Monday, May 21, 2012

Larry Holman


Larry Holman
Coach
Marion, OH

I had the pleasure of interviewing a very inspiring man for my Holding On paper. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Larry's coaching stories and philosophy's that he had attained over the years. What meant a lot to me in doing this interview is that I had the opportunity to learn some things from a man that was a part of such a great generation and can continue to pass on the things that I have learned.

What I learned about writing and reporting is that it can be a challenge. giving a good interview and copying down the transcripts can be a lot of work and very time consuming. Finding the best way to present the information from the interview can be very challenging as well.

My Writing At It's Best



My theory is this, when you have a great athlete you tend to get lazy, because he does things so easy and so well that you get a false reading of how good of a coach you are. For instance if you and I were coaching against each other and you have a great athlete and I have a great athlete, we will probably nullify each other a little bit, but if my average kids are better than your average kids then I’ll probably beat you eight out of ten times. What happens with coaches is that they get an ego. They say “I want to coach Michael Jordan.” Yeah it would be great to coach Michael Jordan, but let’s coach ol’ Joe Blue that can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. Now can you bring Joe Blue to a level where he is competing over his head and if you do, then you start having good teams. These are the kind of things that helped define me as a coach, that when I went into the weight room, I worked as hard with the kid that wasn’t going to be first team next year, as I did with the all-state kid. Sometimes you got to push your stars harder than the other kids because they tend to get lazy and tend to think that they’re pretty good. To keep those guys grounded, you have got to drive them harder, but I drove the other kids hard too. I didn’t want them to think that they were not as important as some of my better players. I think that your greatest thrill as a coach is seeing what you think is right transferred into a young man, or woman and they catch fire and take it to a new level.



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