Rocky: 0:01

Good evening everybody. Welcome to another live edition here on the Rockpile. I'm excited. Tonight on the Rockpile, tonight I bring you the second episode of the Beyond the Game podcast Tonight. This one has a special meaning to me, as many of you that follow the Mohawk Valley Sports Watch high school coaches, college coaches, nfl coaches and more on a very important topic that hits home for me, with youth sports, parents and so much more, and I'm excited to welcome. He was a coach.

Rocky: 0:34

Author of the book Out of Bounds, darren Ault's going to join me in just a moment. If you have any questions for the show tonight, you can put them right in the comment box. If you're following us on YouTube tonight, just make sure you hit the subscribe button Facebook, twitter, linkedin, any of the social media platforms tonight. I appreciate you tuning in tonight for this special episode. So, without further ado, let me bring Darren on now with us. Let me switch this up here. How are you, coach? I'm doing well, rocky. How are you? I'm doing great and, as you and I were just recently talking before we came on here tonight, this one hits home for me. We've had numerous discussions about the parents' involvement. I've talked a lot about what I would say is the old school coaches versus the coaches of today's game. That I want to get into with you. But first, welcome to the podcast.

Darren: 1:25

Thank you very much. I appreciate the platform and the opportunity to share this conversation with you. It is a pretty common thing, more common than most people know, and I'm eager to share the story with you.

Rocky: 1:38

So, darren, first give the audience tonight a little bit of background on yourself. I know a longtime coach. You've coached the boys, the girls, the high school level. I know you spent some time in college coaching. But just give our audience a quick overview of yourself.

Darren: 1:54

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm a native Californian originally but I was swept away by a New Jersey girl and ended up in New Jersey for the last, so I don't know since 1994, let's put it that way when I got out of the Navy, and pretty much right away well, actually, when I was in the Navy, I started coaching and getting the coaching bug. I was working as an assistant coach at the Naval Academy Prep School in Newport, rhode Island, which is the college level that you referred to, and we had a one-year rotation of kids sometimes 10 recruits for Navy, sometimes one and every year was a rebuilding year and we played people like Harvard JV and Brown JV and some of the big prep schools like New Hampton Prep and Main Central Institute. So really fun basketball, but also the challenge, like I said, of having to redo every year. Then, when I moved down to New Jersey, I started coaching seventh and eighth grade boys.

Darren: 2:44

I did that for about 12 years at a Catholic grammar school called Holy family. I had a wonderful time, wonderful experience building that program and raising it to the elevation of champions in the leagues on multiple times. Um, then I got into high school girls coaching when a friend of mine encouraged me at the Catholic high school locally that, hey, this job's open up, why don't you go coach girls? And I had never coached girls, it was always boys and young men. So I was like, okay, that'd be an interesting challenge. And uh, I tell you what I got into it and I absolutely loved it and I spent 22 years in New Jersey and the Jersey shore conference um coaching high school girls basketball at the varsity level.

Rocky: 3:25

Yeah, I'll say this is. I had the opportunity this year so I was giving you a little bit about my background. So I was a head varsity football coach for a little while at a small class D school here at Sequoia High School in Sequoia, new York. I spent some time with my dad, who was a head varsity coach for well over 35 years. And then I came back here to my hometown school in Rome, free Academy here in Rome, new York, as a modified coach.

Rocky: 3:48

But I spent some time at the youth coach in AAU boys basketball, which I'll get into with that, with you here in just a little bit. And then this past year my daughter, who's only nine years old, said to me one day Dad, you've always coached, aiden, you've never coached any girl sports. So I got the opportunity this year, darren, I coached girls' third and fourth grade basketball and I will tell you they were better than any varsity, any modified coach boy's sport I've ever coached. They listened. It was so much better. So I said to myself, I said to my wife, I said I must have missed something in my day because the girls were a lot easier to coach than the boys were.

Darren: 4:27

Yeah, you know they're gold and listen, it's. It's a different style of coaching, a different way of reception between boys and girls and and I enjoyed the heck out of both Um, but the girls were really special in a lot of ways and the biggest ways. I always said to uh. To people ask me, why don't you ever go back to boys? I said the girls are sponges, they want to learn, they want to be taught the fundamentals, they want to. They function better genuinely as a team, where the boys and I don't know if you know back in my day it was Reggie vision Every time Reggie Jackson hit a home run, or ESPN and the highlights but they get caught up a lot in the individuality and the ego part of the game and sometimes that can get in the way unless you're able to break through that. But I absolutely love coaching girls.

Rocky: 5:12

So, darren, you come up with the book, the topic, the name of the book Out of Bounds, which I will say I just purchased, so I haven't gotten it in yet to read the full book. Yet I've read parts that I've seen online. Where did the name Out of Bounds come from for you? What inspired you to write the book? And then the other question is how did you arrive at the name?

Darren: 5:36

So the inspiration and first of all I have to give my wife props because she designed the cover of the book as well. It's great. It's great, thank you. But the the inspiration came from when I was at currently at modern day high school.

Darren: 5:51

I was about 11 or 12 years into that coaching experience and I started to notice the couple of years prior to that that engagements with parents not all of them, I mean, trust me, this is a handful but the engagement with parents where they started to challenge more publicly, more openly, the coaches, decisions around playing time, starters, etc. The engagements became more negative, more visceral, more hateful in a job where you're trying to, I think, collaborate with parents in helping shape their daughters in this case, or their sons if you're coaching boys to be good people through the context of a team sport, basketball. So I started to notice that that was happening more often and, like I said, there were actual outbursts on sidelines, not just towards me, but sometimes fathers of my team degrading girls that were on that team playing with their daughter very loudly, very publicly. The point, and I write about this in the book well, one young lady I happened to call out a timeout because I could hear it and I could see it affecting her, melted in my arms, crying that this father would say that about her. So that became kind of the crux or the meat of hey, there's something going on here and I was trying to understand it.

Darren: 7:10

So I took that opportunity, kind of went backwards through my career to that point and just thought of those moments not often, but enough to where it stuck, where there were these kinds of engagements with parents, and see if I could put any framework around it. The title itself came from one of those conversations again in the book, where this was a friend of mine who I coached AAU with and had the absolute pleasure of coaching both or two of his daughters on my high school team, where he thought with his oldest daughter that I had given quote, unquote her job away and we're on a phone conversation and again, because he was a friend, we, you know, probably got into areas that I wouldn't do with normal parents. But at one point he just started to get really angry and and I said to him you're out of bounds on this one. And then it just kind of dawned on me wow, that that's probably a really good title for a book.

Rocky: 7:59

Yeah, I had, um, a friend of mine, uh, his father. His father is one of the winningest basketball coaches here in New York State and I remember he used to tell us and he's won I think it was two state championships. This way coached at a small class, d school. Here we go AA, a, b, c and D, so small school and he used to say every year he would get voted in by one vote at the board meetings to come back and coach. And here's a guy that won more games than anybody but it was never enough, I feel like, for us coaches and I still consider myself a coach, but us coaches, even when you're winning, it was never good enough for parents. When you're losing, they want to throw you out.

Rocky: 8:43

And one thing and I think you talked about this on another podcast and I've talked about this there's a lot of good athletes in our hometown here and a lot of good athletes across the Mohawk Valley where I live and I say this all the time and I don't downgrade any kid because if you have the opportunity, darren and you could play at like a division, three level division, two division one junior college.

Rocky: 9:03

There's a lot of good colleges out there that you can play competitively and it's good basketball. Right, in your case, you were a basketball coach. But I feel like the parents think that, well, my kid's going to be the next stud player at Duke or they're going to be the next great football player at Ohio State. The percentages of that happening are so small. Right, I think it's like 1% or 2% of the kids that actually can play at the professional level, but I feel like that's kind of taken over with all these AU tournaments that go on. You have all these private trainers now that go on. Do you agree with that? Do you think that was one of the big issues with parents?

Darren: 9:37

I definitely think it's in the mix of what had started to elevate these engagements. Right, you have certainly a lot of people under the hopeful eye that, hey, I can go get a division one scholarship, or my son or daughter can, and, to your point, even have ambitions of going to play pro, and for men, that is about 1.3% of people who do that, and for women it's actually less than 1%. For basketball and and professional sports in general, unless you want to be, I think it was ice hockey, there was actually the best odds at around 33% for men and for women, but every other sport that there's only so many people that can continue to elevate or have the skill sets or the mental capacity because the game is just as much mental as it is physical to combine all those things together to elevate to the point of being a professional. But parents do get lost in that wash.

Darren: 10:30

Um, the challenges around aau and the cost. The cost. Since I was an aau coach, cost has gotten ridiculous, not just in what you have to pay to be on a team, but the, the, you know the? Um, the shoes, and sometimes, if you're lucky enough, you're sponsored um, and which makes it a business kind of entity uh to get into these events is like $90 for for uh for a weekend showcase. You know, it's just, it's ridiculous and it's really taking the emphasis and the focus off of the game and the joy and the passion behind it and learning how to be better as an individual but, most importantly, in that team construct.

Rocky: 11:08

Yeah, I was really fortunate enough. I played for a lot of old school coaches here locally and in my hometown. You know we were really known for football when I played, and for a long time. But I grew up. What I would say is the old school coaches that had no problem getting in your face. They were very vocal, right, they yelled, but as us players back in the day and I'm talking probably like in your 80s, 90s, maybe the early 2000s, where it was just part of it we respected those coaches.

Rocky: 11:42

And I feel like nowadays, like if you get a coach that gets on a player, you know at some point you're going to get a call from the athletic director. Let's say, hey, you know, joey's mom called in and said you know you were yelling at him in practice and you're not playing him. So I feel like today's generation and some of my buddies are coaches are going to yell at me when I say this. I think they're soft, like. I think they're soft and I think they've kind of changed their style because they're so worried that they're soft, like I think they're soft and I think they've kind of changed their style because they're so worried that they're going to get called in and, who knows, maybe they're going to get fired as a coach because they were too tough. Would you agree with that? Nowadays versus the older days?

Darren: 12:17

Well, I do think there's a lot more looking over your shoulder as to how you administer coaching today, which is a shame, because if, first of all, when you're at a game and you're hearing a coach barking out instructions or elevating their voice so that they can be heard over the crowd of people and the cheerleaders and everything else that's going on in the gym so that they can be heard to their players, yeah, it can sound like yelling, it can sound like screaming if you want, but the important part there is to listen to the content of what they're saying, not the volume at which they're saying it. Right, and so that can be kind of misconstrued they. What people also don't get the opportunity to see is how that relationship is built through practice. You know the, the engagement, the, the buildup, the, the challenge of.

Darren: 13:03

I always coach my kids. You know, push yourself to fail when we're doing drills. I want you to be working so hard that you're going to lose control of that basketball, and then I don't want you to drop your head. I want you to go, race across the court wherever it is, pick it up and start over again. But you had mentioned the generation of coaches. I think it's the current generation of parents that are afraid of holding their children accountable to those kinds of challenges, to failing to actually allowing them to fail and learn from those failures, to coach in their home to elevate their energy and effort and have expectations out of them that they will carry that to things they do outside the home, and so I think it's kind of a mushing of those two things.

Rocky: 13:48

Yeah, and you know, what I think is even crazy now today is you have we have one not too far from here, but there's a couple indoor sports complex and I was a three-sport athlete. I was basketball, baseball and football and always found time to whether it was getting a weight room and get some extra shots up for basketball. And it's like nowadays I feel like the three sport athlete is gone. I feel like nowadays, like even when I'm seeing with my own son, if you don't play basketball all year round come basketball season, you know you might get passed up because somebody might be doing it all year round. What's your thoughts on? Like the three sport athlete, you know, and nowadays you've got some kids that are sport specific.

Darren: 14:29

I prefer the multiple sport athlete to you know, just in terms of avoiding repetitive stress injuries, because they're testing their muscles and the supporting tissues and ligaments and tendons in different ways. They're not constantly putting the same kind of stress on it, ligaments and tendons in different ways, they're not constantly putting the same kind of stress on it. They're learning different elements of the game that do translate to basketball or to other sports. You know angles on the court, advancing to position yourself for passing or vision to where you can engage a teammate when you have the basketball.

Darren: 14:59

Some of my best basketball players have been soccer players first, as a matter of fact, at my last stint at Holmdel High School, one of my favorite players I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but every coach does One of my favorite players during the COVID year, as we were navigating, you know, coming out of COVID, but as we navigated that year coming out, she actually had the opportunity to and did letter in five different sports for the high school and beyond, the playing and the growth and development as an individual and the understanding of teamwork which is going to transcend sports into everything you do in life.

Rocky: 15:33

Beyond that, she was supporting her school and I think that's magnificent yeah, I feel like as, as us coaches know, you have a lot of incidents where and I can count on one hand of what makes me most proud today is even with my dad, who's older than I am. But when I hear people still call him coach, they still come up to me and still call me coach and I'm talking from years ago 10, 15 years ago when I coached at a couple of schools. The meaning coach to you, what does it mean to you when you hear some of your former players still say, hey, coach, thanks for that life lesson that you taught me when you were coach, because I know you talk about some of that in your book.

Darren: 16:17

Yeah, it's titles excuse me, titles the wrong word but it's absolutely an acknowledgement of respect and relationship, friendship to a point that has built this chemistry from years ago. You know, I've had 40, 41-year-old men who come to me today and say Coach, what I learned as a father, as a man, came from you.

Darren: 16:45

When I played for you in seventh and eighth grade, I had one young man told me he wanted to go and join the Navy, but his mother wouldn't let him do it and it was because of what he saw in the values that I showed in practice and he wanted to replicate those, you know, young ladies who are now adults, married, have children, and they, just, you know, scream from across the shopping center hey, coach, you know, and run up and give you a hug.

Darren: 17:10

And that is the greatest reward, those relationships that are built in that player-coach relationship and the ones that are not violated, certainly, by these intrusive parent circumstances. But even those, even the hardest one of those where there was that conflict, even those are endearing relationships that hold today. And so, as a coach, you know, I didn't get paid much when I was in high school coaching, and I didn't want it, I would coach for free and most of my time at the, at the naval academy prep school and in seventh and eighth grade boys, was all volunteer, wasn't getting paid anything, and I would have continued to do that because it was about helping develop these young men and women morally, mentally and physically to be better people.

Rocky: 17:56

And I know, darren, you talk about in the book where you had you had the incident that led you to why you're not coaching anymore, and I want to ask like is there any regrets that you have of how it was handled? And one of the things I know you've talked about in some of your other podcasts is the role administrators play, and we can get into that in a little bit as well, because I think administrators now cater to parents more now than they ever did. But is there anything that, when you look back on what happened, would you have done anything different?

Darren: 18:30

No, because to this day, I'm still not even sure what I did, so I can't say that I would have done anything different. However, if there had been a clear delineation of, hey, this was being perceived or felt that it was a violation of some kind or another, then I would certainly have looked at it and tried to understand it and tried to modify it. Unfortunately, I was never given that opportunity. The way I coached was a very loving and engaged coach. I wanted the best for my kids, but I also want to let them know fairly they're going to be challenged. I have expectations for you, your teammates have expectations for you, and we are ultimately accountable to each other. You know to be the best team we can be, so the respect was always there, and so if there was something that I did wrong, I would have loved the opportunity for it to be identified and to correct it, which I think in any walk of life, anybody would appreciate that opportunity.

Rocky: 19:31

I say this all the time and I'll stand by this, but I think that's one of the reasons today. So I'm not a teacher, so teachers in this area always have the priority. So like if a teacher applies to a coaching job and I apply to a coaching job, some schools will hire the teacher over the one that's not a teacher. Now some schools do not go by that. Where I was hired for my first coaching job, there were teachers that were interested but I was hired. So each school has their different policies.

Rocky: 19:59

I will stand to this day that I think coaches the good coaches walk a really, really thin line, because if you do make a mistake or you get on a kid, like I said earlier, the way the administrators have handled a lot of coaches, I think is a reason why, to this day, a lot of those good coaches don't apply for jobs anymore. They don't want to coach because they don't want to have to deal with situations like what you're talking about and have to deal with stuff because I feel like they're guilty no matter what. Like what happened to the days where an athletic director can pull you in, sit down with with a parent and yourself and say, let's talk about it. What happened? I feel like that's gone away.

Darren: 20:44

Well, I think in order to have any of those kinds of meaningful conversations around conflict or perceived conflict, uh, you have to have somebody to lead through that, especially if they're playing the role of arbitrator or neutral party. Unfortunately, I don't think that exists in a lot of schools today and it certainly did not exist in Holmdel High School at the time when I was incorrectly suspended and then was afforded no due process, so, um, but there was an absolute failure of leadership or just a lack of desire to lead in this perceived conflict that and I said it in the book and you probably heard on a couple of podcasts that if somebody had stepped up to be that leader, to be that representative of both parties, a neutral party, this could have been resolved in a day. Instead, it dragged out for 40 days and ultimately cost me my coaching career that season, certainly, which was painful enough but made me a little leery of getting back involved in youth sports Because, like you, I didn't work in a school. I don't work in a school. I never have worked in a school other than the Naval Academy prep school, because that was my assignment coming out of Naval Academy at one point.

Darren: 21:58

But I did. I had my job, my regular job, and oftentimes would take half a vacation day to be on the bus with the girls to go to a basketball game. You know, you know that. You know the drill and I loved it. I had no regrets about that. Would do that all I could, um. But at the same time I'm not afforded or people like us who coach from that perspective are not afforded any of the safety and the support that a union teacher would get in school what?

Rocky: 22:24

what are your thoughts on the pressure now? I feel like there's more pressure now on athletes than what there was years ago. And again I just my son's a seventh grader playing modified baseball right now and I look at now like in college with this NIL basically it's professional sports. The colleges now really aren't recruiting the high school kids anymore because they're getting kids in the transfer portal, which makes it even more harder on the young kids, which is more stressful to the young kids, and I did a podcast on mental health because I think that's gotten out of hand nowadays too. But do you think there's more pressure now on these young kids than what there were years ago?

Darren: 23:03

Yeah, I don't think there's any question about that, just because of the way college sports or collegiate athletics, has become a business. It always has been a business. It hasn't been very honest about that, but it has been a business, but even more so now that it's out in the open, with NIL and the wild, wild west, that the portal has created beyond the intent of giving a collegiate athlete the opportunity to. Hey, the coach who recruited me is gone. He was a big reason, or she was the big reason I came to this campus.

Darren: 23:33

Uh, I'd like to go somewhere else. That has completely blown up. And you bring up a great point, rocky, that, um, you know that the kids that are in high school looking to get some of these scholarship positions are now secondary and even sometimes tertiary to that decision because of the portal kids, because of junior college kids. And if I'm a college coach in some regard, why wouldn't I go look at a more seasoned player first to fill my any holes I have in my roster, as opposed to bringing in a younger person who's going to need that ramp up period?

Rocky: 24:06

What were some of the challenges right right in your book? Do you have any any specific parts of the book that that stands out to you? That was challenging to write. Yeah, it was probably all challenging, right, but you have so many good stories in there, I'm sure Well you know there's a couple layers to that onion.

Darren: 24:24

So first of all, I wanted the book. I wanted to get the message, the messages, the lessons from the book out in a way that it didn't feel like I was just browbeaten people about the toxicity of sports. Yes, it has a lot to do with that and yes, it's through the lens of basketball. But I think a lot of the conversation that I offer and I leave it really to the reader to kind of pull that out in from their experiences but a lot of what I offer is beyond sports, beyond the game of basketball. And so the difficult part, first of all, was making sure I had that balance. And you know I offer a lot of stories in there that are fun, that are about resilience, that are about, you know, accomplishment for the young players through my interactions with them around those more negative stories, you know. So I tried to provide that balance and that was a little tricky.

Darren: 25:14

Staying on target was tricky because after 33 years of coaching I got a lot of things I could share and the book would have been like 3,000 pages long and nobody would have bought it. But so trying to make sure I stayed focused on what the overarching theme was, and then the biggest complexity, I think, of the challenge was the emotional aspect of it, because, um, some of the more, uh, visceral meetings or engagements, um, that are laid out pretty well in the book, um, especially the last, you know my four years at at home, though, and the way that that ended so unexpectedly and so so wrongly, um, and having to relive that again after having just gotten to a point where I kind of wasn't thinking about it as much, but it was. So it was so much of the meat of, um, or the showcase really of, of where that parental influence, that negative influence, was just so over the top.

Rocky: 26:27

Darren, we were talking before we came on just for a few minutes and, uh, you talked a little bit about you get the. You get the opportunity to to to do a podcast with your son. Yeah, I had the. I had the opportunity. To this day I still say it's the best. Best time of my life that I had in coaching was I got the opportunity. I was assistant coach for my dad and then my dad retired and then I got him out of retirement when I got my first head job to be one of my assistants. So I had the opportunity to coach with my dad, which was awesome. Some challenging times, you know, arguing a little bit behind the scenes, but at the end of the day it was great. Talk to us a little bit about the podcast you host with your son and the name of it and what type of show is it.

Darren: 27:11

So the name of it is Outside the Coach's Box and it's on Spotify and on YouTube too, not as a channel, but there are episodes out there and it was my son's idea. He came to me one day a couple of years ago, and probably three or four now, and said hey, dad, why don't we do a podcast? And my first instinct, being Generation X, was who wants to listen to me talk about anything? But he said you know, dad, we talk about sports all the time on the, on the couch, and we go through topics, you know, not just the, the top scorers and that kind of thing, but talk about some of the challenge, like we just did around nil, or um, you know, is aaron rogers going to be on the steelers, why, or why not? Those kind of things. And so ultimately he worked me for a couple of years, punched me like a punching bag until I finally committed to it and, um, it's been great. He's, he does a really good job with it. Uh, he's kind of the creator. He is the creator and and the um, you know the uh, he runs the studio and does all the publication stuff. And then I tease him. I tease him by saying I'm the talent, but it's really his talent that has allowed us to do it. He's very good at networking.

Darren: 28:19

We've had some wonderful guests. Tim Kapstra, the voice of the Nets, was on our podcast. Coach Brian Newberry from Navy Football was on our podcast. We've had an NFL official on twice and now he's on a recurring bit with us around, you know, right after the Superbowl, just talking about yeah. And so we've had Zoe Brooks from the NC state, wolf Wolf pack girls basketball or women's basketball. She was a local fan favorite from St John Vianney high school but you know we got her on after she went to NC state and, yeah, just a great experience.

Darren: 28:53

And it I think it's also something that was born out of basketball, my coaching career, because I did have the wonderful opportunity to coach all three of my kids, a son and two daughters in basketball, my girls from AAU through high school. So there's six to eight years at times where we were together an awful lot, you know, and working through the dynamics of hey, I'm your dad, I love you very much, but I'm your coach when I'm inside these lines and there's a little bit of a dynamic. Still, love you very much, but there, you know, there's different expectations, different challenges and we have to be able to be on the same page. And then, ultimately, to what you said with your father. I definitely had the opportunity at Holmdel High School to coach with my son he was my assistant coach there and then, on the AAU circuit, with my oldest daughter. She and I coached together and then the last stint she was actually the head coach and I was the assistant trying to pass the torch, and it was a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

Rocky: 29:47

Yeah, I got to give my dad some credit because my dad was one of the old school coaches that I talked about earlier with you. But when I came, when I graduated from college and I came on with him, I'd like to say my dad was, in football terms, line up in the I formation run the ball between the tackles and I came, I came on and said we're gonna throw the ball around a little bit and we got one game. He said if it, if it wasn't for you, he goes. We might have been throwing the ball 30 times a game because he goes. I didn't throw that in my whole entire career coaching so he was able to adapt.

Darren: 30:17

So it was fun having dad around, yeah that fresh perspective that people offer too, and the combination, the chemistry between coaches is really, really important. And the young lady who I hired who's now we consider a part of the family who I hired as my first assistant at Homedale High School. We sat, the interview was supposed to be like 20 minutes. We sat for an hour and a half talking about basketball and offenses and things that she's done, and she was only, you know, in her early twenties at the time and I was a sponge I wanted to learn more about. You know, what can I do to tweak my coaching style or my game, the way I teach the kids? That might be better for today's game and I think a lot of coaches lose out on that opportunity, you know.

Rocky: 31:00

Darren, one thing I wanted to ask you a little bit about, too, was you know, nowadays you know we're doing a show like this, but all these social media channels that are out there. Now you've got these cell phones that all have cameras and I'm trying to go back to when I I played if I would have had the phone that I have now the, the apple phone or the droids and you can get on social media. How much in today's game has that impacted too with with parents, how they can interact now with with coaches and and players? I feel like now even like in you watch these guys on the NBA. Some of them are tweeting on the bench during these games, but social media has taken over.

Darren: 31:36

It has. It's definitely part of the problem and, listen, it's a great tool in a lot of respects as well and, like anything else, you have to be able to do things in balance. But certainly, I mean, I remember not that long ago, girls would bring their phones into practice and have them on the bench next to their gear and every water break they'd go to their phone. First it was a water break and they would go to their phone and and then that would advance with with social media that they'd start taking selfies during practice. So I, you know, I I tried to adapt it and say, okay, girls, listen, I get it, but during practice you put the phone in the bag. I do not want to see it and if I do, we're going to be doing some exercises right.

Darren: 32:11

And then one girl tried to outsmart me. She'd get the Apple watch and I noticed she kept looking down at her watch during practice. So that was the next iteration of OK, we've got to manage this. But I think the the worst part about social media is how much of it is driven around promoting self. Even in what we would consider some individual sports, there is a team element to it, and if all you're worried about is promoting self or getting yours or getting your attention, then you're missing the whole picture and the time that you're spending with your face in that phone. You're missing an opportunity to just get to know a different teammate that you know. Maybe a sophomore came up who you didn't get to play with last year because she's on JV.

Rocky: 32:59

Well, let me get to learn a little bit more about her. Darren. What would be the message for for people listening tonight, and for some that'll listen on the on the playback, um, or people to read your book? What would be the message you'd want to relate to the audience tonight?

Darren: 33:09

yeah, I think the biggest thing. You know, I was taught at a very young age and tried to bring it into and then actually, because of some of my family background, you know, my, my parents divorced when I was three. But the saying around it takes a village to raise a child actually resonated with me because there were times where my uncle was my, my authoritarian. You know, if I ever crossed my mother she would call my uncle Chuck. Oh, I knew at that point I'd gone too far, but he was also one of my best coaches, one of my best consults in life and in meanings of life. And then the value of teachers. I could go through a long list of teachers that that I just truly appreciated and and and um were endeared to them in the way that they taught and the way they got their message across. And same with coaches.

Darren: 33:54

And I think a lot of times parents lose that focus. Today, to be a parent today is even more complex because both parents have to work and you know, to make ends meet and the kids are home alone a lot. So to have that extra set of eyes, that extra voice in their head which, again, it's not all coaches, it's not all teachers, but I would say most of them are focused on how do we help make this child a better person, get them ready for what comes next. So that would really be the message is to remember that you're not in it alone as a parent. It does take a village to raise a child and build those relationships around trust and respect.

Rocky: 34:36

Yeah, and Darren, you just talked a little bit about it, but I wanted to ask you you know, even in the business world today, I still I tell my people at work I'm still a coach At work, they call me coach. I'm the VP of a bus company and whether you're on a playing field, a court or whatever it may be, once a coach, always a coach. And you know, growing up I had some mentors that helped me along the way, even in the in the business field. Who are some mentors for you, whether it be in the business field, the coaching aspect as a player, who are some of your mentors growing up?

Darren: 35:07

Well, I definitely had some teachers that I, I, uh, I loved and respected quite a bit, and a lot of times they were the harder ones, you know. They were the ones that kept me on track or pushed my my limits to get the most out of me. I remember my Spanish and English teacher in my freshman and sophomore year in high school Huayrica High School in Northern California. It was Doña Lucia Cardosa, you know, and she came from Spain. She was a Spanish immigrant from the time where Franco was the dictator and fled Spain and came to America and she was both my Spanish and my English teacher. So imagine that. But you know, she was great and so impactful to my youth that when I went off to the Naval Academy, I would often, like you know, once every three months, I'd send her a letter just letting her know how I'm doing and she would write me back. You know, the unfortunate part was it started off all in Spanish but by the time I got away from Spanish class it became kind of partially Spanish, partially English.

Darren: 36:07

Some great coaches along the lines you know, in basketball I had Mr Sly and Mr Pontoni in back-to-back years, seventh and eighth grade year who totally different kinds of coaches, but very impactful and on the not-so-good way. I had a couple coaches early in high school that you know. I liked them, they were great people, I had a lot of respect for them. I just didn't like the way they managed the game and I learned from them and I learned from them. The coach I worked with Tom Marriott at the Naval Academy Prep School. He was a very big influence in me and you know that was my first stint in coaching. So moving from being a player to a coach and being able to view the game in a totally different way, I mean I wish I could have played college basketball after having been a coach. You know, you just see and understand the game in such a different way and certainly in in in my corporate world, my corporate experiences after getting out of the navy.

Darren: 37:00

There was a gentleman who hired me out of the navy who was a 59 grad from the academy howard berkowitz. I was an 88 grad. He gave me my first opportunity to go to work and just his leadership, the way he would. He would walk around the building and talk to every. He knew everything. He knew your, your wife's name, your kid's names, their ages, and he would stop with a cup of coffee in his hand and just go talk to every single person, get to know them as people, not just his employees, um, and then go out to the warehouse and do the same guys for you know, the same for our operational team and just phenomenal example of leadership by example. And and uh, getting to know your folks, uh, and in my current job I just have a wonderful leadership team at Shaw industries that you know you could pick the. They're all great, but you could pick little pieces of gold from each one of them and kind of, um, frankenstein yourself into being a pretty good leader.

Rocky: 37:58

So the, the, the coach Darren of old, old, and we'll say the coach darren. Now what's?

Darren: 38:01

different. What's changed? Uh, a lot of self-improvement. You know, there there was, uh, when I first got into coaching I would say I was kind of a bit of a hot head. Um, all for the right reasons, like to protect my kids to, you know, get caught up in the emotion of the game, get caught up in the bad call or whatever it is, and just kind of really intense around that competition. But then I would start to evolve and, under, you know, learn how to manage officials in the game and build relationships with them, because they're important to it as well, you know, help the players understand more about themselves.

Darren: 38:36

So and this was a real struggle with the girls in particular that they would come in and just don't have the level of confidence, self-confidence that boys do, and sometimes boys have too much of it, an abundance of self-confidence.

Darren: 38:50

But to be able to help work them through the psychology of the game, you know Michael Jordan talked about it a lot of times.

Darren: 38:57

He's known to hit X amount of game-winning shots, but nobody talks about the ones that he missed and there's a great poster out there somewhere that says how he missed 9,000 shots and he just kept working through those failures where a lot of kids today, because of the pressures that you mentioned previously, are hung on every single moment as opposed to, and when there is failure in that moment, they get so absorbed by it that they become almost ineffective in everything else they do and oftentimes will find their way to the bench not because they did something wrong but because they've taken themselves out of the game.

Darren: 39:33

And so to help players work through that and understand the concept of next sequence, you know, in a game which a good buddy of mine had taught me during the AAU days, you know think about the next event. No matter what happens in the one, good or bad, what's the next event? How can you impact the next thing? So next sequence became that kind of mantra as I got older and more experienced in coaching with the kids and helping them elevate beyond just that particular moment.

Rocky: 40:00

And one of the last things I wanted to ask you about for some of the young coaches out there that will be listening here tonight and on the playback what would be some of your advice to them that are looking to get into coaching, knowing how much tougher it is now than what it was, you know, years ago, having to deal with the parents?

Darren: 40:18

Yeah, you know that's. That's an interesting dynamic, because if it's about getting into coaching, if you have that passion to to work with young people and help them realize the potential that's within them, and then the best part about it is taking those individuals and having them actually achieve something as a team. And it's taking those individuals and having them actually achieve something as a team. Go for it. There is no greater reward, no greater engagement than being able to and to your point. You said you know you still do it in work and so do I. But there is no greater connection than being able to help somebody see the light around their ability to do something and then having them continue to mature and graduate to those next steps. So I would say, from that component, go for it, but go for it with eyes wide open, because it is.

Darren: 41:07

It is tense, it is a lot more negative, it is a lot more, much more of a struggle in that dynamic between parent and coach today than I've ever seen it.

Darren: 41:19

You know to where it's not just around challenging you and your capabilities or looking to get rid of you because you, you know Susie doesn't quite get enough playing time, but they don't see how she practices, or that she's always running to the bench to get on her phone, and you know those kinds of things that we talked about. So be wide open and the biggest message I would say to both parent and coach in that relationship is is give each other some grace. When you're, when you're in these moments of a as a parent as to challenging or asking why, well, think about where that coach is coming from in their perspective. They're seeing your son or daughter every day. In that particular context. You are not right. It would be almost like you know me as a coach, coming into your dinner table I'm trying to tell you how to parent your child. Tell that boy to get his elbows off the table or whatever it is.

Darren: 42:09

And then vice versa, as as a coach, when a player and when a parent does come hot, don't just dismiss them with all right you know I don't want to talk about this or I don't want to talk about that but give them the grace to understand that maybe, maybe you know their child had a bad game or the team had a bad game and it's just not a good time to talk about these things. But be willing to have those those crucial conversations around that and then for both, ultimately around the player. That that's where the biggest amount of grace needs to be applied, because kids put a lot of pressures on themselves. I talk about in the book, about the 24 hour rule.

Darren: 42:45

Like you know, my wife was wonderful, but she would always start to coach the kids right after they got out of a game and I was like, oh my God, this car ride is going to be horrible, you know. But the worst thing I think you can do as a parent or a coach is to harp on that moment like just to keep reliving it. They know what they did wrong or what. You know what the failures were, or even if in an ugly wind, it wasn't quite as good as it should have been. So give them the grace to kind of work through it first and most kids, I think, will come to you and say hey, what do you think about my defense? Or you know that kind of thing.

Rocky: 43:16

And I remember I had some parents waiting for me in a parking lot on a Friday night, you know, after a game and the parents meeting before the year started. I'd say, listen, I don't come to your workplace. All I ask is when the game is over and we played on Friday nights is, you know, give me the weekend, a Monday, before practice or after practice, if you want to come in and talk to me, and you know anything like that. But the parents that would wait for you to park a lot or, you know, after a game. And I was like, oh, just just just give me the benefit of the doubt. Let me talk to your son first, if your son has a problem why they're not playing.

Rocky: 43:48

And I remember I had a parent come to me one time and say you one time and say, you know, why is my kid not playing? And I said, well, your kid hasn't been to practice all week. And they said, well, what are you talking about? I drop them off, they drop, they drop the kid off and the kid never showed up for practice. So little things you know like that that the parents don't know that happens. And, like you said, you know, come, sit at a practice and watch what goes on and you know it's a lot different than what they come home and tell mom and dad.

Darren: 44:12

Yeah, and I think you go back to the word I used before accountability. As a parent, teach your son or daughter some accountability in terms of, hey, the struggle you're having with your coach, whatever sport, or your teacher, whatever class, is an indication of the relationship you do or do not have as a player with your coach or as a student with your teacher. Go, build that relationship and putting the emphasis on that son or daughter to learn how to engage people, to learn how to hold conversations, you know, to learn how to question authority, but with respect and courtesy, not just.

Rocky: 44:48

The coach is a nut job and you know in worse words, so, darren, how can our listeners, you know, how can they buy the book, how can they follow you and you know the podcast and you and your son and so forth.

Darren: 45:02

Yes, thank you. The book is available pretty much on all outlets, so Amazon, barnes, noble, ingramspark is a publisher. You can purchase it through them as well, and I know there's a litany of them sites that it's available on, but I don't remember all of them, so the main ones for sure. Uh, you can follow me at at coach all 88 on Instagram and on um X, and then I have a LinkedIn profile If you're interested. It's just. You know my name, just looked me up. It's pretty obvious who I am. Uh, in that picture the podcast is Outside the Coach's Box. It's on Spotify. We absolutely would love and try to engage with people as well, to get on and listen. We're open to any ideas because we'll cover just about any topic.

Rocky: 45:48

Well, I'll tell you what. This was a lot of fun. I feel like I can sit and talk any sport with you here for a while, and I'll tell you what. You're more than welcome to come on the Mohawk Valley Sports Watch. Here we can talk some sports, and if you guys ever need a guest out your way to talk about anything football, basketball, you name it I'm always willing to come on. But this was great. I purchased a book. I have not gotten it yet, but this was absolutely fantastic. Great insight by you and I look forward to reading the book and can't thank you enough for taking the time tonight with me.

Darren: 46:18

Well, rocky, thank you, and thank you very much for buying the book and I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love your input because I, you know, who knows if I ever do one of these again. But I, you know, I'm always looking for the opportunity to improve and get better at the things I'm doing. So but, thank you and I, we would love to have you on, so we'll, we'll get that worked out.

Rocky: 46:36

Sounds good. I appreciate it, Darren. Have a good rest of the night and enjoy the weekend.

Darren: 46:41

All right, Rocky, you too Be well.

Rocky: 46:43

Thank you. Sorry, guys, I was trying to switch in between screens there, but, uh, hopefully enjoy tonight. Uh, darren was great. Uh was just talking to him before we came on. Um, live here tonight and uh, really good. Uh, insight behind his book out of bounds. Um, again, I'll post all that where you can purchase his book, uh, and so forth. So so I appreciate him coming on here tonight.

Rocky: 47:17

I'll let you know when the next guest will be joining me on the Beyond the Game podcast. Right now I'm shooting for every couple weeks. Right now I'm booked through the end of June for this show. I'll let you know when we do the next Mohawk Valley Sports Watch. We're looking at possibly doing one this Sunday night, but I got to see what the guys are doing. I have not put that show to the side. That show will still continue to air, as well as this one. So I appreciate it. I hope everybody enjoyed it tonight. On behalf of myself and the Beyond the Game podcast and the Rockpile again, follow me on YouTube, follow me on Facebook, all the social media sites and I'm also up on Spotify, iheartradio, apple Podcasts and any of your podcasts and platforms and more. So thanks again for tuning in tonight. I'll catch you again soon right here on the Beyond the Game podcast. Have a good evening everybody.