of time into my race plans, and if I follow them I’ll have the best chance at meeting my goals.” This part cannot be skipped over, because it reiterates your commitment to each other and the partnership. But if you and your coach are able to pull this off, you are in a vanishingly small minority in the coaching world. Trust me, going through a rupture and repair will strengthen your relationship, not weaken it, because you will both see each other as mature adults who want to get the project right.

Ways Athletes Think Themselves Into Corners With a Coach

The five traits listed above are great, but I’ve seen three particular ways of thinking that drive the coach/athlete relationship down the wrong path, and we’ll get into those briefly.

The first is the “I didn’t want to disappoint my coach” thinking. If you find yourself in this position, a few things may have gone wrong. You may have forgotten that the coach is the employee, not the employer, or they may have forgotten that fact and made you think that in order to succeed you need to make them proud of you. Nothing could be further than the truth, and both sides can have a part in it. On the athlete side there is often something in their personal history that makes them believe deferring to authority is the way to be safe. If the coach is behaving in a way that makes you feel you need to perform for them, they could have some issues of ego or insecurity. In either case (and those are not exhaustive examples) impressing your coach should be the last thing on your mind, because it takes both of you out of partnership and into a superior/subordinate structure, and that’s toxic where a coaching relationship is concerned. If you feel the urge to impress your coach or avoid disappointing them, something has gone wrong with one of the five topics above and needs to be addressed—and fast.

The next part is what I have started calling “escalator thinking.” In the past few decades or so, as race results have become commodities and trophies and devices have promised to “take the thinking out of training,” I’ve noticed that a population of athletes think that success is a simple recipe: turn on erg mode, make every workout in TrainingPeaks green (ya’ll know you can disable that “feature,” right?), let your watch remember your workout for you and all of these things will carry you to your goal as if you are standing on an escalator. Nothing could be further than the truth and makes me so sad for those athletes. The good stuff of being an athlete is struggling to understand effort, pacing, fueling, race dynamics, and the rest of the small galaxy of details you need to learn in order to succeed. Growth is the goal, not a certain time or a trophy, and part of you hungers for that growth, even though you might not have known that consciously. How does a coach come into this? When a coach says “trust the process” it usually means something as bad as “shut up and dribble.” Coaches like these aren’t interested in your growth as a person or as an athlete. They want you to succeed to burnish their credentials or, even more cynically, so you stick around and keep paying them. I think “trust the process” is one of the worst things a coach can say, because they’re essentially saying “just get on the escalator,” when their actual job is to walk behind you on the stairs, guiding you but not carrying you, and offering feedback and redirection when, inevitably, you trip.

Finally, there is “one foot in” thinking. Some athletes aren’t ready for coaching, for a wide array of reasons. They might be intimidated. They might not believe they are worthy of coaching. They might have wandering eyes that look for the brightest new thing. They might not be able to focus. They might be chasing external rewards instead of internal ones and, therefore, have little true motivation. They may be compensating for unfulfilled aspects of their lives. In any case, there are some athletes who just can’t commit. Like a friendship or a romantic relationship, that lack of commitment is palpable to both athlete and coach, and it poisons the relationship. This problem goes both ways. If your coach is overwhelmed, overworked, or burnt out they might not be fully committing to your process any more. When we get to “one foot in” thinking on either side there needs to be a reckoning, often described as a “come to Jesus moment,” although I am sure there are similar metaphors for all religions. Coach and athlete need to figure out if they are going to recommit to each other or part ways. There is no sense in throwing good money and time after bad.

Conclusion

You may have noticed a theme here: the coach-athlete relationship is similar to the other primary relationships in your life, romantic, filial, or platonic. As I said above, your coach will be one of the few people in your life who has seen you at your worst and at your best, who knows the details of your menstrual cycle or what color your pee is that day, who knows your big hopes and your big fears. It’s deeply important to get this relationship right, because getting it wrong will lead to wasted time, money, hurt feelings, missed opportunities, and a small army of other minor demons. So be brave and ask your next potential coaches about moments of conflict with athletes, if they’ve ever apologized to an athlete, if they think the relationship is collaborative or top-down. Trust me, both of you will appreciate your bravery.