I say professional sport because that is the top echelon of a sport. If a boxer is going to fight in the world championship, why does he need a trainer? His trainer never had the ability to make it to the world championship, so why would the athlete take advice from them?
is it because the trainer has a better cognitive understanding of the sport, they just never had the physical fitness to reach the top?
I just don’t see why the best athletes in the world need trainers who never were able to compete on their level.
I know in some sports the trainers are ex-professionals. But I also believe I’ve seen situations where coaches in the NFL only played college football, not professional. That’s like letting someone who played high school football coach a division I college team.
Coaching isn’t just what you know from direct experience. Lots of people were great players but shit coaches. It’s not about getting the most out of yourself, it’s about getting the most out of someone else, that’s not the same thing.
Angelo Dundee never fought professionally, but trained many of the best. (I know he’s an exception).
I think it may be that increased knowledge of physiology and other disciplines allow a non-professional athlete to bring training knowledge that wasn’t available in the past.
A boxing trainer, AIUI, is more akin to a coach. In other professional sports (e.g., football, baseball, etc.), “trainers” are staff members who treat injuries and assist athletes with rehabilitation (as @running_coach 's link shows).
Tell me again which round Bill Belichick was drafted. What about Andy Reid?
Trainers simply know far more about the regimen needed to get an athlete in tip top shape than the athletes themselves, simply because they’ve spent far more time and effort learning and specializing in these topics. Think an athlete knows more about nutrition that a nutritionist? If you do, that’s insane.
Watch “Quarterback” on Netflix. Guys like Patrick Mahomes spend enormous amounts of time and money with trainers who work on creating exercises and routines that target specific muscle groups and other biometrics to excel. Do you really think a marketing major who didn’t graduate is going to know more about biometric data and specialized training than these trainers?
I think the fact that every top echelon boxer from Jack Dempsey to Mike Tyson had a cornerman is a good indication they play an important role. The cornerman has the advantage of having a somewhat objective view of what’s going on during the match on account of him not getting punched in the face or fatigued. i.e. He might very well see something the boxer doesn’t a relay that information.
As others have said, coaching is not the same skill set as playing. Anyone who ever trained anyone on anything will quickly understand that. I used to handle H-1B visas at work and I was pretty good at my job. When I trained my replacement, I did a bad job of that.
Wesley_Clark is among my favorite posters here, but I feel the OP shows a deep misunderstanding of the subject at hand.
For starters, even to the world’s best athletes, it is immeasurably useful to have an outsider observing and commenting on their performance, down to the tiniest detail. Before video recordings, there was no way around this, but it’s still immeasurably useful.
At the Olympics etc., most athletes run straight to their trainer after each try to ask how it went and how should it go.
Like others above noted, a world class athlete simply cannot have the same knowledge base as a trainer, since the athlete spends her time and energy training for the events, not devouring research articles and attending seminars.
And again, knowing how to do something and being able to teach it to others are two different skillsets.
In a podcast I heard about baseball, a relief pitcher was saying that the best pitching coaches were the guys who had to work really hard to stay in the majors, the guys who were always in danger of being sent back down, because these guys have spent their entire lives thinking about pitching and working at it.
He said if you asked Clayton Kershaw how to throw a fastball, he basically says “just throw it.” Step 1: be born Clayton Kershaw; Step 2: throw a fastball.
ETA: Look at Greg Maddux and Mike Maddux. One is a really good pitching coach, the other is one of the great pitchers.
Coaches can be a valuable source of motivation needed to train enough to be at the top level. Most people will not be able to self-motivate enough to train for hours and hours on their own. A swimmer is more likely to swim 10,000 meters because their pool-side coach tells them to do it rather than if the swimmer just showed up at the pool on their own. Even normal people can benefit from this kind of motivation. Sometimes the benefit of having a personal trainer is that it encourages you to show up for the workout and complete the whole workout. Without a personal trainer, a person may cut the workout short, not workout as hard, or even just stay home and skip the workout all together.
The coach will be able to spot imperfections in technique that limit performance. The athlete may not realize that their elbow is too high or too low, but the coach will see it and tell the athlete to focus on keeping their elbow where it should be.
A coach will also be looking at the event schedule over the season to determine the level of training to maximize performance. The coach may have the athlete train hard at certain times and easy at other times to ensure the athlete is at peak performance on event day.
An athlete without a coach will still be a great athlete, but they will probably not be able to compete at their peak level in order to be successful in competitive events. The athletes with coaches will be some percent better than the athletes without coaches. Even if that percent difference is small, it can make a huge difference in sports where the difference between winning and losing is measured in hundredths of seconds.
And, what’s more, there have been star NFL players who became coaches after ending their playing careers, and nearly all of them wound up being unsuccessful as coaches. Some relevant examples, all of whom are in the Hall of Fame as players:
Bart Starr (5 NFL championships as a player, 52-76-3 record as a coach)
Forrest Gregg (5 NFL championships as a player, 75-85-1 record as a coach)
Norm Van Brocklin (2 NFL championships as a player, 66-100-7 record as a coach)
Bob Waterfield (2 NFL championships as a player, 9-24-1 record as a coach)
Otto Graham (3 NFL championships and 4 AAFC championships as a player, 17-22-3 record as a coach)
Mike Singletary (1 NFL championship as a player, 18-22-0 record as a coach)
Though, there are a few counter-examples (Ditka and Shell are in the HoF as players):
Mike Ditka (2 NFL championships as a player, 121-95-0 record as a coach, with a Super Bowl win)
Tom Landry (1 NFL championship as a player, was an All-Pro once; 250-162-6 record as a coach, with 2 Super Bowl wins)
Art Shell (2 NFL championships as a player, 56-52-0 record as a coach)
Don Shula (Seven-year career as a defensive back, though not a “star”; 328-156-6 record as a coach, with two Super Bowl wins)
In baseball, Ted Williams wasn’t very successful for the four seasons he managed the Washington Senators. Reportedly, he was impatient with average players who couldn’t meet the insanely high standards he had held himself to as a player.
This is the real issue, specialization, and time. The elite athlete has to spend time doing physical things. Lifting weights, running various distances, practicing skills, and that all takes time. Do they have enough time left in the day to also study strategy at an equally high level? Probably not.
So, the coach tells them what they should be doing at any given moment, because the coach spends all their time thinking about “If X, do Y”.
Well, in most team sports, they should, at a minimum, be studying the strategy of playing their position – but with the likely exception of football quarterbacks, probably don’t have the bandwidth (or need) to be studying or understanding the team’s overall strategy. That’s what coaches are for.
Larry Bird coached for the Indiana Pacers for three seasons (one lockout shortened) and his overall record was 147-67. A pretty solid record, but it’s hard to know how good he was since it was only 3 seasons.