Football season doesn’t feel the same this year. For the first time in 10 years, I’m not coaching. Even though I didn’t do a whole lot of actual coaching last year, I still got to spend Friday nights on the sidelines. There’s a certain atmosphere, an intensity, a feeling of adrenaline you get when you’re among the players. You don’t get that feeling by sitting in the stands. Unfortunately, it was time to hang up the whistle, as I wrote earlier this year.

By being on the sidelines, I was able to observe things about the game that I never knew before. Here are five things I learned about the game during my ten years coaching it.

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I recently decided it was time to retire from coaching football after ten years. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, the time commitment became too much. There’s a lot I’ll miss about it, especially the relationships with the other coaches and the players.

Luckily, over my ten years of coaching, I had some great mentors who taught me how to instruct the game and, more importantly, how to be a coach. Under their tutelage, here are the most important coaching lessons I learned from them. The best part, these lessons can be applied to any sport, not just football.

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