I Truly See People As Athletes

MUSINGS FROM A COACH - 4 NOVEMBER '25

I truly see people as athletes. When mentoring or teaching other professional, endurance sports coaches, I like to explain that coaching wisdom comes from three different pipelines: continuing formal education, experience with a wide range of diverse athletes and a great deal of time with other coaches as a peer, mentor or mentee. The wisdom that comes from this continual path we walk down teaches us humility, patience and a focus on the athlete, not ourselves. I've seen coaches who are masters at coaching one type of athlete and yet unable to effectively "teach" others outside their preferred type. And I have seen others with years of formal education but little experience with actual coaching. There's no shortcut. I truly believe great coaches walk those three pipelines, and that is why I try to follow all three.

The second path I mention, experience with a wide range of diverse athletes, happened immediately within my professional coaching career. My former business partner and I walked into our first USAT coaching certification class and choose seats in the back, close to the coffee machine. :) Soon thereafter, another man sat next to me. We soon shared our love of long-course Ironman racing and hit off an immediate friendship.

Turns out, he was a prosthetist (makes legs for amputees) and connected me with the Challenged Athlete Foundation. CAF contacted me that summer and invited me to coach their first Paratriathlon Certified Camp in Sand Diego, CA. That led to me coaching all of CAF's camps for the next six years, coaching all of USA Paratriathlon's High Performance Camps, coaching Paralympic athletes and Team Coach of USA Paratriathlon for the Rio, Tokyo and Paris Paralympics. So glad I chose that seat in the back!

In those early days, there were no formal education classes in Paratriathlon, very few athletes using coaches and no coach mentors to call on. So how did I learn? I listened to the experienced paratriathletes who had years of experience training and racing. I listened and learned and made my best guesses as to how I should coach each athlete.

Learning how to coach these paratriathletes from themselves had a profound affect on me. It forced me to look at each person as an athlete first. Instead of looking at what they could not do, I just looked at them as athletes and learned their capabilities along the way. It taught me to see everyone as an athlete first. A side note to this is an unintentional lack of priority by myself to learn why and how each athlete became a paratriathlete. It's not that I don't see or understand their disability, it's just that in my head, it didn't define them, so I often, again unintentionally, never asked them about "their story".

These experiences, along with thousands of coaching interactions with such a wide range of people, have defined a belief I hold dear: Every person is an athlete, and I see them as an athlete regardless of if they share that same view.

One of my many goals for athletes I work for is to get them to believe they truly are an athlete. Buy in to that belief can be transformational. It's all part of the process.

Gratefully, Mark

CEO Team MPI

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