Are You Coach Cupcake or Coach Drill Sergeant?
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As a wrestling coach, have you ever wondered where you fall on the spectrum of coaching styles? Are you “Coach Cupcake,” always soft, overly accommodating, and hesitant to challenge your athletes? Or are you “Coach Drill Sergeant,” relentlessly demanding, sometimes to the point of breaking trust and respect?
The reality is that your effectiveness as a coach is often determined by how well you find the correct balance between these two opposites. Your ability to adjust your ratio of care and accountability based on the situation and the individual athlete is essential for guiding athletes and teams toward their full potential.
The Radical Candor Framework
There are many books on giving effective feedback but one that I have found provides a very simple and helpful framework is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. The model uses an X-Y axis to define two critical components of effective leadership:
The X-axis: Challenging Directly – This is your ability to communicate expectations clearly, hold athletes accountable, and push them to grow.
The Y-axis: Caring Personally – This reflects how much you demonstrate genuine investment in your athletes’ well-being and development.
The top-right quadrant, where you both challenge directly and care personally, is what every coach should aim for. When athletes know that your criticism comes from a place of care, they are more likely to trust your feedback and act on it.
Building a Culture of Feedback
To operate in this top-right quadrant, you need to create a team culture where feedback is valued. Wrestling, like life, is a series of lessons, and feedback is how we learn and grow. A loss in a match isn’t just a defeat—it’s a piece of valuable data. A team loss in a dual meet offers insights not only for the wrestlers but also for the coaches.
But feedback is only effective if your team is open to receiving it. Here’s how you can build a culture of feedback within your program:
Normalize feedback as part of growth. Talk openly with your team about how feedback works. Explain that losses are just data points—not failures—and that even in victories, there’s always room to improve.
Emphasize the value of feedback. Reframe it as something to seek out, love, and appreciate because it’s the fastest route to improvement.
Model emotional maturity. Acknowledge that receiving direct feedback can be uncomfortable, but stress that handling it with resilience and courage is part of becoming an elite athlete.
Invite feedback for yourself as a coach. Be willing to own your mistakes and show your athletes that you too are committed to improving. For example, after a tough loss, you might say, “I need to do a better job preparing us to improve on bottom position.”
When feedback becomes a shared team value, it transforms challenges into opportunities and fosters a mindset of continuous improvement.
The Role of Encouragement
Encouragement is the foundation for effective feedback. Without it, criticism can feel overwhelming or demoralizing. Think of encouragement as the ship that carries the weight of feedback across the abyss of self-doubt and insecurity.
High school and college athletes, in particular, thrive on acknowledgement from their coaches. A simple statement like, *“I’ve noticed how hard you’ve been working on your finishes—it’s paying off,”* can fuel an athlete’s confidence and motivation. When delivered in front of their peers, this kind of recognition has an even greater impact. Many young athletes are still in a developmental phase where the respect of their teammates is crucial.
The more you build your athletes up with genuine, specific encouragement, the more trust and emotional resilience they’ll have when it’s time to hear direct, constructive feedback.
Tips for Effective Encouragement:
Acknowledge effort, not just outcomes.
Be specific in your praise. Highlight exactly what the athlete did well.
Celebrate small wins for both individuals and the team.
Deliver praise publicly to amplify its impact.
A foundation of encouragement ensures that your athletes know you care about them personally, making them more receptive to the feedback they need to grow.
Confronting Directly: The Art of Tough Love
While encouragement builds trust, challenging directly ensures growth. Yet, for many coaches, giving direct feedback is one of the hardest parts of the job. It can feel uncomfortable to deliver tough messages, especially if you fear damaging your relationship with the athlete.
I’ve faced this struggle myself. Thankfully, I had other good coaches around me who were willing to help me see that if I wanted to be a better coach, I needed to be able to confront my athletes with direct feedback.
During my time as an athlete and coach with J Robinson, who led the University of Minnesota to three NCAA Championships throughout his legendary career, J shared his coaching credo with me and suggested that I put it somewhere that both myself and my athletes could see. J had something similar posted above his own desk. Here is what he gave me:
“Though it will be hard to understand at the time, the standard of excellence I ask of you implies that you deserve to be your best self, that you deserve to reach your potential, and that I’m going to take it upon myself to expect more of you than you, yourself, are at times, able to expect.”
This credo encapsulates what tough love is all about. It’s not about being harsh or overly critical—it’s about believing so deeply in your athletes’ potential that you’re willing to push them beyond their comfort zones.
Avoiding direct feedback may feel easier in the moment, but it’s a disservice to your athletes. When coaches avoid tough conversations, it’s often because they’re solving for something other than the athlete’s growth, for things like:
A desire to be liked.
An unwillingness to take the time and energy that the conversation would require.
Avoiding discomfort, either for themselves or the athlete.
By sidestepping these conversations, you risk letting your athletes settle for less than they’re capable of achieving.
How to Improve at Confronting Directly
If giving direct feedback is a challenge for you, remember that it’s a skill you can develop. Here are some strategies to make it easier and more effective:
Be very cautious of criticizing publicly: A good rule of thumb is to encourage publicly and criticize privately.
Prepare in advance. Don’t assume you can “wing it.” Think through what you want to say and how to say it clearly.
Check your motives: Are you avoiding feedback to protect your comfort, or are you genuinely working to help your athlete improve?
Acknowledge your emotions: Emotions can be very useful, and they can also send us way off-track. Recognizing your emotions so that you can stay focussed on your best intentions.
Collaborate with other coaches: Discuss the best way to deliver feedback as a team to ensure consistency and support.
Direct feedback, when combined with genuine care, can transform athletes and teams. It shows them that you believe in their potential and are willing to do the hard work of helping them achieve it.
The Power of Adaptability
Coaching is an art that demands adaptability. It’s about knowing when to encourage and when to challenge, when to nurture and when to push. By understanding yourself in a way that allows you to both care personally and challenge directly, you move beyond the limitations of “Coach Cupcake” and “Coach Drill Sergeant” to become a transformational leader.
Building a culture of feedback, rooted in encouragement and trust, sets the stage. When you combine that foundation with the courage to confront athletes directly, your athletes will not only feel better, they will also get better.
Your athletes don’t need perfection or coddling—they need you to care deeply and hold them to their potential. So, what kind of coach will you be today?
