How are you doing?
I ask that question forty different ways a day: you good, how’s the arm, we alright, how’s home.
We talk about our players’ mental health constantly now, and that’s a good thing. Check-ins, culture, watching for the kid who’s gone quiet. We almost never talk about the coach’s. I’ve got good kids. People who care about me. I’m not writing this because nobody checks on me; I get checked on plenty. But go count how many times this month somebody’s asked you that question and actually waited for the real answer, not the reflex one. For most of us, the number’s low. Not because the people around us don’t care. Because the job puts you on the asking end of that question, not the answering end, and most coaches never stop to notice they’ve been standing on the same side of it for years, mental health included.
This spring, I’ll have 35 to 40 guys walking through the gate every afternoon. Every one of them needs something different from me: a mechanical fix, a confidence rebuild, a hard conversation, a soft one. I give a piece of myself to each of them, all day, and I’d never once stopped to ask where those pieces are supposed to come from until I read something written about me, not by me. A personality assessment I sat for earlier this year had a line I haven’t been able to shake: guys wired like me find our identity in serving, and the honest question underneath that is “who takes care of them?” The report’s own answer: usually, no one.
You can hand out pieces of yourself for a long time before anyone notices you’re running low. You’ll notice it first. Then your spouse will. Then, eventually, your team will too, because a coach running on empty doesn’t stay hidden forever. He just gets shorter with people. Slower to listen. Faster to snap. The pieces he’s still handing out start arriving smaller and colder than the ones he used to give.
That’s the picture I can’t shake. A coach handing pieces of himself to a player to close the gaps that kid showed up with, a gap in his confidence, his mechanics, his home life, and the coach’s own body dissolving in the process. Three words underneath it, and I think they’re the whole job in order: Player. Coach. Faith.
Player
Start where the transaction starts. Every guy who walks through your gate is carrying gaps he didn’t ask for, and you didn’t put there. A gap where confidence should be. A gap a father left. A gap a bad swing keeps widening every time it fails him in front of his teammates. Your job is to close some of that. Not all of it; you’re not built to close every gap a seventeen-year-old shows up with, but enough that he leaves better than he arrived. That takes a coach who still has something to hand over on the last day of a long fall, the same as the first. Kids don’t need you invincible. They need you present, and presence is the first thing that goes when the tank’s empty and nobody knows it. A coach running on fumes still runs practice, still calls the right defense, still says the right things after the game. But something underneath it goes flat, and kids feel flat before they can name it. They just know the pieces you’re handing them don’t close the gap the way they used to.
Coach
Here’s the part I have to be honest about. A lot of my giving isn’t as selfless as I’ve told myself it is. Some of it’s ego wearing a selfless costume.
There’s a real temptation in this job to be the one who jumps in and fixes things the second discomfort shows up, not because the kid always needs fixing yet, but because I can’t sit still inside somebody else’s struggle. I’ve done it more times than I’d like to admit. Jumped in before a kid finished wrestling with his own problem, because watching him wrestle made me uncomfortable, not because he needed rescuing. That’s not always service. Sometimes that’s just me handing out another piece of myself, so I don’t have to sit with the discomfort of doing nothing.
And the data backs up what that costs. A 2024 review in the journal Sports Health looked at what’s actually known about elite coaches’ mental health, and the finding wasn’t subtle: coaches carry real, measurable rates of burnout, anxiety, and depression, and it’s consistently overlooked because we’re too busy managing everyone else’s. The same review found something worth sitting with: a coach’s mental health doesn’t stay contained to the coach. It reaches the athletes too. (Baumann et al., 2024, Sports Health)
That’s the Coach panel of the picture. Every gap you close in a player costs you a piece. The dissolving isn’t dramatic license. It’s what actually happens to a man who keeps handing out pieces of himself to close every gap in every kid, and never once asks where his next piece is coming from.
Faith
Here’s where I part ways with every wellness article that stops at “practice self-care.” That advice isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete, because a watering can doesn’t refill itself. Somebody has to fill it.
I coach guys who are locked-in believers. I coach guys who are searching, asking real questions, honestly unsure where they’ll land. I coach guys who’ll tell you straight up they don’t know what they believe, or that they don’t believe anything at all. I’m not writing the rest of this to talk past any of you.
And that’s not just true of my roster. It’s true of every coach reading this. You’re leading guys through their own believing, searching, and not knowing, while you’re standing somewhere on that same ground yourself. Some of you have it locked down. Some of you are still working through it, quietly, in ways your team never sees. Some of you honestly don’t know, and you’re running a program every day without an answer to the biggest question there is. I’m not writing this to just one kind of coach. I’m writing to all three, because whichever one you are, your guys are looking at you the exact same way mine look at me.
If you’re a believer, you already know where this is headed, and if you’re honest, you probably already know you’ve been trying to run your program off your own reserves more than you’d admit out loud. If you’re searching, I’m not asking you to have it figured out by Friday’s game. I didn’t either, not for years. I’m asking you to notice something you already know is true even if you haven’t named it yet: you can’t be your own bottomless well. And if you genuinely don’t know what you believe, the principle holds before the theology does. No man refills himself. Something outside you has to. For me, and I’ll say it plainly because dancing around it doesn’t help anybody, that something is Jesus.
Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That’s not a suggestion to work less. It’s an invitation to stop pretending I’m the source instead of a vessel, and it’s how my cup gets filled enough to keep filling everybody else’s.
Player. Coach. Faith. The player’s gaps get closed by the coach. The coach only has pieces to close them with if he’s receiving too, from his people, and underneath that, from God. Skip that last piece and the picture doesn’t lie: you keep closing their gaps until you’re the one riddled with them, and nobody in the dugout is positioned to notice, because noticing isn’t their job. It’s mine, turned back on myself for once.
This Week
Pick one person, just one, and let them take care of you this week instead of the other way around. Tell your assistant you had a hard day instead of pretending you didn’t. Let your wife ask how the game went instead of reading it off your face before she opens her mouth. Sit somewhere quiet for ten honest minutes- a pew, a porch, your truck in the parking lot after everybody’s gone home – and actually hand something over instead of carrying it by yourself one more night.
You cannot pour from a cup nobody’s filling. Figure out who fills yours, and let them.
Greater Together
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