At a coach appreciation night in Washington, D.C., former U.S. Men’s National Team captain John Harkes stood before a room of youth coaches and told a story about the kind of mistake every coach hopes to avoid.

“Something else is there. Don’t assume,” Harkes said, before making a small but important correction: “I assumed.”

The lesson came during an ordinary day at practice, when a player showed up late, angry and difficult to reach. Harkes thought he was dealing with a bad attitude. But the problems that follow us home into our kitchens and living rooms, the ones we turn over for hours, are often the ones trying to tell us we got something wrong.

That night, Harkes told his wife he didn’t think he had handled it well.

“OK,” she replied. “What are you going to do better?”

The next morning, Harkes greeted the player at practice. Instead of opening with an interrogation about the young man’s behavior, Harkes began with an admission about his own.

“I wasn’t fully in here for you yesterday,” he told him.

Then he followed advice his father often repeated: Two ears, one mouth. Listen more.

The player told him what had been weighing on him: school, work and the pressure of trying to raise money. He had been running on fumes long before he touched the field, and Harkes had read all of it as a bad attitude.

“Now I see you,” Harkes told him. “I won’t let you down again.”

 That was the lesson Harkes carried back to the coaches in Washington, D.C. “Humility as a coach,” Harkes said. “You are not perfect. You are going to make mistakes. But if you are genuinely trying to do the best for this child, then you are a good coach.”

Coaching the person, not just........

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