I am friends with Jayson Blair, former NY Times columnist turned Life Coach AKA Psychologist without the Masters or Doctorate. I was reading his blog and he wrote one on what makes a good athletic coach and here is what he said:
A good coach should recognize that winning is not everything and that the process of trying is where young people develop, build their self-confidence, recognize their talents and learn to cope with their weaknesses.
Coaching is a process of teaching skills, helping people develop intuition and self-awareness and building character. Coaches should seek to understand and motivate their players. In a one-on-one setting this is easier to do, but in a group setting coaches can teach people to lead and should help their players coach each other.
The best coach teaches life skills along with sports skills. Motivating begins with understanding the kids you work with, putting yourself in their shoes and coming up with ways to help them accomplish their goals, see their potential and get to know themselves better. These are the tools that help them learn to motivate themselves.
The temptation for those who coach a large group of people is to focus on a few players, the most talented, their favorites and the ones who are most like them. Some coaches also fall into the trap of attempting to motivate players through yelling at them and putting them down. This is generally a failure in the coach at truly spending the time to identify what motivates their players. Intuition, analytical abilities, leading by example, being able to model healthy relationships and positive motivation are the most important skills for a good coach -- not to mention being able to laugh and have fun.
Norm fits his description. Players like Norm, Players GPAs are up, Rob Thomas did a 180 on his life while at SJU, they learn under Norm. The only weakness in this is that Norm does alienate one player each year from the Mold leading to a transfer like Larry Wright or Cedric Jackson. And BTW, if you are thinking, why am I quoting a man who plagrized articles during his tenure at the Times, He did it because he has a severe case of Bipolar Disorder which I can sympathize to because I have it and some cases lead to heavy drug use which he spent most of the day doing which left him no time to plan interviews and was forced to make up or steal quotes (BTW, I never did drugs) and he would still have a journalism job if he worked for the Post covering St Johns basketball during the Willie Shaw-Marcus Hatten-Grady Reynolds-Abe Keita era since Willie and Marcus were busted for weed and part of Bipolar is strong sexual urges and he could have gotten inside info in Pittsburgh during that sad night. One more thing, I did not pay much attention to the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 because I was friends with Rachel Seager and she was bugging me to talk to Lenn Robbins in his quest to bring down St Johns and word around the athletic department was Robbins was the more pathetic journalist (Its true, Robbins broke a story as an exclusive in September of 2004 that the Garden would not renew SJU lease there and SJU was close to signing with Nassau Coliseum to play their games there but 2 days later, the Garden signed a new deal with SJU)