Rodd Strobel: The oldest profession in the world

The Distinguished Faculty Lecturer for 2023 reveals lessons learned from more than three decades of coaching.

IF YOU EVER GET THE CHANCE, stand on the inside corner of an athletic track about 25 meters down the homestretch and watch eight good sprinters run the 200 meters. It’s art in pure, thundering, athletic motion. Coaches have unique opportunities to see athletes at peak performance and during extreme challenge. These moments of achievement and failure offer insight into how humans act and interact.

The profession of coaching dates to the beginning of time. The very first coach was God. Starting with Adam and Eve, God taught, supported, and developed a relationship to help them get from where they were to where they wanted to be. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were also coached by God, and God said things to them, like “Go to the land I will show you.” Throughout history humans have variously followed God’s game plan or gone way off course, but the best part of having God as our coach is that he never gives up on us.

I have been fortunate to be a part of coaching for over 30 years. My coaching career has spanned 41 seasons. I have coached a basketball team that lost 50-104 and one that won 97-17. I have coached a team with a one-win season and a few teams with one-loss seasons. I have no idea what my overall win-loss record is, and from the standpoint of fortune and fame I have had a remarkably unremarkable coaching career. However, I have practiced and thought about coaching for many years and have taught a lot of future coaches. During that time, three themes have emerged that are critical for effective coaching at any level and for any sport or activity.

1. THE CENTRALITY OF BEING HUMAN IS OUR PHYSICAL EXISTENCE.

Our bodies are not a secondary characteristic of our reality but are foundational to our human existence and experience.

In Jesus' life and ministry, He took care of physical needs first—repairing deformity, restoring sight, healing disease, feeding the hungry. He wanted to build a relationship, but He started with taking care of physical needs. He knew relationship wasn’t possible when people were too broken, hurting, or hungry to engage.

We are promised our bodies will be made perfect in the Earth made new. This tells us something about the importance of our bodies here and now. Paul teaches that our bodies are the temple of God. As the temple in Jerusalem was the place God met with the Israelites, our bodies are the place God meets with us. This is not a metaphor; we literally cannot experience God without our physical bodies.

We take in the world around us through our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. There is no human experience that is not a physical experience. Even the seemingly sedentary act of reading this article requires physical processes: Thoughts require neurological activity. Neurological activity requires action potentials. Action potentials require sodium and potassium ions to move through the channels and gates of semipermeable membranes. These are physical processes that are influenced by the health and wellness of the body.

I contend that taking good care of our bodies is our first responsibility if we want a relationship with God because we cannot experience God without our bodies. At an Adventist institution of higher learning, physical education in its largest sense, should be our first priority. If it isn’t, we are shortchanging our students and handicapping their ability to maximize learning opportunities. We should follow Jesus’ example of taking care of the physical first.

2. EMPATHY IS THE NECESSARY SKILL FOR HUMAN THRIVING.

In 1991, anthropologist Donald E. Brown published a list of human universals—features that show up in every culture with no exceptions. Along with crying, making jokes, understanding reciprocity, and having a concept of fairness, Brown finds that empathy is universal.

In his book "Humans are Underrated," Geoff Colvin points out that as machines and AI continue to replace instead of simply enhance humans, our unique abilities—particularly empathy— are becoming more valuable. Colvin notes that experts can predict with a high degree of accuracy which doctors will be sued for malpractice just by watching a few minutes of their interaction with a patient. Doctors with high empathy skills are sued less and their patients have better health outcomes. You can imagine that doctors with high empathy skills will be more valuable—and not just for hospitals and insurance companies— than doctors that come across as arrogant, impersonal, and unfeeling. Knowledge and skills are essential, but they are not enough to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Empathy enables better understanding and performance through strengthened relationships, but it doesn’t just work in athletics. I have worked on teams and led teams of people that didn’t involve scoring points or beating someone else. I’ve learned that empathy makes me a better teammate, employee, and boss. An empathetic approach allows those around me to flourish, which makes my life easier and very likely makes me more tolerable as well.

Empathy is a skill you can develop through practice, so don’t worry, you can get better at it if you want to.

3. OUR JOB IS TO LOVE PEOPLE THE WAY WE FIND THEM.

I Corinthians 13 lists skills and abilities that would be pretty amazing for people to have, but then says they are worthless without love. When Jesus was asked, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” he replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36–40 NIV)

Jesus was saying that everything the pharisees and teachers of the law had built a culture, religion, and church around was intended to point us toward loving God and loving others. Jesus didn’t qualify who the “others” were. “Neighbors” seems to imply anyone we interact with. That means the people living next door and across town. That means all the students that walk through our doors and sit in our classrooms—no exceptions for race, culture, ethnicity, orientation, or political party. Jesus didn’t qualify or allow exceptions for who our neighbor is, so when we choose to make those distinctions we are saying we know better than Jesus. Our job is to love people so freely that they wonder why. And when they ask, we get to say, “Because God first loved me, without reservation, without qualification, and despite a lifetime of proof I don’t deserve it.”

What does this have to do with coaching?

Coaches dream of a roster full of accomplished, seasoned players whose skills, understanding, and experience allow them to execute a game plan with just a few tweaks and adjustments here and there. Then coaches wake up and realize their players aren’t perfect, and they have to take each player right where they are.

Most players want to get better, but there is a complicating factor: human nature. It may surprise you to learn that not all players hang on every word the coaches say. Some players think they know better. Some players don’t want to improve their footwork or learn how to play defense. Then coaches have a choice: They can write off their players or they can work with who they’ve got.

If I want to influence a player’s game or their life in general, I have to take them where they are. If I can convince them I care about them—and it has to be genuine because they have great lie detectors—then I can get them to try almost anything.

In its fullest sense, coaching is not just about athletics. Jesus, the original coach, came to us in human form, with a physical body. He demonstrated empathy, taking people where they were, ministering to their needs, and developing a relationship based on respect, which led to understanding, which led to love. Jesus knows we are broken, but instead of wishing for better players, he takes us where we are, shows compassion, understanding, and love, and helps us get to where we want to go. With Jesus’ style of coaching, where players understand their coach is more interested in them than their jump shot, they end up desperately wanting to improve their jump shot.

The best coach ever loves us despite the fact that we’re not perfect, so we shouldn’t expect perfection from each other. Our job is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves. God is inviting each of us to join his coaching staff.

Watch Strobel's complete lecture at wallawalla.edu/dfl.