ASCA Podcast 146 - Sam Gardner

I know you've got plenty of experience now.

Were there a couple of roles in particular that shaped you as a coach?

Yeah, I think every stop, right? You know, I look back to when I was in high school, I had playing basketball.

We used to do summer league outside of our scholastic year.

We'd play in the summer.

And my, uh, coach at the time, he, when I was going into my senior year from my junior year, he, he didn't coach the team.

He had me do it.

Um, so I've been kind of thrusted into coaching roles since I was basically 16, whether it was summer camps, working hoop camps and things like that, or even coaching my own peers in high school.

Through college, even studying, you know, pedagogy and physical education was really helpful.

I, I remember getting thrown into a situation, uh, an adaptive PE class where there was an athlete, or sorry, not even an athlete, a student in physical education who, who had autism and was visually impaired, and my job that day was to teach them how to, how to throw a Frisbee and play catch.

You know, just little, little learning lessons all along the way.

I think in specifically when you look at my, my career, I, I do think I've been blessed to, to work across great teams.

You know, I think that's more common now across the US system, but 16, 17 years ago when I first got introduced to Team USA, this idea of high performance teams or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary teams supporting athletes maybe wasn't as common of a structure here stateside as it, as it is now across collegiate settings and professional settings.

But everywhere I've been really in the last nearly 17 years, I've been on a team.

You know, and I think that's really helped me too.

Working across Team USA, working across special forces in a human performance setting where it's not sport, uh, but working with other professionals across medicine performance to try to help those, those individuals perform the best they could, as well as, you know, I referenced earlier my time in pro hoops working w- under Johan Wang where he was trying to create one of the first HP teams that we saw in the NBA here stateside.

I also think I was fortunate where a lot of the settings I was at, it was, it was multi-sport where you got thrown on the floor and you're coaching, hands-on coaching with athletes, you know, easily eight to 10 hours a day.

Not on the computer, not in the planning, not in the process, but like actually hands-on interacting with humans eight to 10 hours a day.

Like-

Yeah

... a lot of training takes place at some of these centers that I've worked at, and that teaches you a lot of lessons.

Working with different individuals, working with different personality profiles, working across different sport profiles, working across different physical demands, working across different coaches with different philosophies.

You know, I've, I've never worked at the same Gardner Training Center, right? So for me, it's always been about working as a team member, and that might have been unique to some of my peers who came up at S&C together.

Yeah, and I, I think managing staff early and young was a learn by fire situation, but a lot of the roles I've had, mm, throughout my career, there's been some level of management with that outside of, you know, just the coaching component with athletes and support staff and coaching staffs that you work with, but managing staff who do the same thing and helping them grow and learn.

Yeah, those are all great learning lessons for me and, you know, a lot of mistakes made along the way that hope- hope- hopefully, uh, I won't repeat again anytime soon, but have hopefully helped kinda shaped me to, to where I'm at today.