As the fall sports season rolls around, parents have to deal with the issue of who is going to coach their kids’ (fill in the sport) team. Will the coach know how to deal with young kids? Can they teach skills? Will the kids get to play a fair amount of the time? And God forbid, will the coach be a pedophile?
There is an axiom in individual college sports such as golf, tennis, skiing, track and field, “Players with A-level talent always beat players with B-level talent. It is not possible to coach B-talent to beat A-talent”. Right or wrong, some coaches believe that rule holds true in youth sports also.
In other words, many winning college programs have coaches whose primary strengths are recruiting, motivating, and 
organizing. They have winning records because they recruit more players with A-level talent than other coaches and they do a better job motivating them and keeping them happy.
John Calipari recently addressed this axiom as it relates to team sports. He was asked whether it’s difficult to get young blue-chip talent to jell as a team. In other words, how difficult is it to coach a group of A-level talent players?
The $5.2-million-dollar-a-year coach responded, “I’ll tell you what’s hard – coaching bad players.”
If it is really difficult to coach bad players and A-talent always beats B-talent, then why bother coaching bad players or players with B-talent? The answer is simple. All superstars begin their careers as bad players, even if they have A-talent. And the number of athletes with B-talent, or less, far outnumbers the elite players who play in the Olympics or major championships.
Hats off to Calipari for being able to recruit and manage elite athletes. He is a successful coach based on the number of games his teams have won.
Kudos also go to the coaches who like to work with bad players and those with “B” talent or less. In fact, a case can be made that this group of coaches should occassionally grace the cover of Sports Illustrated.
In other words, we need to have the absolute best coaches at the entry level, not on prime time television. Having the top coaches mentor young athletes when they start playing a sport will keep kids in sports and motivate them to be active for life. That will solve a lot of the problems facing our society.