Beyond X's and O's: Kirkwood Man's Business Helps Train Volunteer Coaches

It happens over and over – a dad raises his hand or a mom checks a box agreeing to volunteer for their son or daughter’s soccer or little league team.

The next thing they know they’re in charge of a roster full of busy 5-year-olds who possess unlimited energy and no volume control.

Now what?

Here comes Bill Bommarito to the rescue. The Kirkwood man is passionate about youth sports but particularly about turning those intrepid volunteers into effective coaches who know how to make it fun for all. 

“It’s the only job in this country that you can get and get zero training,” Bommarito said. “We give them the rosters, the equipment, the officials, the fields, the kids, and we say, ‘I hope it goes well.’ And we hope they go out and do a good job.”

What's missing is training. That’s an oversight Bommarito is trying to fix with a business called Coaching Coaches.

The former high school teacher and coach got the idea years ago when he was coaching his now-grown daughters in CYC (Catholic Youth Council) sports.  What he was seeing from volunteer coaches of teams from kindergarten through eighth grade was not what he was used to at the high school and college levels.

The difference was not in ability or even desire but in training, he said.

“They all have their hearts in the right place, but 99 percent of them have never taken a child development class,” he said.

Bommarito, 56, grew up in Kirkwood, attending and , where he played football and hockey and was inspired to go into teaching.

He went on to the University of Dayton, where he played hockey, graduating with a business degree and a teaching certificate. For six years, he taught and coached football and baseball at the high school level in Ohio, before leaving for a position in sales back in his hometown.

While his three daughters were growing up, Bommarito volunteered to coach their soccer and softball teams. He also officiated and umpired and served as a lay leader in parish sports.

Along the way he began developing his ideas to share with other volunteer coaches. Not skills and drills but what he calls the “other side” of coaching – how to work with kids effectively, how to make it enjoyable yet competitive and how to communicate with parents, handle discipline and set expectations.

The focus in youth sports should not be on winning but on having fun, Bommarito said.

”If we don’t make this enjoyable enough they’ll quit before they know whether they have the skills,” he said. “If your only goal is to win, you probably shouldn’t be coaching grade school kids.”

What he tells new coaches is that it’s not about the scoreboard but about the “individual wins”  taking place on every play of every game and practice – a good throw-in in soccer, a good cut-off throw in baseball, a good pass in basketball.

“Even though you may not win on the scoreboard, you have an opportunity to pump these kids up every time you are with them,” he said.

The St. Louis Archdiocese, with some 75,000 children playing CYC sports, got on board from the beginning, underwriting the program for all of its new head coaches, the large majority of whom are parent volunteers.

“His program is not about the X’s and O’s,” said Paul Scovill, CYC sports director. “He teaches the coaches that the kids are there for the fun of the game.”

Through the years, Bommarito has made hundreds of presentations to coaches in Missouri, Illinois, Texas and Ohio.

“It truly is a passion for me,” Bommarito said. “For every coach that I positively affect I think I positively affect 10 or 15 kids.”

That’s a lot of kids when you consider that Bommarito has trained some 16,000 coaches since 2004.

Now he’s looking at expanding the program to include other groups where leaders are volunteers but don’t have a teaching background, such as scout leaders. Even at the high school level, more and more coaches are coming from outside of the school, he said.

He’s also developing an online training program in order to reach more volunteer coaches and to give them additional training beyond his two-hour presentation.

“It’s all about youth sports for moms and dads who are busy doing a thousand other things,” he said.