Can A Coach Please Everybody?

Coaches often struggle between having to both keep their own standards and address certain needs and wants of the athletes they coach.  A coach has a certain work ethic he wants to see his athletes emulate or has a certain set of team goals he wants to see his athletes to achieve.  In a coaches mind, the perfect team would just allow him to coach and not have to deal with interruptions or issues that deviate from his plan.  Obviously this is not how the world works.

Athletes have their own desires, goals, and work ethics.  Some just want to be a part of a team, but really don't care to put in a large amount of work, and others are all in on team goals and what is necessary to achieve those goals.  Some will do whatever it takes to advance themselves personally, but don't have much motivation to bring the rest of the team up with them.  There is a wealth of issues a coach has to deal with.

The coach has to determine at one point a person's attitude becomes detrimental to the team, or if a person who has a lazy or apathetic attitude shows enough prospect of helping the team to warrant keeping around.  It's never easy for a coach to have to ask an athlete to leave the team, or at the same time have an athlete leave the team because their goals did not meet eye to eye with the coaches or the rest of the team.  This is compounded even more when a coach only has a small amount of athletes to begin with.  The coach needs to determine if quantity of athletes or quality of athletes is his philosophy because the core makeup of the team can be vastly different with both.