To start this post, during 2007-2009 I coached as a High School Student. This year, I'm a mentor, coaching for the same team.
Looking back on my years as a student coach, I'm not going to lie, I learned a lot from interacting with other teams and getting a true understanding of the "little things" one needs to account for in this competition from field experience. As an awkward high schooler, I even developed more social skills because I was forced to work with groups of people I've never met before and of varying ages.
I will not dispute the positives that a high schooler can learn from coaching, but there are also many negatives from the experience. If something goes wrong on the field, who's fault is it? The Coach. If your teams human player commits a penalty, who gets chewed out by other drive coaches? The Coach.
If your team lost a match by two points, and one of the mentors on your team comes up to you and says "you should have done this" even though the mentor didn't think of what you should have done until 5 minutes after the match, displaying classic signs of "monday morning quarterback" who gets blamed? The Coach.
As a high schooler, I wasn't ready for the pressure that the position held. Now this doesn't mean that every high schooler can't do it, that isn't what I'm saying. But I was coaching students of the same age as me, if the strategy didn't work, instead of the drivers blaming the coach, they blamed themselves. It was difficult for me to put the weight of the drive team on my shoulders because I was just another student.
As a mentor coaching now, there is a difference in age between my drivers and I that allows for a certain level of respect. There are other factors such as experience, number of sandwiches I've purchased for them, and having to show that I put in more hours than them to create the "first one in, last one out" effect. But, when we lose a match, I can teach these young students not to blame themselves and put the weight of the matches on someone like me. By taking the pressure off of their shoulders, and putting it on a seasoned coached like myself, if we lose a match, we can spend time watching the replay to see how to improve, hit the practice field to try new things, and move on rather than sticking in the past.
Looking back on it now, I wish someone could have taught me not to dwell on past matches and move on. It hindered me as a high school student, but now that I'm older, and have experienced other failures in life, I understand when to move on.
Although 1 high school student loses the ability to learn something from the competition, another 3 are taught an even more important lesson. That is why I coach as a mentor.
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Every team works differently.
