Deep Dive: The Return of the Old School Coach

We’re leaving the era of specialization and entering the era of the old-school coach. No, not the hard-ass disciplinarian. The kind of coach, prevalent a few decades ago, who didn’t just know how to coach distance runners or the offense, but knew the entire game. And they often coached multiple sports.

When I was a young athlete, almost all of my coaches and mentors were in this mold. My high school coach was a sprinter who spent years helping coach kids to #1 in the country in the pole vault, triple jump, and 100m. When I came along, twenty years into his career, he took over the cross-country team, leading me to #1 in the nation and our team to the fastest distance relays in the country.

One of my college coaches, Tom Tellez, got his start coaching JuCo cross-country, before becoming one of the most sought-after field event coaches in the country and eventually one of the best sprint coaches in history. I was fortunate to be mentored by folks like Vern Gambetta, who started as a decathlete but could just as easily go deep on the history of endurance training or strength training. When I worked at the University of Houston, the coaching staff was so adept at various events that they often traded off who handled the jumps, hurdles, or sprints.

All of these folks had deep knowledge, but it also went wide. They were what I’d call a coach’s coach. Meaning, instead of narrowing and proclaiming they were a middle-distance or offensive guru, they learned to apply their craft to every aspect of the sport. And often, across sports.

For a long time, this coaching style was fading. It gave way to the specialist, who did one thing really well but had little depth of knowledge outside of it. Coaching staffs expanded, specializations narrowed, and there was little need for someone who knew how to do everything. This was true well outside of coaching, as we can see in the explosion of sub-specialties in academics, or in the ever-narrowing job titles.

And it was for good reason. We had to specialize in response to an environment of expanding knowledge. The world got too complicated and messy to master. Meaning, there were so many books, studies, and the internet to access them all, so you had to cover your small corner of the world. It's the argument economist Benjamin Jones made in The Burden of Knowledge and the Death of the Renaissance Man. And for much of the 21st century, it was true.

But we’re about to go back towards that Renaissance Man or old-school coach. With the rise of AI, Professor Ethan Mollick has offered that humans have four key advantages. Two of them are having both deep and wide knowledge. We need to be the old-school coach. His point is that we need genuine expertise, which allows us to have discernment over whatever AI does. We are knowledgeable enough to see when it messes up or when it’s going down the wrong path. But wide knowledge is just as essential. As Mollick puts it, “AI tends not to volunteer any of these patterns unless you know to ask. This is where wide knowledge comes in.”

In a time when AI can do just about anything with knowledge about an insane number of things, wide knowledge allows us to ask the right questions, take the right detours, and work toward getting things done. We're entering a different kind of world, where instead of specializing in our small corner and holding on to that, it's imperative we learn to become a 'head coach'. We need to know about the entire game in order to manage both our assistants and the information flow.

While AI is part of the reason why we need both, it’s also because traditional job titles are disappearing. Meaning, the single specialist who only codes, only does copy, or only does graphics is going by the wayside. We need to do a bit of everything pretty well to turn our ideas into reality.

You can see it in our own careers as writers. When we started this years ago, you needed to write and communicate well, with just enough marketing to break through. Now, you need to be a full-blown social media expert, marketer, podcaster, video editor, and on and on, just to keep writing books. The job has transformed from mostly writing books to communicating those ideas across a number of outlets.

One of the reasons this is going to be ever more important is that it lies at the heart of creativity. We often assume creativity is some kind of wandering into the unknown and discovering something completely new. But that’s not how it works. Most creative ideas combine something familiar with something from a disparate, faraway field. It’s what researchers found when studying unique scientific contributions among 17.9 million papers. They found that high-impact science was more likely to come from those that took established knowledge but introduced an unusual combination or twist on it.

A 2025 review in Science looked at nearly 35,000 world-class performers, including Nobel laureates, Olympians, and composers. Those who reached the top had done more varied practice early on and progressed more slowly at first. Again, it’s not about being a specialist or a generalist; we need to cultivate the ability to zoom in and out, utilizing the skills of both. It’s depth and breadth, at the same time.

A 2015 study, aptly titled The Renaissance Man is not dead, shows us why we're making this shift. They found that generalists helped solve problems in high-uncertainty environments. When they were in a low-uncertainty environment, generalists got in the way. The value of breadth depends on the problem you're facing. When the path is unknown, generalists help.

It’s easy to get scared entering a world that seems to be changing rapidly. But history offers us a solution. In 1838, Charles Darwin had already spent years as a naturalist, including his famous voyage on the Beagle. But the idea that ultimately cemented him in history came from an economics book. He “happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” and it handed him the missing piece: under the pressure to survive, “favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.”

Deep knowledge told Darwin what he was looking at. Wide knowledge told him where to look. That’s the old-school 'Renaissance' coach. It’s time to bring it back.

--Steve

Listen: How to Care Deeply and Compete Fearlessly

How do you want something very badly and still hold the result loosely? Detaching from the outcome is one of the most important skills in performance. It's also one of the hardest. Today on excellence, actually," we...