What makes a good leader? What a great way to pose the question. It highlights that leaders are made not born. Leaders are made through experience. You have to lead to come into your own as a leader. For coaches who hope to develop their athletes into leaders, that means, you have to give them opportunities to lead. And that doesn’t mean just handing them a captain’s armband for show, while you tell what they should choose should they win the coin toss.
Leadership development has to include authentic leadership opportunities, rather than just tokenistic ones. If you want young people to become leaders, you have to actually let them lead. That means they need experience making decisions, directing others, communicating before groups, and holding responsibility. That can seem a bit daunting, like you need to give over full reigns of your team. However, this can be smaller scale opportunities that give them a taste of leadership while they still learn from you. It can be as simple as setting practice captains, who are responsible for leading aspects of the practice, like choosing the activities, getting players into groups, and providing directions for the activity. Or allowing the athletes to choose certain responsibilities like managing equipment for the day. Or having captains for the scrimmage who can speak to their small side team’s needs and manage their strategy for the game. Whatever option you choose, be sure to provide feedback on how things went at the end of practice to help your athletes learn and grow in their skills.
There are multiple ways that you can provide leadership development opportunities in you practice, more than I can fit into a post. What ideas do you have?
The Sideline Fix 
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