Mastering the art of coaching is nearly impossible.
For professional sports teams, there’s the pressure of performance and the constant scrutiny from fans and media. For local youth sports, the pressure comes from other directions: parents wanting more playing time for their kids, coaches clashing with players, or even disagreements between coaches themselves.
There’s no recipe for being the perfect coach, but Lance Marohn is doing his best.
“It’s all worth it,” said Marohn. “It’s so rewarding to see the girls’ faces light up and how well they’re doing and learning, and watching the progression from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. I’m a very social person, so it’s a great way to get to know the community and the people.”
Marohn grew up in Waldersee, Man., where he played hockey, baseball and even broomball. His father, Ronald, coached him growing up, and that’s where he learned what it takes to coach community sports and succeed at it.
Since moving to the Interlake, Marohn has carried on the tradition by coaching his kids. It’s become a year-round commitment on top of his job as a project manager for PCL Construction.
The schedule leaves him with only about a week and a half away from coaching each year, as one sport ends and another begins.
Now 45, Marohn has built up nine years of experience behind the bench in hockey, softball and soccer for his children Brock, Katie and Annika.
He still has a long way to go to match his father’s four decades of coaching.
“He’s a mentor,” said Marohn. “He’s somebody I can go to and talk about little things. He’s the one who told me he prefers coaching girls over boys because girls he can coach out of a jam. Boys fall behind in a game, sometimes they lose their head and take themselves out of the game. But he says with a girls’ team, you can coach them back in a lot easier. That kind of stuff, he’s always said. If you run a drill with the girls and show them how to do something, they’re going to do it that way every time. If you show the boys, he basically said if you tell the boys to go beat each other up, they will. It’s just the psyche of the two genders.”
This past year, Marohn coached the city championship–winning U11 A2 Female Stonewall Blues and served as assistant coach for the provincial champion U11 A Stonewall Blue Jays girls’ softball team.
He has also pitched in with Timbits soccer and U9 hockey.
Balancing fun and competition is one of the greatest challenges when coaching younger players. Some are just there to try a new sport, while others want to push for the next level.
Marohn works to blend the two.
“You need a healthy mix between competition and fun, so I always make sure the girls are going to have fun—that’ll never be a problem,” said Marohn. “When it comes to practices or games they also need competition. In my mind, it’s a huge thing for learning. As the kids come into adulthood, they need to understand how to get out of tough situations. They need to learn how to handle losing, whether it’s a battle for the puck in the corner or dropping a fly ball. Not only that, the others on the team need to learn how to handle it when one of their teammates fails, because at the end of the day the team wins and loses together. That’s something I’ve really been practicing and preaching. The biggest part of it is communication.”
That communication extends to the coaches as well. Marohn says his teams have found the most success when head and assistant coaches work as equals.
“What I’ve learned about being a coach is that it’s not all me at all,” said Marohn. “My job is to organize the group, and one of the first things I learned is that I really need to put a lot of trust in my assistant coaches and ask for help right from day one, whether it’s hockey or baseball.”
Marohn said he tries to learn something from each coach he works with.
He named Scott Marohn, Scott Yurick, Jim Campbell, Nathan Brunel, Megan Humeniuk, Brian McLeod, Scott Kwasnitza, Heidi Fingas, Kevin Donovan, Shawn Rempel, Nicole Hutchinson and Brynn Williams as recent collaborators.
Other mentors include Larry Denbow, Garth White and Jerry Caumartin, who all coached Marohn during his playing days.
