You played church league softball when you were growing up. You have lots of great memories of catching fly balls and pegging members of opposing teams in the back, but what you remember most is your coach. He was an older guy, someone who loved the sport and so volunteered his Saturdays and a couple of afternoons a week to practices and games. You learned a lot from him: how to hit, how to catch, how to win and lose gracefully. One lesson more than any other has stuck with you through the years, however: There's no crying in baseball.

Now you'd like to pass what you learned in church league softball on to a new generation, not as a volunteer instructor, but as an actual, honest-to-goodness athletic coach. While there are several team sports you could coach and various levels you could coach at, all coaching jobs share some similarities:

• You'll plan and conduct practice sessions, where you'll instruct your team on technique, the rules of the sport, strategy, and why it's a bad idea to try and to purposely injure members of the opposing team
• You'll prep for games by analyzing the other team and your own players, so you can decide who should play what position and when
• You'll give heartwarming pep talks prior to and during games
• You'll call plays and substitutions and argue with the ref during games, and get ejected as needed
• You'll track your team's performance and adjust how your athletes train accordingly
• You'll identify and recruit athletes who would make good additions to your team

You long to be a high school, college, or professional-level coach, not because you love a particular sport, but because you adore it, and you want to see it played well. Maybe you played the sport in high school or college, maybe you were good, but not great, or maybe your athletic career was ended too soon by an injury. Whatever the case, you believe that you’re the best possible person to teach others, not only how to play the game, but how to win it.

You’ll have to possess top-notch communication skills in order to fill the sometimes empty skulls of your athletes with information. You'll need to be able to make intelligent and resourceful decisions about who to play during and how to play the game. Perhaps most importantly, you'll have to lead. As a high school coach, you'll be shaping young men and women, not only into competent athletes, but into (hopefully) competent adults. As a college or professional coach, you'll be directing players who may be wonderful people…or who may be full-blown basket cases. Wherever you're coaching, you need to show your players how to be motivated, dedicated, and disciplined.

So, how do you become a coach? At the high school level, you just have to want the job. Seriously: that's the requirement. You're the kind of person who likes kids and wants to show teenagers how much they can learn about being decent, successful human beings through sports. You also have the fortitude of a saint, because rather than dealing with the teenager, half of your job will be dealing with the parent who thinks their kid is the second coming of Michael Phelps.

If you want to coach the University of South Carolina to its next College World Series title, or the Denver Broncos to that bright and shiny Vince Lombardi Trophy, you can’t just want to be a coach. You've got to go after your dream like a dog going after a rabbit:

• Get your undergraduate degree in a field like sports management or sport science and exercise
• Play the sport you want to coach at the college level
• Go on to earn a master's degree in a field like education or sports administration
• Work as a minion to a coach while you’re in graduate school

• More