Model. Inspire. Challenge. Encourage.

This article is quite good and is a solid model to encourage in your coaching friends.

First-year (Chicago) Bears head coach Matt Eberflus has had quite the road to lead his own NFL franchise.

He played for Nick Saban and then Gary Pinkel at Toledo before starting his coaching career with Pinkel at Toledo and Missouri before breaking into the NFL ranks with the Browns, Cowboys and Colts.

In Indianapolis, he had joined Josh McDaniels’ staff in 2018 and was in Indy when McDaniels backed out of his deal to become the team's head coach. Thankfully, Eberflus had developed a solid relationship with Colts GM Chris Ballard, who told him he had a spot on the staff, and then Eberflus really hit it off with new head coach Frank Reich and became his defensive coordinator.

After a few seasons doing impressive work with the Colts defense, Eberflus earned his head coaching opportunity in Chicago and recently joined the Rich Eisen show to talk about his coaching journey and overall philosophy.

One of the more interesting parts of the interview was when Eberflus had the opportunity to talk about how important the coach-player relationship is and how cultivating that really comes down to four key areas.

Those four areas? Model. Inspire. Challenge. Encourage.

"I believe in this. I believe in the coach and player relationship. I think that's very important to get the best out of players, you really have to have that."

"Well how do you do that? There's really four different ways."

"You model the behavior that you want to see as a coach. You do that with the player, and then the player does that for everyone else. In that, when you model, you also inspire guys. You inspire them to act and do right and work extremely hard.

The next thing is that you challenge. You have to challenge them, and how you do that is you do that in a respectful way.

"So you model, you inspire, you challenge, and at the end of the day, football is hard and it's difficult and the last thing you've got to do is you have to encourage. Encourage yourself to keep going, and encourage others around you."

"That's really my coaching philosophy and the product that you'll see on the field," he ends the interview sharing.

BY DOUG SAMUELS

Here’s a link to more in a video clip - https://youtu.be/nWEIg3jHe2k

The Chaos of Collegiate Sport in 2022

In the rapidly changing, chaotic climate of collegiate sport in the USA, we are privileged to be agents of Christ’s peace, perspective, and comforting presence. Let's lean into this situation.

Here's a excerpt from an article recently posted in Slate.com describing the NCAA and all of college sport's dilemma. The entire article is available at the link below.

"Some measure of chaos has reigned since then, and the NCAA is now scrambling to settle things down with a new rule that, in its view, isn’t really a new rule. The association fought tooth-and-nail for years to keep athletes from getting paid by third parties, and as it scrapped its way to a long-inevitable defeat on that front, it declined to do any planning for what would happen once a new world arrived. Years of living in denial have caught up with the NCAA in a big way. Third-party payments to players have, in the absence of clear rules, given rise to the thing the NCAA really abhorred from the start: players getting paid to play for specific teams. By going all-out against athlete pay of any kind and declining to engage with even a relative half-measure like name, image, and likeness payments, the NCAA played itself."

https://slate.com/culture/2022/05/ncaa-name-image-likeness-athlete-pay-for-play-dilemma.html

The world of sport needs us. Let's serve its people wisely and well.