What I Wish I Knew as a First-Year Coach
NYU Huddle
The year was 2000. A few years out of college.
My first coaching job: a club team in New York City — NYU.
I was young, wired with energy, and ready to set the world on fire.
If you’ve ever walked into your first season as a brand-new coach, you know that feeling.
The nerves.
The dreams.
The head full of ideas that have been simmering for years, finally about to be unleashed.
I thought I was ready for anything.
Looking back now, I can say this with complete honesty:
I made it a mess!
Complicated.
Intense.
Too much of everything.
Not because I didn’t care or didn’t know the game — I cared too much.
That was the problem.
I mistook passion for wisdom.
And passion, when it’s unfiltered, can make you blind.
Back then, being a “good coach” meant proving myself every minute:
– Teach them everything I knew
– Push until they broke or got better
– Install schemes meant for teams far more polished
– Demand intensity like we were prepping for Memorial Day weekend
– Pretend every practice was a championship dress rehearsal
But here’s the thing they don’t tell you in the coaching brochures:
Good coaching isn’t showing how much you know.
It’s reading the room.
It’s understanding what your players need — not what you wish they needed, not what you needed at their age, not what the perfect imaginary team in your head would respond to.
With NYU, that realization hit me like a brick.
These guys weren’t me.
They weren’t NCAA athletes grinding for glory.
They were students in the chaos of New York City — brilliant, ambitious, stretched thin, and playing lacrosse because they loved it… not because it was the center of their universe.
And those differences mattered.
Every coaching stop after that drove the point home:
A middle school in Beverly Hills.
A high school rooted in religious Judaism.
A national team in a Latin American country.
Even a competitive high school program that most resembled my own past.
Different places.
Different cultures.
Different kids.
Different battles.
And every time, the same truth stared back at me:
They are not me.
So I stopped talking about my own background.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was whether I could adapt — whether I could take the knowledge I’d gathered, break it down, reshape it, and deliver it in a way that fit their world, not mine.
People talk about lacrosse IQ like it’s understanding the nuances of your home system.
Sure. Fine.
But the deeper truth is much uglier and far more honest:
Real coaching is being able to move pieces without losing the people attached to them.
Simplify.
Adjust.
Strip away the ego.
Coach the team in front of you, not the ghost of the team you wish you had.
Two decades later, I still think about that first season and all the moments where I wish someone had pulled me aside and said, “Relax. Slow down. These kids need a coach, not a visionary general staging a Broadway show.”
So I put together something for the brand-new coaches — the young ones hungry to prove themselves and the older ones stepping into leadership with a lifetime of life experience but zero reps with a whistle.
Will the younger coaches listen?
Maybe. Maybe not.
You can’t force-feed wisdom. You can only offer it.
But I remember that feeling:
Passionate.
Eager.
Overcommitted.
Overwhelmed.
And quietly wondering, every night, if I was screwing it all up.
If that’s you… you’re not alone.
What I break down is everything I wish someone had handed me back then:
– how to decide what to teach and what to leave the hell alone
– why simple, clean execution beats flashy chaos every time
– how to read the temperature of a team
– how to earn trust before asking for fire
– how to talk so players actually hear you
– why culture comes before the playbook
– and the mindset that turns young coaches into real ones
Twenty-five years of mistakes, small victories, growing pains, and perspective — boiled down and offered up.
Because passion is rocket fuel.
But wisdom?
Wisdom is earned.
One season. One screw-up. One breakthrough at a time.
And if I can pass even a little of that along…
Why wouldn’t I?
