Show notes
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What happens to your team when the head coach has a bad day?
In this episode, Coach Collins takes a deep dive into one of the most important responsibilities of leadership: managing the emotional temperature of your program. Coaches often spend enormous amounts of time thinking about strategy, practice planning, player development, and culture. But players and assistant coaches are also constantly reading something else—the emotional state of the person leading them.
Coach Collins uses the idea of the thermostat versus the thermometer to explain the difference. A thermometer simply reflects the temperature around it. A thermostat helps set it. Athletes naturally react to what is happening around them. Coaches have a greater responsibility. Their frustration, confidence, fear, patience, body language, and emotional consistency can quickly spread throughout a team.
This becomes especially important when circumstances change quickly. Winning streaks, great practices, injuries, difficult losses, parent problems, player issues, staff disagreements, and unexpected setbacks can all happen within days of each other. If a coach’s emotional state rises and falls with every event, players begin experiencing leadership whiplash.
The episode explores the idea that every coach has a leadership range. At the top end, coaches are clear, proactive, relational, confident, and able to see the big picture. At their baseline, they are steady and dependable. At the low end, fatigue and frustration can lead to emotional reactions, micromanaging, distance, impatience, or poor communication.
The goal is not to pretend that great leaders never reach their low end. They do. The goal is to raise the floor.
How do you behave when things go badly? Can you lose and still communicate clearly? Can you receive difficult news without bringing panic into the gym? Can you correct a player without turning your frustration into that athlete’s shame? Can your assistant coaches concentrate on coaching instead of trying to figure out what mood you are in?
Those questions reveal a great deal about leadership.
Coach Collins also challenges coaches to separate their identity from the scoreboard. Winning matters. Competition matters. Championships matter. But when a coach needs winning to validate who they are, the entire culture begins riding the emotional roller coaster with them. A great night means everything is wonderful. One loss suddenly makes everything feel broken.
That is not stability.
Great programs need leaders who can compete intensely while remaining grounded through both success and adversity.
The episode gives coaches three practical questions for evaluating themselves: Did I act as the thermostat or the thermometer this week? What did my low end cost the people around me? And what boundary can I create to protect my emotional baseline next week?
Sometimes that boundary is waiting before speaking after a difficult loss. Sometimes it is refusing to send the emotional text. Sometimes it is sleep, time away, perspective, or simply recognizing that an important decision should not be made while angry.
For coaches trying to build sustainable culture, this episode is a reminder that your emotional regulation is not just personal. It becomes organizational.
Players feel it.
Assistant coaches feel it.
Your program eventually reflects it.
The scoreboard can change your circumstances. It does not have to change your leadership.
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