Mission

The Coaching Zone mission is to help coaches become lifetime learners who bring out the best in themselves, their athletes, and their teams. The Coaching Zone psychological skills are essential in all competitive sports environments. These skills give coaches the wisdom to make the team environment vibrant and healthy. We draw upon ourselves and other coaches’ lived experiences along with covering a wide range of concepts drawn from mindfulness traditions, sports psychology, positive psychology, and positive organizational behavior.

This book tells many stories illustrating both the challenges that coaches face and the solutions that worked – or didn’t work. It also provides 48 exercises that you can use to practice as you learn. You can even assign some of the exercises to your athletes to help them grow similar self-management and relational skills.

Written by coaches for coaches, The Coaching Zone: Next Level Leadership in Sports will help you to:

• Play to your strengths and work around your shortcomings to become a more effective leader.
• Provide clear direction and empower your athletes to make their own decisions.
• Put into action strategies that inspire teamwork and build a healthy team culture.

What people are saying about The Coaching Zone…

In a lot of ways, The Coaching Zone brought me back to those deeper academic underpinnings of coaching, but with a contemporary perspective.  I appreciated how the book stretched me.

John Pirani, Former Winchester High School (MA) boy’s lacrosse coach

Do you want to be the coach your athletes remember?  Go deeper than the X’s and O’s, and read The Coaching Zone.  Raise your self-awareness by looking at your own sports stories, your strengths and your shortcomings, then build from where you are to the next level of coaching.  Weaving together research, analysis, and stories gathered over two lifetimes of coaching, The Coaching Zone guides coaches through psychological, social, emotional, and mental strategies to bring out the best in themselves, their athletes, and their teams.  Coaches at every level who are committed to lifelong learning can up their game with this book.  As for me, I’m going to focus on polarity thinking – finding the balance between direction/empowerment and individual/team.

Beth O’Neill Maloney, Executive Director, Positive Coaching Alliance – New England