Musings of a Community College Coach: Keeping a journal
By Liviu Bird
During my junior year of college, I decided to start keeping a journal. All the sports psychology books I had read recommended it for helping players achieve top performance and have an outlet to put thoughts on paper without vocalizing them.
I’ve always been a writer, so it seemed logical enough. As comes with the job, I’m not afraid of people reading what I write, but that journal ended up being such a place of escape that I hid it from my teammates, friends and girlfriend, even though I shamelessly flaunt most things I write on social media sites.
In the coming weeks, I’ll lift the veil a bit on some of the writings in my journal, but I will be extremely judicious about it, mostly because I still wouldn’t want ex-coaches and teammates knowing what I wrote at times. As a player — this is something of a goalkeeper trait — I tended to over-analyze everything that happened on and off the field, nitpicking until I wore myself into a nervous wreck.
Having a place to purge myself of those thoughts ended up being the ultimate form of therapy. Have a bad training session? Write about it. Pissed off at a coach? Write about it.
But keeping a journal is about more than free-writing, although that did take up the majority of my pages. I also set up sections for notes from my meetings with coaches, video sessions with the team and self-evaluations after the season ended. Shorter sections were devoted to writing down quotes I liked (a lot of Marcus Aurelius and other Stoic classics) and concentration techniques.
In the locker room, I would read my post-training notes from the day before and figure out what worked and what I needed to fine-tune: when was the last time I ate; what did I eat; how much sleep did I get; how did I feel; was I struggling through knocks or a cold?
Knowing that my finite playing career would soon draw to a close, I also kept notes on possible writing topics for the future (including why I kept a notebook). My notebook has been the source of many columns on tactics and life as a college player trying to break into the professional game.
The one regret I have is that the overall tone of much of my notebook writing was negative. I didn’t tend to write that often when things went well, probably because I felt like holding onto those feelings as long as possible instead of writing them down, as if my joy would drain out of my pen along with the ink.
Luckily, I also remember the good times a little easier than the more difficult times. I remember the road trips to exotic destinations like Nampa, Idaho, Billings, Mont., and Bismarck, N.D. I remember playing cards at team meals, on airplanes and during one particularly memorable six-hour flight delay in Phoenix.
Even if your players don’t plan on writing about their experiences in college soccer one day for everybody to read, a journal is a good way to keep those memories alive for themselves. For some ideas of what could be part of a journal, read Focused for Soccer by Bill Beswick, which is a great sports psychology book and should be part of any coach’s collection.
Liviu Bird is an assistant coach at Edmonds Community College in Washington state, as well as a reporter for SoccerWire.com and NBC ProSoccerTalk.
