When coach is talking, your eyes better have been on his eyes. In football, the coach is your leader besides your captains and he deserves all of your undivided attention if he is talking. My coach sent kids home from practice if they fell asleep in a team meeting, or would send a kid on a focus lap if he was not paying attention when the coach was speaking. One of the main goals of my football team was to teach us players the importance of communication and how to do it well.
The defensive coaches were incredibly focused on getting us to communicate to improve our success as a unit. Everybody on the defense needed to talk in order to succeed. We wanted to be loud on the field, whether it was communicating a new play call in or calling routes out to the defensive backs behind us, the outside linebackers needed to be able to communicate.
From the Field to the Office
My football experiences set me up for success in the office. In the office you are constantly working as a team in order to improve your business. Instead of all eyes on coach when he is talking, in the office it is all eyes on the boss when he is talking. Another communicative element that was instilled in us was how to problem solve. A lot of situations arose on the football field where people at differing viewpoints and you would need to work it out in order to figure out what was the right way to do something. This will be similar to the business world when someone has an idea, but someone else has another. Sometimes, you just need to stop and figure things out before you move any further.
Without the communication skills that I learned in football, I would have been ill-prepared for the business world. I am forever in debt to my coaches for not only teaching me how to be a successful football player, but how to be a successful man in life.
Nik Koelblinger 