Yeah, in most team sports they’re a sort of blend of EMT and physical therapist, and they’re usually in charge of hydration and stuff like that.
In boxing and some other sports, trainers are essentially what would be called coaches in most sports.
I’d think that the why of how the person didn’t get drafted, or why another went to the Super Bowl is the critical thing here. I mean, if that person didn’t get drafted because they were an offensive lineman and was only 6’1" and 240, or because they were a backup player, that doesn’t mean they may not have an encyclopedic knowledge and understanding of the game. Similarly, just because some running back is elusive and runs a 4.2 40, doesn’t mean he really understands much about football beyond what he personally does.
Being successful as a player is a very different thing than being successful as a coach, and I’d suspect that the Venn diagram of those two don’t overlap a whole lot.
This thread is confusing because in the U.S. outside of maybe boxing and horse racing, a trainer is part of the medical staff. I’m still not sure if the OP is talking about coaches and managers.
Take Mike McDaniel. He was a walk on at Yale. He was 5’9” 170(maybe). He was on the team but managed to compile zero stats his entire college career. By all accounts he’s been eating and breathing football his entire life since before he was a ball boy with the Broncos. He thinks more about football than any star player.
He literally wrote the book on hitting (The Science of Hitting). I’ve heard that players still use it. He was just really bad at teaching it directly to players. Mostly due to the fact that he was an asshole.
Lau had an eleven-year MLB career as a journeyman reserve catcher and pinch-hitter, hitting .255, and having an aggregate bWAR of 2.0 – in other words, he wasn’t substantially better than a guy his teams could have brought up to replace him from the minors.
In the 1970s, after his playing career had ended, Lau became a hitting coach, and dug into photographic and video study to dissect and analyze batting, identifying what made for a good swing. His teachings were unorthodox for his time, but George Brett (one of his early students) credited Lau’s coaching for making him into a major-league hitter. By the late '70s, Lau was seen as the pre-eminent hitting coach in the game, having a big impact with the Royals, Yankees, and White Sox, before dying of cancer at age 50.
Those Pacers were also really good teams that went 10 men deep, pushed Michael Jordan to Game 7 of his last Eastern Conference Finals, and won the Eastern Conference Championship a couple years later. They just had the misfortune of running into Shaq and Kobe who were starting a dynasty.
I wouldn’t say Lau has been discredited but baseball has certainly moved on from that. He emphasized balance and stance and eliminating a lot of movement in the box. Still seen today. He also taught being flat through the strike zone with an emphasis on contact and line drives. Now it’s launch angle and exit velocity.
That’s a fair point; as you note, he primarily taught contact hitting, but as noted in the current thread “How has Baseball changed in the last 50 years?,” the 1970s and early '80s (when Lau was a hitting coach) was the era of large ballparks (many with Astroturf), where hitting for average was the standard of the day.
IMO, the big and lasting impact he had was in being one of the first coaches to champion photo and video analysis for analyzing and coaching hitting technique.
Regardless, even if the game is different now, he’s another good example of an outstanding coach, who had excellent results, despite being a very pedestrian player.
I’m going to give an extreme but true example of why ability isn’t that crucial.
I was in Cub Scouts as a little kid. We used to do something called “day camp”, where we’d do activities at a campsite during the day but go home after it got dark.
One of those activities was archery. I couldn’t shoot an arrow with any kind of accuracy. I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I couldn’t even get close to the target.
My buddy’s dad, though, was shooting arrows and I was standing off to the side watching him, and I noticed that he was missing when he pointed the arrow a certain way. So I started guilding him to raise or lower his aim, or turn a bit one way or the other, and he was hitting the target consistently with my coaching.
I had no skill, no talent, no knowledge. All I had was a different perspective and that was enough to be a useful coach that day.
Even if you (wrongly) assume that the people that are best at throwing a ball would be the best at coming up with game tactics, the athlete has a lot of other stuff to do to be a pro athlete. So even if Patrick Mahomes was the best tactician in the world, it would be beneficial for a team to have a specialist to draw up plays, study opponents, etc while Mahomes is in the weight room.
For more individual sports like ski racing, motocross, biathlon etc. it’s also not just strategy but targeted fitness. These athletes need to have the ultimate level of fitness in addition to the ultimate level of talent anymore. The days of passing cigarettes at the Tour de France or partying hard and getting on your motocross bike are looonnngggg gone. Nutrition, supplements, heart rate monitors, and crazy training regimens that no athlete would come up with on their own are the norm. Look at Aldon Baker in motocross–these kids could probably be competitive in the Tour de France if they weren’t racing motocross. Brutal. Providing the discipline is key of course. Even Lindsey Vonn might let herself slack a little without a trainer/staff.
Welllll . . . now the trainers are prescribing it.
John Tomac says hi. Although he didn’t have great success in Europe he did ride in a few big races including a grand tour (Giro d Italia) and had success in USA events. He did start out in BMX.
Not disagreeing with anything you said Tride. Your points just jumped out at me a bit.
Of course you know his son Eli is one of the best motocross racers of the last decade. Ran into John and Eli a few times in the mountains above Rico CO. Eli considered buying our house…