Today’s Play on Picking Teams: A Playbook for Parents, explores the importance of character over talent in college recruiting. Coach Bryant’s guest shares a story of one of his athletes who became all-conference in college despite setbacks while emphasizing the value of intangibles like body language and effort. He recalls a poignant moment from the 2018 Final Four, highlighting the emotional impact of team unity. He also stresses the need for coaches and parents to work together, viewing sports as a learning experience rather than just wins and losses. Both Coach Bryant and her guest advocate for a growth mindset and the transformational role of coaches in students’ lives. The transcript is available below.
Today’s Guest: David Harbin is the Assistant Director of Activities and Athletics at Decatur High School in Decatur, GA. He is a Certified Athletic Administrator, recognized by the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, and serves on the Board of the Georgia Athletic Directors Association (GADA). He has taught various classes with the GADA on Middle School Athletics and has served as the Middle School Liaison, as well as the Chair of the Technology Committee. Prior to becoming a full-time Athletic Director, David taught Middle School Social Studies and coached high school and middle school soccer and basketball, working primarily as the Boys’ Varsity Soccer Coach for eight years. His team competed in multiple Final Fours and won the 2016 state championship. He was recognized by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America as the Small School State Coach of the Year, as well as the Small School Coach of the Year for the Southern Region of the US. In college, David played soccer for Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Amy Bryant 00:52
With your student athletes that did go on to play in college. What was the difference with them? Like, how were they that successful?
David Harbin 01:02
Gosh, that’s hard to say. You know, we have had a handful of kids, kids who I coached in soccer, but then I’ve also seen a lot of other athletes in my role as an athletic director. Move on. It’s so hard to pinpoint. You know, I think talent, obviously, is important. You a coach is always going to look for who are the players that can help my team. But you know, as a college coach, talent is not the hardest thing to find. And I imagine, as a coach, when you are I guess, an advantage or disadvantage that a college coach has over a high school coach is you get to pick your players. We work at a school, we coach the players who go to this school, right? But because you do that, there’s a little bit more pressure on you because you picked them, and so you better be successful. But also you need to know who you’re inviting into your program and finding out who they are as people you know, not only are they going to be competitive on the tennis court, but how are they going to behave on the bus? What are they going to be like at Team meals? Are they going to be encouraging with their teammates? And finding that’s got to be difficult. And so when I think back on our high school athletes, it’s challenging to say we have some who we have a our goalie. Trevor McMullen is a goalie at Mercer right now, who is all conference goalie. He was pushing to go to Mercer. Mercer had four goalies when he was trying to get recruited. They just didn’t make sense for them to give an opportunity to a fifth goalie. Again, a few things happened, and they offered him an opportunity. One of those goalies graduated, two of them got injured. He ended up being the starting goalie as a sophomore. Has been an all conference player and has had a great career, but he was one that was, you know, one conversation away from not getting that opportunity, and it’s been successful. We’ve had a lot of other kids who have not had, you know, nearly the same success, have gone and gone to school to play, but didn’t necessarily pick a good fit, or they went somewhere and the coach left. So it’s it’s challenging, but I do think focusing on your talent is a mistake focusing on character. Good college coaches are going to be able to come and see your talent quickly. They’re also going to be able to judge your body language quickly. They’re going to be able to judge, you know, how did you warm up? How did you finish the game? What was the conversation like when you came off the field or off the court? Those are the things that now I, you know, when I was coaching, I was trying to teach it, but now I’m not coaching. I have an even more peripheral view, but I see those things and saying, Hey, I know you scored 20 points in the game, I know you had two touchdowns. I know you had a great time in your race. But here’s the things that I noticed, that if you want to go to the next level, those coaches are noticing it, and you’re not even thinking about it right now. So putting that learning opportunity for our students to say, Oh yeah, just as hard as just as much emphasis as I put on getting better at the sport, I need to be just as thoughtful about all those intangibles, my body language, my attitude, my effort, my conversations
Amy Bryant 04:21
and it is really a learning process for these kids, isn’t it? I mean, this is, you know, you’ve got them young, you’ve got them in a very impressionable age. And it’s, I feel like you have to be very patient with them as well as you groom them and educate them and and show them the way to become a mature adult, or as mature as they can be. I mean, we all know the frontal lobe doesn’t develop till age 25 you know, for boys, any you know. So you’re dealing with some of that too, and college coaches are dealing with that too. But I know that there’s a huge, you know, learning curve that that happens in high school. So kudos to you for being patient and helping them through. Do you have a favorite coaching memory or success story that you can share with us where a kid really developed? Yeah,
David Harbin 05:11
I people ask me this all the time. I think the obvious and maybe not the obvious, but the expected answer is, we won the state championship in 2016 and we celebrated on the bus and in the locker room, and it was just a great culmination of a lot of effort that year, but also for the two years before, and that was great. And I loved winning. And we think about that, but there are other, you know, moments that come to mind. And I don’t know why this sticks out, but I vividly remember waiting on a practice to start as the I think the lacrosse team was finishing up their practice, and we were waiting for our opportunity to get on the field. And there was a lacrosse ball that had rolled off the field, and I had picked it up, and one of our seniors and I just were throwing the ball back and forth, bouncing it, catching it, no talking, but just connecting in a way that I can’t describe. But it was like, I love this, like I love being around these kids. I love having like these moments, like I love the competition, I love all the sport, but I just also really appreciate being around them. And that’s a strange memory to stand out for that question, but I hold on to that. And I don’t really know why, but I’m putting that out there for people. I think the real answer I had to pick one. We were in the Final Four in 2018 had a very good team. We had lost our first game, went undefeated since then, we lost our first game to Macintosh, who is a arrival of ours for years, and ran into McIntosh again in the Final Four, and just played a great game. Really had opportunities to win, and just the ball did not bounce in the direction we needed it to, to close it out. It went into overtime, went into penalty kicks, and we ended up losing in penalty kicks. And I get emotional thinking about this. Hopefully it doesn’t come across too much in the audio, but it was heartbreaking. And we went into the locker room, and you know, you don’t, you know, you know this. As a coach, when the season ends, there’s no script for what you say. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to make it better. But we went through that conversation, and one of the things I learned as a coach, like, I don’t really know what to say, but I do want, like, all of you guys need to hug each other because you’re not going to be back in this locker room again, and this is hard, but like, show that you care about each other before you leave. So we did that, and we had two players as the players slowly, like, trickled out of the locker room, knowing, again, like we’re not coming back, and this is sad. They trickle down. We had two players our goalie, who unfairly took responsibility for not saving a penalty kick, who was just felt like he let his team down. And we had one of our best players and most impactful players, who his penalty kick did get saved, and they were very emotional without going too much into it. So we were consoling them and talking to them. And ultimately it said, All right, guys like, you know, we got to go. And my assistant coach came in the locker room and he said, Hey, y’all like, let’s go. Everybody’s waiting on you, and you’ve been to our field, so you’re familiar. But for those who are listening, our locker room is kind of down the stairs, and you kind of leave the locker room and walk up the stairs into the bleachers, and that’s usually where our parents would wait for the kids. And so I thought, you know, parents are waiting for these, these two kids, parents are waiting on them. And I said, Well, you know who? He said, everyone’s waiting on me. I said, Coach. Who you talking about? He said the whole team is standing outside the locker room. They won’t go to the bleachers until all the kids come out so they can go together. And for me, it was like they care about each other. And I didn’t teach, you know, I didn’t tell them that and tell them to wait, but they just said, like, we know somebody’s hurting, so we’re going to stay together and we’ll go, this is definitely going to come across in the audio, but it was so touching, and so that’s where it’s like, we lost. That was a failure. We didn’t win. We should have won that game. We should have won that championship. But in the end, like that, that’s the most important moment I’ve had as a coach, because I knew we did a good job connecting them with people.
Amy Bryant 09:28
There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion. David
David Harbin 09:31
and I think talk, I have to be able to say
Amy Bryant 09:36
that’s it’s just powerful. It’s real powerful. What you did there for those student athletes and for their future, the impact is going to be long term for them, they’ll take that lesson with them. You know that, yes, they’ll take the heartache, but they’ll take more importantly, they’ll take the experience of being with a group of people that they genuinely care about and realize that they can go from struggling to achieving to struggling. They can do it all together, and they can lean on each other for support, and they’ll take that into their future jobs. They’ll take that into their future families. I mean, that kind of development is really what sports are all about. That’s,
David Harbin 10:30
I think, and this is my philosophy. And you were, you were very successful, and more so than me, you have, I have one championship, and you have more than one championship, but I won a championship the third year that I was coaching, and I naively thought, well, now we’re going to win a championship every year, which we didn’t. But one of the things I learned from that, and this is so difficult to communicate, but I very quickly learned how irrelevant The championship was. It was nice to win, but winning, winning a championship, did not determine that team’s experience was more valuable than any other team’s experience. You know, we talk to kids all the time about, you know, your playing time does not determine your value to this team or the number of points you score that everyone has value, and you have to be again, intentional about teaching that and showing that and recognizing that. But when I won, I thought, yeah, we did it. And immediately realized, no, this team is no better. They’re no they’re no more valuable than the team before, and that didn’t quite do it, or the team that got put out in the first round as an experience as a high school student athlete, some of those things are uncontrollable, right? You’re not You’re not going to win because your best player was was injured. You’re not going to win because the other team’s just better than you. But I think too often, we’re putting all of our emphasis on playing time, points, score wins and losses and on championships, and when you do that, you risk missing so many opportunities to win that you can control. But you have to be thoughtful about how you do that,
Amy Bryant 12:13
absolutely, absolutely. And hearing your story brought back a memory that I had of one of my successful teams, and I had a lot of successful teams that didn’t win championships, too, you know, but this particular team, we were doing morning conditioning, and each time, we were doing wind sprints, line sprints, whatever. And I’m a big proponent of look, you know, if you if you’re going to a line, touch the line, turn around, right? It’s really easy to cut that line short, and especially when you’re doing multiple sprints, you know, it feels unnecessary to get all the way to that line. You know, we’re talking about an inch. We’re talking about two inches making it there. So I would always coach my team. You go past that line so you don’t accidentally cut it short. You go past that line every time. And we are having a struggle with that with one of my teams and and we had them out there for so long doing these sprints. I mean, it was, it was borderline. We’re going to get in trouble by our administration for so anyways, we finally get to the point where I’m like, I can’t sprint them anymore. I’m going to hurt them. This is going to be a malpractice situation. And so we called it a day, and my captains looked at me, and they’re like, coach, we got, we got to do this, right? We got one more coach. You know, we’re not going in yet. And they continued to go until they got that entire group to go past the line, and that says a lot, right? That says a lot about the job that we’re doing as coaches. And it’s definitely the things that you hold on to and look back at as successes. And that team actually did turn out to be successful in the end, beating a much better opponent, you know, one of those uncontrollables. But, you know, I just really attribute that success to the great leadership that we had on that team and as well as the ability for everyone to buy into that leadership. So I think,
David Harbin 14:16
as a coach, one of the most important things that you do, there’s, there’s, there’s a million different ways to to coach and to get a job done. I think the most important thing is how you communicate and what you communicate. I think I’ll use your example of running, if you were just running them over and over again, and they don’t know why they’re running again, as I experienced now, we just hate our coach. She’s just running us, and she doesn’t like us, and we don’t like her. We don’t know what we’re doing, but you tell them we’re running because you’re not touching the line. Okay, that’s one form of communication, but take that the next step. Here’s why touching the line is important, because touching the line is eliminating excuses for underachieving. Touching the line is showing that we’re disciplined. Touching the line is all these things, but I think as coaches, we get in trouble when we assume that kids know what we’re thinking, or they know what we think they should know. And you have to teach everything. It goes back to like every opportunity is a teaching opportunity, and teaching is communicating. So talking about here’s why we’re doing that. There’s a great book. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. Joe IRM is a former NFL football player turned high school football coach, has a book called Inside Out coaching. I read a lot of books, but that book spoke to me in terms of just kind of capturing my philosophy of what I was trying to do as a coach. And one of the points that he talks a lot about is being a transactional coach versus being a transformational coach. And your example is that, to me, right, you are running because I told you to, it’s transactional. You are running because if you don’t, you’re not gonna play. You are running because I gave you a scholarship and you do what I told you to do is transactional. And I think we as coaches sometimes don’t realize that what, while we’re trying to teach a lesson, if we’re not communicating it, it can feel very power struggling. I’m the coach. I tell you what to do if you want to play. You do what I say versus the same scenario. But you’re telling them, here’s why we’re running. It’s important to touch the line we went through this. You’re adding a transformational piece to the same activity, right? I want you to know how important details are. I want you to know how important discipline is. I’m explaining that when we get to the conference finals three months from now, we’re going to be able to, you know, consciously or subconsciously remember that, like we put effort into going above and beyond, and we’re going to have confidence because we did that. That is a transformational lesson in how people think, versus a transactional I’m only doing this because I have to and that. Again, I’ve used the word mindset a lot, but I think coaching is mindset, is psychology, and you have to talk and teach those things in order for kids to learn those things.
Amy Bryant 17:24
I could not agree with you more. And the coaches that you are responsible for at Decatur high school, I think, are very lucky to have you, as long as they’re still willing to learn and still learning to grow. I mean, again, the coaches that have the growth mindset are the ones that are most successful for the longest period of time. And our job as coaches is to be teachers, and we have to be patient. We have to educate. I do want to mention for parents, you know, we’ve talked about some some great examples here, of experiences that your child might come home with, for example, in my situation, when I was talking about the sprinting, one of those student athletes could called home and said, you know, mom, dad, my coach ran me into the ground today. It was incessant. There was no care for my emotional well being, my physical health. They were just running for the sake of running. And as a parent, you can hear that that’s a snapshot of what happened. Yes, that is a description of what happened. Is it a complete description? No. And so I think as parents, it’s important to ask questions like, tell me more about this running experience. Why was your coach running you into the ground? What transpired to make you run longer than you thought you were going to run? How did your captains react to the situation? How did the practice end? So these are all questions to help educate your child as well, because it’s not just the coach’s job to educate it is also the parent’s job to support the coach in their lessons, as long as there is a lesson there right, as long as they aren’t being too transactional, as long as they are being transformational. But as a parent, I think oftentimes we’re so quick, we have this knee jerk reaction to jump in and say, You can’t run my child like that. You know, we have to protect. We go into Mama Bear, Papa Bear, mode, and we want to protect, but we need to listen to we need to slow down, and we need to listen and hear what is actually the lesson and the value that’s being taught. What are your thoughts on that you work with parents a lot more than I did in college.
David Harbin 19:52
Yeah, that’s really hard. Coaching is hard. Yeah, coaching is really hard. Teaching is hard. Part of that difficulty again, goes back to like, not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it, and you might know why, but if other if the kids don’t know why, yeah, they’re going home and they’re telling mom and dad, Coach ran us into the ground, and my knee hurts now, and this, this and this, and that’s all they know, because you if you didn’t tell them something different. That’s what they think. Right the other side, as you might have told the kids, here’s why, here’s why we’re doing this, but the parent doesn’t know. And I, I just think, especially in youth sports, and this may change some in college, I think it definitely does, but in youth sports, you we are going to be most successful guiding our student athletes if our coaches and our parents are partners. I make it a point to try to get to our preseason parent meetings that our coaches have with their parents, and I have a few points that I make, but one of them is preparing the parents and the students for what they have signed up for. And what I tell them is, your kids have signed up for failure. They have signed up to make mistakes, and they have signed up for disappointment. We’re all agreeing that that’s what we’re signing up for today, what we as the adults have to sign up to do is guide them through all of those lessons as a as a student athlete myself, and I think this is probably range through for a lot of people, some of the most important lessons that I learned as an athlete were the hardest lessons to learn. I learned lessons when I was injured and I couldn’t play for a year and I had to go through that recovery process. That was not a fun lesson to learn, but it was an important lesson to learn. I learned a lot when I would get cut, cut from various programs as a player, growing up, I didn’t make the middle school basketball team, and I was devastated. Those lessons are not fun to learn, but they’re important to learn, and as the adults, kids don’t learn them if we are not helping them, or they see us not supporting each other as as they’re trying to go through it right, if the parent’s initial reaction is to yell at the coach, talk bad about the coach, to the kid at home, send an email to the athletic director, we’re missing the opportunity, because I believe that our coaches have good intentions, and when we have conversations about what happened, we can learn from it. I think the other thing that’s another story I tell, is when I was a teacher, we had a parent conference that that has stuck with me forever. Had a student who we were meeting with the parents, and it was just kind of a general parent conference. We were probably in October. For me, the student had been doing well. They were not scoring the best grades, but there was nothing about their academic success that was concerning to me. They seemed to be having a good time in class, laughing, had friends, and so I thought it’d be a pretty easy meeting. And the parents came in, and it wasn’t just my class, but in general, they told us, you know, our student, we’re concerned because our student is coming home every day, stressed, anxious, they’re crying, they’re not enjoying school, and we want to just know what’s going on. And all of us teachers were totally surprised, because the student we saw was doing well academically, having a good time, laughing, socializing, everything looked great, and without that conversation, we would have never known that this student was really having some struggles academically, having some struggles socially, and it wasn’t a contextual meeting where the parents were coming to attack us. They were saying, Hey, here’s what’s happening. We were, you know, are y’all seeing this? And how can we help each other to make their experience better? And I think the same thing goes with sports. You know, you’re going to have kids who come to practice and they work hard, they’re smiling, they seem to be having a good time, and they go home and they’re disappointed because they’re not playing, they aren’t having a good experience with their teammates, all the variety of things that can be challenging, but if parents don’t communicate with coaches, and coaches don’t have that aren’t willing to have that conversation with parents, the necessary partnership never comes together, and so I think it’s important for coaches to be open, but I also think it’s helpful when parents assume the best and also give grace. Hey, this was the lesson I was trying to teach this day. You’re I appreciate you telling me that, because it obviously didn’t land with your son or daughter the way that I was hoping it did, and now I can navigate that differently. But if you don’t have that conversation, I don’t know why would change as a coach, because from what I saw, it seemed to be okay, or I had no you know. So I think understanding, again, as I said, coaching is hard. Coaches do a lot of extra work, and coaches care about their kids, but they don’t always, you know, they’re going to make mistakes or lessons are not going to land, and parents give grace, go out of your way to show support, but also like be a partner in guiding them through these the challenging lessons that we signed up for at the beginning of the year.
Amy Bryant 25:18
Absolutely, I love that. I always say the coaches are human too. You know, we make mistakes, and you know, as long as our intentions are good, you know, there’s a difference between intentions and the impact, for sure, but as long as the intentions are good, then then we can always make things right. So having the parent support, having their trust, having their belief in us and having them extend grace when we need grace, can create the ultimate partnership for our student athletes. Yeah,
David Harbin 25:51
I think you know, if we’re going to wrap it up, I’ll also say this, and I say this to our coaches, and I try to say to our parents as well, we actually have started giving away superhero Awards where we have a superhero cape that we will give to our coaches, because I believe they are superheroes, not only for the lessons that they teach through their sport, but what I have seen in my you know, years as a teacher and a coach and now an administrative position, coaches are your are your front line workers. They are going to be the first people who know about a crisis. Coaches, teachers, literally, most of them are teachers, but coaches are teachers of the game. They’re teachers of life lessons, but they’re also counselors. They’re social workers, they’re athletic trainers, they are all of these. They play all of these roles. And our kids go through a lot. There are some, you know, small issues that they deal with, but it’s academically, socially. And there’s also some major issues that you know, a parent is sick or a parent dies during the season, and very often the coach is the first person who knows about that. And again, that’s such a valuable relationship for a kid to have, and so like having a coach and having a teammate who you can be vulnerable with and share and lean on in those moments, and then having a system that a school system provides to say, Hey, I appreciate you sharing with me. Here are all the resources that I can connect you with to sort of guide you through this. You know, this challenge, whether it’s big or small, is is huge, and that’s where, again, the value of our coaches, but also the value of coaching in a school system is just unparalleled to anything else. I think kids can, can get it, having that, that adult role model,
Amy Bryant 27:38
that’s great. That’s really good. Well, David, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing and for being vulnerable yourself. We appreciate it, but truly, you shared so many great insights with us. We didn’t even get through half of the questions that I had for you. So we’ll have to have you back on the show again to share some more insights with our parents, because, because truly you are a great source of information and support for our parents, our students and coaches as well. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, and we’ll we’ll see you soon.
David Harbin 28:12
All right, Sounds Good?
