Coaches Coaching Coaches Pt. 2

Coaches Coaching Coaches, Part 2: The Three Things Every Athlete Needs (And How Coaches Build or Break Them)

If you read Part 1, you know that seven out of ten kids drop out of their sport before they even get to high school. And you know that Self-Determination Theory gives us a framework to understand why that happens. But knowing the theory and actually applying it are two very different things.

Today let's talk about what autonomy, competence, and relatedness actually look like on the sidelines, in the weight room, and in the locker room. Because all three of these needs show up in your program every single day, whether you are intentional about them or not.

Autonomy: Do Your Athletes Feel Like It Is Their Choice?

Autonomy is the feeling that what an athlete is doing comes from within them, not from fear, pressure, or obligation. It does not mean they get to do whatever they want. It means they feel like they have ownership over their experience.

Think about the difference between an athlete who runs their route full speed because they want the team to succeed versus an athlete who runs it full speed because they are scared of getting benched. Both are sprinting. But only one of them is going to sprint like that when things get hard in the fourth quarter, when it is raining, when they are tired, or when nobody is watching.

Controlling coaching behaviors actively tear down autonomy. Bartholomew and colleagues identified some of the most common ones: intimidation, conditional regard, controlling feedback, and excessive personal control. A coach who uses fear as a motivational tool is not building autonomy. A coach who only shows affection when things are going well is not building autonomy. A coach who tells athletes what their goals should be, who their friends should be, and how they should spend their time outside of sport is not building autonomy. These behaviors feel like coaching. They often come from a place of genuine care. But the research is clear that they drive athletes further away from intrinsic motivation and closer to the exit.

Here is what supporting autonomy actually looks like. Give athletes a voice. Let them weigh in on team decisions. Explain the why behind your expectations instead of just issuing commands. Allow them to problem solve. Create scenarios where they have to think, not just react to instructions. When they ask questions, treat it as engagement, not insubordination. An athlete who asks why is an athlete who cares.

Competence: Do Your Athletes Believe They Belong?

Competence is not about telling athletes they are great. It is about helping them genuinely believe they are capable and improving. There is a big difference between empty praise and real feedback that builds confidence.

One of the researchers I studied in my graduate project highlighted something that stuck with me. An athlete described their experience in a controlling environment this way: when they made a mistake, coaches focused on what went wrong and kept talking about their errors. That athlete had no sense of competence. Every mistake was a reminder that they were not good enough. Over time, those athletes do not get better. They get more anxious, more hesitant, and eventually more gone.

Competence gets built when athletes can see themselves improving. That is why systems like our Rank, Record, Publish setup work so well in the offseason. Athletes time their 40, lift their max, and the numbers go on a board. Over weeks and months, they can watch themselves climb. They are not competing against a standard someone else set for them. They are competing against who they were last week. That is a competence builder.

It also means you have to think about every athlete on your roster, not just the starters. The kid at the bottom of the depth chart needs to feel competent too. If your culture only celebrates the guys who play on Friday night, you are losing most of your team emotionally long before they ever officially quit.

Relatedness: Do Your Athletes Feel Like They Matter?

Relatedness is the need to feel connected, valued, and seen by the people around you. In a sport context, that means athletes need to feel like their coach actually sees them as a person, not just a player. And they need to feel like their coaches and teammates genuinely care about them.

Here is the thing about relatedness that a lot of coaches miss. It is not about being your athlete's friend. It is about being someone they trust. There is a version of a positive athlete-coach relationship that still has high standards, still has accountability, still has hard conversations. But underneath all of that, the athlete knows you are in their corner. They know you want them to succeed. They know that if they struggle, you are not going to turn your back on them.

When relatedness is missing, the sport environment becomes transactional. Show up, do your job, go home. Athletes in those environments do not push for each other. They do not cover for each other in the fourth quarter. They do not stay after practice to get extra reps. They show up because they have to, not because they want to.

Martin's research out of Bowling Green captures this really well. One athlete described a coach who, when they performed well, got excited, gave them a hug, made a joke. The athlete said it made them want to have higher expectations for themselves. That is relatedness doing exactly what it is supposed to do. When an athlete feels connected and cared for, they stop performing for the coach and start performing for themselves.

So What Does This Mean for Your Program?

Here is the honest reality. Most coaches are doing some of this right and some of it wrong, often on the same day. You might build great competence in your starters and accidentally ignore the rest of your roster. You might create genuine relatedness with your older athletes but never quite connect with your freshmen. You might support autonomy in the weight room and completely shut it down in film sessions.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is awareness. Once you start seeing your program through the lens of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you start noticing things you never paid attention to before. You notice when a kid's body language changes after a certain type of feedback. You notice which parts of practice light athletes up and which parts shut them down. You notice who is thriving and who is quietly fading.

Over the next few weeks I am going to break down what my actual survey data from 128 Deer Creek athletes showed about each of these areas. We will get into what the numbers mean, what they reveal about the culture in these programs, and what practical things coaches can do to move athletes from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation.

Because the three things every athlete needs are not complicated. But meeting them consistently, in a high school program, with all the chaos that comes with the job, that is the real work of coaching.

This post is part of an ongoing series based on my graduate research project at the University of Oklahoma, examining student-athlete motivation through Self-Determination Theory in a high school athletic program.