In an interview with Bill Simmons, President Barack Obama commented on some of the difficulties of his first two years in office: "....a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it."

By Dennis Young, @dpyoung13

Whenever a team makes a splash nationally with a roster loaded with talented athletes, listen for the faint ripple: “Just a recruiter.” Claiming that a successful coach is really just a good general manager and not some leader of men and women or brilliant designer of training is maybe the most reliable slander in our sport. Here are a few representative examples from the LetsRun message board that took about thirty seconds of searching:

 

“[Jason Vigilante] is just good at recruiting and not destroying top talent with training.”

 

“A big LOL at your suggestion that Joe Franklin coaches his guys and doesn’t buy them. Oh, and Mick Byrne too.” 

 

(NB: Franklin has heard this line of complaint roughly ten billion times: 

 

And my favorite: “Greg [Metcalf] is a recruiter, not a coach.”

 

As if these were different jobs. I coached for less than two years--and in Division III--but in that short time, I learned that coaching is recruiting, and recruiting is coaching.  The best athletes don’t just get picked up by elite programs--coaches have to legitimately get those athletes to buy into what the program is doing. And no matter how well that program is run, it won’t win unless it convinces people with other choices to buy in. You know who else found that out the hard way? President Obama. Here he is, in a GQ interview from this morning with Bill Simmons, mostly discussing sports and pop culture, but also: 

 

“And somehow in those first two years, I think a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it... You can’t separate good policy from the need to bring the American people along and make sure that they know why you’re doing what you’re doing. And that’s particularly true in this new communications era.”

 

Whatever you think about the policies--and for our purposes here, it really doesn’t matter!--the point here is that the policies themselves are not enough for success. You have to sell them. In that way, the Obama of 2008-09 sounds exactly like an arrogant young coach who knows training theory in and out and just assumes that his killer workouts and perfectly fine-tuned mileage will get his team to the top. It just doesn’t work that way. All the good training in the world doesn’t do much without getting athletes to run for you and buy into what you’re doing.

 

A coach basically has two tools to win--developing athletes and attracting them. One is no more honorable than the other when the job is winning. Coaching and recruiting are the same thing.