Going the Distance: Five Sets for an Emotionally Healthy Coach
Coaching asks you to give, give and give again. Few coaches burn out in a single season. More often, they keep showing up to practice while slowly losing the heart they started with.
That was the concern behind a International Coaches connect webinar, with Coach Chad Simpson. Author of the books Walk Like a Champion and The Freshman. Chad is also the director of Athletes in Action Tennis.
A coach's wake-up call
The guest speaker, Chad Simpson, knows the grind from the inside. A former Division I tennis player at Liberty University, he spent ten years coaching — three in high school and seven in college — before joining Athletes in Action as a chaplain to coaches and athletes. He has since written a book, with a second on the way.
By his own account, his first four years as a college coach looked very different from his last three. He describes himself in that season as a disconnected husband and a distant father, stressed and exhausted. Then three things happened in close succession:
The dream job he had been working toward opened up and closed again — without so much as a phone call.
His father, also a coach, faced two bouts of cancer and a stroke that took him off the sidelines for a time.
Seven years into marriage, with a toddler and an infant at home, his wife sat him down and told him plainly that he was not meeting her emotional needs.
He had a choice to make. He stepped back, assessed his life, and began to rebuild it. What came out of that season is a framework he calls the five sets.
Why coaches are struggling
Simpson believes every good coach dreams of three things: to reach higher (help their team excel), to invest deeper (shape the lives of the people in front of them) and to play the long game (build something that lasts beyond one good year).
Yet the word he hears most from coaches is grind. The promise is that working harder will eventually get you where you want to go. Often it leaves you lower, mentally and emotionally. He pointed to a recent NCAA survey of more than 1,000 coaches, in which about 40% of head coaches reported mental exhaustion and roughly a third reported trouble sleeping.
His answer is not more doom and gloom, but a plan for going the distance. In tennis, the longest match you can play is five sets. Before you read on, Simpson asks one question: on a scale of 1 (burnt out) to 10 (thriving), how emotionally healthy are you as a coach — and would the people closest to you give the same number?
Set 1: Define the win
The first set asks the most basic question: why do you coach? Your boss has an opinion about what success looks like. So does the public. But inside your own heart, you need to know what the win actually is.
When the question went to the coaches on the call, one answer captured the room: to help players live out the best of their talent. That instinct — to bring out the best in people — is why most coaches start.
Knowing why you coach starts with knowing who you are and what matters most. Simpson suggests writing down your top five priorities, then holding that list up against your weekly calendar and your spending. Do they match? Are you living your stated values, or someone else's?
Two definitions of success shaped his thinking. John Maxwell defines success as being most loved and respected by the people closest to you. Early in his career, two coaching veterans in their 60s gave Simpson the same warning: don't lose your family. John Wooden, meanwhile, tied success to peace of mind — the quiet satisfaction of knowing you did your best to become all you could be. That peace comes from alignment between who you are and how you live.
Three practical ways to define your win:
Write a purpose statement — a short line you could put on a T-shirt, or the title of the book you would write.
Name your core values so you can make decisions against them.
Review regularly. Your definition of the win needs to be revisited, not set once and forgotten.
Changeover: In tennis, players sit on the bench every two games to reflect. Take your seat. In one sentence, what is the win for you?
Set 2: Visit the past
This is the set most coaches would rather skip. Simpson admits it. But young people at pivotal moments in their lives are entrusted to our leadership, and the things coaches say stay with players for years. A coach who is not healthy and whole can cause deep hurt.
So the second question follows the first. You know why you coach — now, why do you coach the way you do?
Try this exercise. Write down five to seven coaches, teachers, mentors or parents who shaped you. Next to each, mark a plus or a minus for whether their influence was positive or negative. Then add one word that sums up their impact. Look for themes. Much of your coaching style was handed to you — for better and for worse.
There is a saying in psychology that hurt people hurt people. Everyone carries some baggage. The real question is what you do with it: ignore it, address it, or eventually embrace it. Often our greatest pain becomes our greatest purpose — the mess becomes the message.
Simpson offers three ways to begin:
Seek counsel. Talk with a wise friend or someone trained to help.
Apologize. Own a hurt you have caused.
Forgive. Begin the process of releasing someone who has hurt you. As the old line goes, unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Changeover: What will you do to let go of, revisit or learn from your past?
Set 3: Build your player's box
The first two sets clear the ground. From here, Simpson starts building — and he borrows a principle from James Clear's Atomic Habits: you don't rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. Sets three through five are those systems.
In professional tennis, each player gets a box of courtside seats to fill with the people cheering them on. In basketball, think of who has the front row. A strong box is not five copies of the same person. A top player's box might hold a physio, a nutritionist, a tactical coach, a mental coach, and friends and family.
So who is in your box? Is it full, weak, or empty?
Simpson suggests filling it in three directions:
Ahead of you: mentors you are learning from.
Beside you: peers who are in the battle with you.
Behind you: the people you are pouring into.
The longer he lives, he says, the more convinced he is that one plus one can equal three. Or, as the African proverb puts it: alone you go faster, but together you go further. John Wooden called it making friendship a fine art.
Changeover: What skill, attitude or character trait needs to change for you to reach your win — and who can help you with it?
Set 4: Create rhythms of rest
Schedules fill up on their own. If rest is not on the calendar, something else will take its place. So start with an honest question: when did you last truly rest?
Simpson is clear about what rest is not. He showed a photo from a family trip to Disney — 19 people, tramping through the parks — and admitted they needed another break when it was over. Vacations, sleeping in, TV, social media and junk food are what we reach for when we are worn out. They rarely refill us.
Real rest is recharging. Ask what gives you life and energy. Then build it in at three levels:
Daily: An early morning of prayer, Bible reading and journaling; a workout; being choosy about the podcasts and audiobooks he listens to; reading before bed
Weekly: Working six days and resting one, following the pattern of creation. On the Sabbath the phones go off, and the family eats well, walks, talks and enjoys each other
Annual: One adventure a year — a mission trip, or travel to learn from other coaches, such as the Academy in Ohio each November
The point is not to copy his routine. It is to know your own.
Changeover: What is one way you can add rest to your life this week?
Set 5: Execute with excellence and energy
Only now — after the first four sets — is a coach ready to execute with speed and excellence. Simpson's warning is that most coaches start here. They land the job and immediately start grinding. That was his own story, and it is exactly where burnout sets in when the foundation is missing.
He describes the coach as two kinds of CEO, leading in two worlds at once.
Chief executive officer. This is the world of the scoreboard, where jobs and money can be on the line and excellence is expected. Here a coach casts vision, plans strategically and thinks long term — then executes daily. That means attention to morning routines, how you handle email and social media, whether you work from a simple to-do list, and how well you sleep.
Chief energy officer. This is the world of relationships, where emotional intelligence matters as much as tactics. Simpson's motto is people over projects. Your attitude and energy set the tone, and your joy creates an environment where players can thrive. Think about your favorite players to coach. They were probably not the most talented. They were the ones who brought positive energy and a love of life to practice every day.
So ask yourself: Are you leading with love, joy and a contagious spirit? Do your players feel that you care about them?
Changeover: How can you improve both in your pursuit of excellence and in your relationships?
What coaches around the world said
When our coaches on the live call were asked whether this kind of training was new to them, the answers were strikingly similar across continents.
A coach in Rwanda shared that coaching education usually focuses on licenses and drills, not on the well-being of the coach. If we are not well, he said, we cannot deliver anything good. The idea of rest as a way to get energy back was new to him.
A coach in Kenya described a growing emphasis on what coaches there call "3D coaching" — learning how to handle emotions and work with many kinds of people, not only teaching the game.
A coach in Uganda commented that the balance should be closer to 50-50: as much time working on ourselves as on X's and O's. His team started the season strong and has hit a sudden slump. When a coach's identity rests only on winning, he said, that weighs heavily. We pour out to our players and forget ourselves.
A coach from The Gambia shared that he coaches kids from age five to their early twenties. Many arrive at practice carrying pain from home and use the court as a place to let it out. The night before the call, he had tried and failed to calm two players in an argument — knowing what one of them was going through, and wondering whether he would be in the right frame of mind for a quarterfinal the next day. He doesn't think of them as players, he said. He thinks of them as family.
Playing within the lines
The host of the call Jason Stankus added a thread that ran through the whole conversation: limits. As he has taken on more as a parent, a leader and a caregiver for aging family members, he has realized he cannot give to every need around him. Much of his lost energy, he said, comes from trying to do everything — or feeling responsible for everything — and refusing to accept God's limits.
He pointed to the apostle Paul, who wrote of laboring with all the energy God powerfully works in him. All life on earth runs on energy from the sun; Stankus sees a parallel in drawing energy from a different son, that of Jesus Christ.
A short prayer coaches can carry with them: I can't. You can. Thank you. We are not superheroes. We are needy, and we need God and each other.
Coaches can misread Philippians 4:13 — "I can do all things through Christ" — as a license to take on everything, when concentrating on a few things done well would serve them better. This is like learning how to play inside the court's boundaries: we don't like boundaries, and when the ball goes out, we argue with the referee that it was in.
That is why the player's box matters. Sometimes we cannot see that we have stepped out of bounds. Simpson, who grew up in a broken home, holds a deep goal of a long and great marriage. He needed his wife to tell him he wasn't leading well at home. He is grateful she had the courage to say it.
Who are you really coaching for? Often we compete for an imagined audience — critics who don't exist — while neglecting the real people closest to us.
Your five changeovers
Simpson was candid that he has not perfected any of this. He still struggles. The value of the five sets is not in hearing them, he said, but in taking 30 minutes to an hour to work through the questions honestly. Here they are in one place:
Define the win: In one sentence, what is success for me?
Visit the past: What will I do to let go of, revisit or learn from my past?
Build my player's box: What needs to change in me, and who can help?
Create rhythms of rest: What is one way I can add rest to my life?
Execute: How can I improve in my pursuit of excellence and in my relationships?
Coaching will always demand a lot. But a coach who knows the win, has faced the past, is surrounded by the right people and has learned to rest is ready to play all five sets — and to finish well.
