which i was also a part of yes there are many other great ways of great things about it but today we are going to be focusing not just on the generalization of coaching and teaching but the struggle of balancing the two together me what it is like to balance coaching and teaching together honestly i started coaching before i became a permanent teacher here at peters township so the balancing act really began just all in one i would say the the big difference that i could see teaching throughout the fall in the winter is one thing you have a little bit of time to work with you have a little bit of free time and then as soon as the season starts in the spring all of that gets cleared away so i would say the biggest thing is just utilizing that free time to the best of your billet he becomes more valuable in the spring once a season that started what do you do when your free time to yourself you don't have to spend on when managing your time with the actual teaching part do you have to always plan and stuff like what is it like to plan for like say a week of school well yeah i mean with coaching and teaching teaching obviously i think the lesson plans  practice plans and it's it's difficult especially in your first couple years as a teacher to have the forward thinking ability to say ok it's monday right now this is going to be what i'm going to do on friday so i would say just as far as time management you just you try to give your best estimate if you lay out some type of a groundwork at least you have some type of a plan that you can follow going on my personal experience what i write up for friday is rarely what i actually because things change you get caught up in the faster sometimes you just have to be willing to adapt to those changes that occur i feel you dug into it's a huge bore into this because with schedules just in general it's probably or as a teacher just to be  manage that with coaching sure sure i mean the nature the nature of both jobs you're going to get unexpected situations thrown at you that adaptation is is what it's all about it can be scary sometimes but that's that's really what you have to be accepting of to be able to stay in and be able to do this what do you think teaching has taught you about your coaching skills and what have you learned from it i think i think both of those roles are actually really similar as far as being a leader of students in the classroom or leader of student athletes on the field both of them are going to take some of the saying qualities so that the whole time management that we're talking about teaching forces you that it's not something that is necessary they're great at when i was in high school so my my coaching has improved because of that time management that i was able to learn to teaching also just the the ability to create this practice plan i mean it directly goes back to creating a lesson plan and then of course the the adversity that you see working with high school students has both its  positives and its negatives and that's really why i love both of those jobs being a teacher gives you just more experience of kind of dealing with the unexpected events that then when you deal with something like that on the cross field i feel that on a more comfortable in handling the you guys across the something that's near and dear to me and i started playing in fourth grade put it all throughout my middle school high school career so it's an important sport to me i love to see the sport grow i like to people develop that passion and then the other thing is just it's an immense responsibility to be a player as was a coach so seeing you guys rise to the occasion and deal with the setbacks and and become better athletes become better students become better young men for a couple of seconds my friends got worried about mick's apparently i was just laying on the ground for like ten ten minutes i don't remember any of that so the knowledge of concussions where they were for me at that time personally i went to the cross back the next day and then at lacrosse practice the next day i was hit in the head again fell to the ground once again switching to memory loss so yeah they they said that that's the whole double concussion syndrome in this whole crazy thing i remember the recovery being tough i remember comes like since you're a teacher what do you do for students that have can go sions i mean there are different accommodations the one thing about the concussion is it's going to be different and unique for every student so sometimes it's kind of they're the specialists they're the experts they know it to do so but if you if you're really good connection with the students at a school don't you i mean it's helpful i joke sometimes but it is true i spend more time with the lacrosse the cross field helps reinforce that relationship was like the toughest part about teaching in general there's there's a lot of difficulties i would say the toughest part is balancing teaching specially government it's not always the not is the easiest content area to get you guys excited or are a to go so i would say the toughest thing would be balancing that high expectation with also trying to make it fun make it entertaining  i want to hold all my students to a high degree of expectation but at the same time i don't want to to crush you guys and have you kind of lose that that enthusiasm for coming to class and being a part of what we do know what it's like the just just get it done one thing i've become better at is if i'm going to enjoy free time make sure that your stuff done the way as a teacher is a little bit different than a student as a student if you progress in your homework the only individual you really impacting is yourself as a teacher if i procrastinate i'm going to grade what i do sometimes then i'm impacting sixty ninety sometimes one hundred kids and with not it's not necessarily just one experience they got me here it's kind of a couple things that bounce me around and threw me down this path honestly throughout middle school into early high school i want to go into some type of field of maybe engineering maybe med school all that changed i took chemistry hated chemistry that for me confirmed that medical careers out engineering careers that any autoblog or anything like that  aside i didn't get it i didn't get the science i didn't want to get the science i just had no interest in and whatsoever so my other passion was history so the passion for history continued to grow throughout high school and then when it came the crunch time senior year i was kind of trying to think about well which i do with this history passion i want to be a librarian or work and there's nothing wrong with being alive and well it just wasn't for me that's that's something that's something that i knew so it was actually through talking to a couple of my teachers that i was most in high school they said they they saw some similar personality traits right itself on so that i was on a more outgoing side that i needed to be active in a profession so it just kind of made sense and i thought that i was a good fit so i played the duquesne and very quickly as you can i i was in a classroom my second semester freshman year i found out you know what this is this is going to work  that's cyclical repetition in anything the one thing that i would say for a teacher that's unique is i mean the people that i work with are high school students so you really don't know it to them and every day that brings some excitement and then the other thing you you always when you get older yos kind of question what's what's the impact of what i'm doing in my in my doing anything helpful not changing anything what's the impact of what i'm doing being a teacher is one of those jobs that gives picking your own career i would say i would say i mean star general that's that's kind of what i did in a lot of different ideas and then kind of narrowed it down almost through trial and error in my head  think one of the big things would be just keep in keep an open mind about it i i know dozens of my friends that went to school for a person that's just having major and changed it so i would say just make sure you're always following your passion make sure you're always following something that you're interested in not something that you feel that you should be doing if you're if you're not personally interested in it it's not going to be a successful or enjoy look strange for you we're talking the rest of your life one piece of advice what would it be so selecting a major because right now i'm picking beaded between like medical field technology and business and i like it's going to hard for me to just pick one of them because i do have like smaller say give it give it a lot of personal money see yourself in those different roles see if it if it really is something that works if you evaluate the reasons why there's different things or options for you and sometimes it kind of reveals itself that one is a better option than the other even though i said make the decision for yourself invite other people that you trust into that conversation or maybe it's different teachers maybe it's your parents maybe it's bosses maybe it could be me but if you have that conversation sometimes talking to other people about yourself can reveal different things about yourself that you don't know so those other people can be an effective influence like i said it was some teachers responsibilities your family responsibilities your academic responsibilities just your social responsibilities every one of them is important its own way and it's up to you to figure out how are you going to do that juggling balancing act i think it's something that we all improve on as we go through high school it's something that as you mature in college that it becomes more natural and you just put generally make once you get older i would say that high school kind of with those good role model teachers high school kind of presented me an image of the type of student the type of question of the i want to be but it wasn't a college that should strive to i think the only moment they had doubting teaching it wasn't necessarily about you know what i'm not really passionate about this is not something i want to do i do something else it was more the fear of something new when when duquesne sends you out they call him like off servatius or stood up surveys i think what exactly they call him but they got you into different questions early and it was in this different school every time not being used to being in the settings that anxiety set and he was hard to think yourself what am i doing it could be so much easier if i chose something else so yeah you get those doubts i think because this is something that i had been striving for for a while i  doubts and then going through with the going through with the experience usually for me just reaffirmed that i was once again making the right choice i would say i'm a little bit unique in that that i made my decision in high school went this route for my decision and then completely just kind of stayed on that path i i had a pretty nice little sentence on there it did and once again i saw a lot of my friends make different adjustments and they're out doing their thing they're successful so that happened so you don't necessarily need to mirror the experience of that i had it's not an experience everyone shares and to find people find themselves in a career in a lot of different ways  situations when i when i first get home especially on a friday one of the most important things from it for me is just to kind of sit down and just decompress for a little bit  drive themselves insane trying to trying to be busy all the time trying to be work oriented all the time trying to be so driven all the time if you don't give yourself that person with that you're just you're going to age a lot faster wasn't just boom of a sudden one year were successful we had a very talented group of athletes last year that talented group of athletes kind of as freshman and sophomore or junior a s they built up through the system you can see them coming closer together as a group unit also becoming more familiar with lacrosse and the ins and outs of how you're supposed to respect yeah i mean we had we had our disappointments and i think through this disappointments of of losing the first run in the playoffs we became more solidified as a unit when we went into the season last year we were able to set the very covered so i think it was just the fact of we knew the talent we knew the dedication from the group of players that was set that high expectation and you guys were were able to challenge yourself and keep yourself  about fear or concern or paranoia i think that in that that's what championship team to us wow i really don't understand how you do mr barrow that seems like a lot to me and i can barely handle across practice and homework well that's all the