I had accepted the position of club mentor after nearly thirty years around beach volleyball. I wasn’t the director. I wasn’t a coach. I wasn’t there to evaluate anyone. My job was simple on paper and impossible in practice: help the people inside the club work together again.
On my first afternoon, I watched practice from the far edge of the beach.
The volleyball was beautiful.
The relationships were not.
A coach corrected an athlete without making eye contact.
A parent questioned another coach before practice instead of after.
Two assistant coaches taught the same skill in completely different ways and quietly criticized one another once the athletes walked away.
None of the disagreements were loud.
They didn’t need to be.
During our bi-annual coaches meeting I interrupted the coaches small talk about weather and traffic.
“We’re together every day but we’re almost never with each other.”
That sentence changed the conversation.
The coaches started telling stories.
Not about work.
But about how they found volleyball.
Who taught them.
The tournaments that changed their lives.
The mentors who believed in them before they believed in themselves.
One coach admitted he almost quit coaching after his first season because he thought he wasn’t good enough.
Another confessed she still gets nervous before every practice.
Someone else laughed and admitted they still forget athletes’ names during the first month of every season.
By the time breakfast ended, nobody had solved a single club problem.
They had simply become more human to one another.
The athletes noticed long before the adults did.
A twelve-year-old walked over to Coach Aaron.
“You guys are smiling more.”
He laughed.
“Are we?”
Every session became less about proving who was right and more about exploring what each person could contribute.
Parents stayed afterward asking questions.
Not because they had received perfect answers.
But because they had watched adults model respectful disagreement.
The athletes were sitting in the bleachers during the final session.
I asked one of the older players what she thought.
“It makes me feel better.”
“Why?”
“Because if the coaches don’t know everything, I don’t have to know everything either.”
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