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iQuestions Faculty, Joe White 
 
 
Question: 
 
How do I coach my kids in sports? 
 
Answer:  
 
Coaching your kids. This may the most exciting thing that ever 
happened to me. I started off my coaching career coaching football at 
Texas A&M. As a player who had played against Texas A&M and had 
the privilege of beating the Aggies a couple of times, they weren’t 
really excited when I came on their football field.  
 
But it wasn’t long before I became great friends with the kids on that 
Texas A&M football team. Later on in my career I started coaching 
high school football when I moved and started doing the summer 
camping role in my life. 
 
But, I learned some things about coaching. And maybe you’re going to 
get to do some coaching someday as well. But in coaching, number 
one is to be the greatest encourager on the field. The coach I worked 
for at Texas A&M was named Gene Stallings, a very good friend of 
mine, who of course won the national championship with Alabama.  
 
But one day I was talking to Coach about his career, and he’s had a 
great coaching career, and I said, “Coach, what was the greatest 
coaching year of your life?” And he said, “Oh, it had to be the Cowboys 
in ’75.” Now, he coached with Tom Landry for fifteen years after we 
had coached together at Texas A&M.  
 
And I said, “What was so special about that team?” He said, “Well, 
twelve rookies made the team.” He said, “That’s pretty good. We 
 
 
made the playoffs.” And I said, “How’d you do it?” He said, “We 
decided as a coaching staff that our motto, our job, our theme, our 
focus, was to encourage every player all the time.  
 
Now, you probably didn’t think that went on at the Dallas Cowboys. 
But it did when Tom Landry was there. To encourage these 350-pound 
defensive linemen—now folks, if it works for them, think how much 
better it works for little peewee guy on the peewee soccer team—I’ve 
also coached peewee. And that philosophy worked through my heart 
as I coached my little peewee team and the high school team. 
 
And you know what, though, the funniest thing about coaching to me, 
was, in all the fun things I got to do was coaching my own kids. I got 
to coach my daughter in volleyball. And if you have a son or a 
daughter you’re really the best coach in their life. We had a ball 
together learning how to serve that volleyball through the years.  
 
I got to coach my son in basketball. Just home at night, he’d find a ball 
and I’d find a goal somehow at seven, eight, nine o’clock, whenever I 
got home. And I had the joy of standing under the basket for five 
years, watching that little knock-kneed fourth-grader, who couldn’t 
even really run to the ball very well, much less pass the ball or shoot 
the ball. I had the privilege of standing under the basket and catching 
over a hundred thousand of his shots in five years. And you know 
what? He didn’t make the NBA. But he and I became best friends. And 
we’re best friends today. 
 
When you get a chance to coach, and you want to be the encourager 
in their life—not the mean, hard-hitting, some of the things you see on 
television—it’ll be the greatest job in the whole wide world. Just be 
sure and remember that the number one job as a coach is to be an 
encourager. Be the best encourager in their life. A lot of those kids 
have never had anybody say to you, “I’m proud of you. If I was your 
daddy I’d be proud to be your daddy.” 
White -2- 
 
 
 
I speak at the National Football League and kids will come up to me— 
players before those Sunday afternoon games—and every time, often 
with tears running flowing down their faces, I’ll throw my arms around 
their neck, and I’ll say, “I’m not your daddy, but if I was I want you to 
know I’d be the proudest daddy in the world to have a boy just like 
you,” and they’ll go out on Sunday afternoon and play their guts out, 
because somebody spoke love into their life, that no coach had ever 
done before. You’re a coach that speaks love in their life. You’ll change 
their life. Whether they win or lose, they’ll feel like winners every day. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
White -3- 
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