“The idea isn’t to coach most of the population to a decent level of performance in football, baseball, soccer, tennis, and swimming. It’s to coach the best athletes in their one or two sports.”
Football, soccer, baseball, tennis are the sports where it’s MOST important to bring people up to a decent level. The ones that excel will excel and take the least of the coach’s time. These are team sports, everyone works together to learn and to play, or the team as a whole doesn’t succeed.

“Few kids play more than one sport; often, they choose one they’re good at, and really practice. It’s really hard to start a new sport and get on a team if other kids have been doing it for a couple of years (individual sports are easier to get into). Imagine a student whose never played baseball, deciding in college to play on the team. Do you think the coach is going out of his way to get the kid the individual coaching he needs to catch up?”"
In a lot of colleges, this is the case, unless you’re Division 1 in everything. Rugby starts up with people that’ve never played before, sometimes lacrosse, etc. The kids who excel the best in sports have been playing many sports, maybe a different one every season since they were small. General athleticism and reaction time helps in all other sports too, it’s half physical and half rules/techniques execution.

Since my area is music and music technology, I’ve been studying how teachers get the most of their students. Fortunately, because of the time I worked in Hollywood, I met many composers and orchestrators who after WWII, studied either in Paris or Santa Barbara with Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger studied with Faure who also taught Ravel.

While I was writing How Ravel Orchestrated: Mpther Goose Suite, I spent time studying Ravel and his life as a student. To the point: Ravel was a terrible student in the classroom and was thrown out.

What made Ravel Ravel, was Faure, who in the evenings would go hear student compositions outside of class and critique them constructively.

Ravel had the desire and the motivation to put into excelling as a composer. What he needed was direction and mentoring. That came outside the classroom, not within.

What I’m seeing is that learning must be broken down into two camps. The first is fact based. This is easy to teach in a lecture environment. Skill, however, is assimilating and doing.

This is where the coaching comes in. I think good models here are basketball greats John Wooden and Dean Smith. The coach has to be “hands on” for those times where a demonstration is required.

To develop skill one must learn to think the subject through. Then comes the experimentation that develops insight, competency and technique.

The requirement of the student is that he/she must be willing to give themselves over to this level of dedication and the teacher must be skilled enough to direct it.

Coaches at almost every level (except the youngest kids) get to kick players off the team or bench them if they don’t perform or appear to be working hard, or for any rule infraction. The idea isn’t to coach most of the population to a decent level of performance in football, baseball, soccer, tennis, and swimming. It’s to coach the best athletes in their one or two sports.

Few kids play more than one sport; often, they choose one they’re good at, and really practice. It’s really hard to start a new sport and get on a team if other kids have been doing it for a couple of years (individual sports are easier to get into). Imagine a student whose never played baseball, deciding in college to play on the team. Do you think the coach is going out of his way to get the kid the individual coaching he needs to catch up?

In academics, we want everyone in the population to be literate, to have some basic math skills, to know some history, and so forth. In college, we provide introductory courses in many areas (and community colleges provide remedial courses in things such as reading and math). A student with minimal math prep in high school can become a math major. (Admittedly, in my school at least, that doesn’t work for music majors.)

My school has maybe 80 students on the football team, and six coaches. There’s a coach for the quarterbacks, and one for the offensive line, one for defense, and so on. I’d like those numbers for my teaching, wouldn’t you? They also have nice facilities, and we’re no big ten school or anything. Even the local high schools have multiple football coaches.

In contrast, most high school kids get no coaching, just go to a gym class and get told to run around and do this or that. We’d have a whole lot healthier population if high school PE folks focused on teaching active lifesports to most of us rather than trying to get a couple of men onto college football teams.

And bully for your soon, who I am assuming is in the image above.

School on the other hand is 50 minutes of “remember this” and then “Okay, now go home and practice by yourself… and if you mess up on the big day there will be consequences”. Then, almost as an afterthought “I’ll be at some obscure place at some obscure time that is completely out of context and doesn’t fit with your schedule and is far away from the field for about an hour if you need any help”.

Ultimately, students will not learn anything unless they learn it themselves. They have to get out of bed and come to class, read the assignments, ask questions in class, and make use of office hours. We can’t do that for them. If they do not do that on their own, they will not learn. The coach gets to cut the players who do not do that.