Linda Sheridan coached basketball and volleyball for 25 years at Shadle Park High School. Her teams captured 17 Greater Spokane League titles, qualified for state championships 32 times and took home seven championship trophies. Sheridan, who turned 60 last week, has been retired since 2001. In a recent interview with editorial board members Rebecca Nappi, Doug Floyd and videographer Colin Mulvany, Sheridan looked back on leadership lessons garnered from her long, successful career.

Q: You were obviously a leader from an early age. Looking back now on your long and successful coaching career, how do you see leadership as your calling?

A: I probably wouldn’t have said it was my calling. I adored kids and athletics was such an opportunity for me. I was a reluctant leader. I came in at the point where Title IX came in, and I was the first coach of the sports I coached in Spokane. No one cared about women’s sports. I had to take leadership because it was the right time and right place. I had a group of kids that needed to be coached and from there it went on.

One of the things I learned very early in coaching was that regardless of what I did as a coach, the power in the word coach was overwhelming. When you stand in front of a group of kids and they look at you out of those eyes and you know they see you as their coach, the power and significance of that title is so magnificent, or so devastating, depending on how you choose it.

I had an eye-opening experience at 22 that said if you are going to take this responsibility, if you are going to be this person to these kids, you have to take it very seriously and be careful to use it to empower and not to degrade. I think I got scared to death about. I wasn’t a born leader. I think I had enough positive experiences in wonderful kids who gave me the freedom to be part of their lives in a time when lots of times parents are put back a step. Kids are feeling themselves in some other way. They want that distance but they still don’t want it to be completely adult-free, and I just happened to be adult in that time period and got to interact with hundreds of great kids, both through coaching and teaching. I feel blessed by the encounter.

Q: How did that fear early on make you a better leader?

A: When you are in a position of leadership, you have two choices. To empower and to serve. Or to use power over, to control. I’ve seen coaches do it both ways. It’s the nature of leadership. You can use it to benefit the people you are working with and to serve them and empower them to be more complete in their beings. Or it can become about your position, your ego, and you can use that, particularly in the case of kids, say things that are never forgotten.

The few times I regret in my career I forgot about that. I said something and the second it came out of my mouth, I knew it was one of those things that kid will never forget. And you can’t pull it back. I take that very seriously. And when I talk to the young people now coaching who were coached by me I want them to remember the power of their position. You have to use the power of your leadership well.

Q: What could candidates for political office, and the leaders we elect, learn about leadership from the best coaches in the country?

A: It has to do with being a person of integrity and character. When I was a kid, we talked about our political leaders as public servants. Now we call them politicians. Somewhere in there, we have lost the quality of great people coming from the place of true, honest character and integrity. And then bringing that to the populace, rather than their political office being too much about them. My hope is that we can find people coming from a place of really wanting to serve the best interest of the people they represent, be that on the local or national level.

Q: Is there one coach coaching now that you think our elected leaders could borrow some tips from?

A: There are so many wonderful coaches. He’s not still coaching, but my favorite coach of all time was Dean Smith, because Dean Smith was always about team. He could take a Michael Jordan, who was maybe the greatest player ever to play the game, and the whole time he was in college it was about helping the team be successful. Anyone who can inspire that from people who have so many individual talents to offer and still see that there is a bigger picture. There is a bigger agenda in all of our lives than just getting what it is we want and putting ourselves in front. He was my hero.

Q: All natural leaders seem to share one characteristic: tenacity. When you were a student athlete, it was pre-Title IX. How did you keep the hope alive then that there would be a day when girls and women athletes would be recognized and supported?

A: I’d like to tell you I had that dream, but I don’t think we could even have that dream then. It wasn’t something we even thought about. I watched this incredible women’s basketball game the other day between Duke and North Carolina. It was a marvelous game, but you don’t hear about those college women opting out early to go into the WNBA. It’s still dramatically different for women. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think those girls are there getting great educations and being challenged and empowered by their experience.

When I was growing up, I just wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to be a P.E. teacher, because I had some natural physical abilities and I had one opportunity to play softball one summer in a summer league team where I had a coach who made me feel good about myself in that role and so I thought wow, it’s great to have a good P.E. teacher. So coaching came to me really secondhand. It was required of me when I got my first teaching job, that I would also be a coach. I was maybe always a reluctant leader.

Q: How did tenacity help you during each season and season-to-season?

A: I’m a very passionate person by nature, particularly when I was coaching. Anyone who saw me coaching knew I was 100 percent there at the moment. It came from passion, loving what I was doing in the moment. What I wanted the kids to understand is that there is so much freedom in that, in being where you are completely in any given moment. Tenacity is what you might call it, but being really proud of the opportunity right there to do the best you can do. That is how I would interpret tenacity.

It was part of my natural character to be where I was 100 percent of the time. I loved coaching. I loved practice. I loved practice more than the big games. I just loved being with the kids and trying to get to the next place. I was kind of driven that we were never as good as we were going to be and the last game of our season should be our best. That is what I tried to draw the kids along with and I hoped they learn that there was always the next thing. There is always the next thing in our life. We’re never done. We never get it done, whatever it is we are here to do, we never get it done. And I’m not sure too many times we get it wrong. There’s always a lesson in it. There’s something we can learn from the experience. That’s what I wanted the kids to get. Whether we won or lost, there was something there for us.

Q: You took a break from 1990-1991 to get a master’s degree in education. How did the break help you become a better coach?

A: It gave me an opportunity to re-choose. I needed the break. I had a couple of hard coaching years. Some kids I couldn’t get to come together in the ways I wanted. I had some doubts, and some parents were questioning my abilities. I needed to take a step back. It seemed like a great time. It meant more money for me and my future. I did that with the idea I’d spend time watching other coaches. I did a two-year master’s in one year. But what I also did was spend every afternoon in the Whitworth gym or the Gonzaga gym watching the coaches coach. I got permission. I saw (Dan) Fitzgerald and Sean Madden and several of the coaches coaching during that time period. I stole drills, if that was appropriate. And I just watched the things I saw them do with kids. I helped Julie Holt, she was the basketball coach at Gonzaga at the time, and she had me come in and we’d talk about mental prep. I got to interact with other coaches.

That same year, my mother passed away. I needed to take a break. But when I went back, I got to actively re-choose my career, totally. I could have chosen not to go back to coaching. I re-chose and I was really clear that this was my passion, my career, my job.

Q: How can breaks help all leaders?

A: We tend to start getting into habits of behaviors and thought patterns. It does become too much about us and what we’re doing. It’s a chance to re-choose it from a new place. I had that opportunity to re-choose and I got to see some other people and get some other opinions. There was some real collegial working together with the other coaches. That was really positive.

Q: Your advice to your girls, written up in one story: “Risk it, trust, don’t be afraid to fail.” Can you elaborate on each of these.

A: Risk it. You don’t go anywhere if you don’t push the boundaries of your comfort zone. For high school kids that’s so tough. They want to be OK the way they are. They are taking a risk walking down any high school today. That’s huge. Knowing we were doing it together, there was real comfort knowing as a group we could risk it together. It buoyed them up to push outside their parameters. Lots of time it’s easier to do it for someone else. That’s the nature of leadership, the nature of being part of a team. And team is what we’re all about, whether we call it a family, a job or whatever. We all work in teams constantly. There’s always something else you could be trying to do. So the risking part was trying to push their limits, see how much better they could be.

Q: What about trust?

A: The basis of our program was trust. Tell the truth and keep your agreements. From day one, those were the things we required our kids to buy into. That was the only way we could function as a group. If we said we were going to do something, we did it. We laid ourselves out there for each other. We didn’t have to be best friends, but we respected our individual identities, strengths and weaknesses. When we brought those together, the collective was the most important. Trust is huge. You have to believe that people are going to act in your, and their, best interest.

Q: And don’t be afraid to fail?

A: You don’t learn anything if you don’t fail. We learn way more from our failures than our successes. We focus so much, particularly in athletics, on winning and 99 percent of the people don’t end up their season on a win and to say that all those other experiences aren’t equally as valid would be ludicrous. There was way more to learn from the time we didn’t meet our standards. Failure is a marvelous teacher. We shouldn’t call it failure, necessarily, but lesson.

Q: Some experts have cited the reason for quality leaders is the lack of quality followers. What makes good followers? You had experiences with followers with your team members and their parents.

A: My experience with my teams is that kids who wanted to be leaders didn’t necessarily have the following to be so. Sometimes leaders, in our case, seniors for the most part, ended up being leaders — for better or worse. It’s not always for the best. Leaders can lead us in the right direction or the wrong direction. But the power of that depends on the followership. Whether we know enough about our character whether it’s a direction we can follow or not. We also must give the opportunity for people to take leadership. And if they say I will do this, the microscope can be overwhelming. I understand why people don’t run for office. It’s very difficult to be under the microscope for 24 hours a day for the entire breadth and width of your life. We need as a populace to be a little more tolerant of our humanness. We have failings and flaws and we aren’t perfect. It takes tremendous courage to be the one who steps out and says “I will do this. I will serve.”

Q: I sometimes picture the electorate as parents gone wild in the stands. Give me your thoughts on parents and followers.

A: When you come to a game, you come as a parent, an official, a coach or an athlete, and you can only do one job. I think the job of a parent is to support the experience of their kids. That doesn’t mean to short-circuit it, make it all pleasant. Kids learn from not always getting what they want or not always succeeding. We don’t do them a service by jumping to their defense and not ever teaching them there is responsibility, there are consequences, there are other shareholders. There are people who are going to suffer from the decisions that you make. That’s all part of growing up, being human.

As parents, we need to give back those experiences to the kids. That doesn’t mean we let them be mistreated. When parents would call me, and it didn’t happen too often, I’d pretty much say, “Send your daughter to me. If she has a problem with what we’re doing then she and I need to work it out, because that’s what the situation is about. It’s not really important that you understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, but it’s real important that your daughter understand what I am doing.”

That’s how I short-circuited it. I would try to empower the kid to come talk to me about it. I know sometimes they were shy or their parents didn’t feel they had the guts to come do that. But to me that’s how parents support. They help empower their kids to get their own questions answered, to stand up for what they believe, but it’s not to do it for them. We don’t grow that way.

Q: Who do you wish would run for public office? What kinds of people?

A: We all need to look at what we want in leadership rather than in most elections when we vote against someone, rather than for someone. That’s unfortunate. There are so many people who want to step forward and take some positive leadership. We’re seeing that in candidates who say let’s start early and let the populace know what we believe. We have to listen to what they say. What their actions show. Find out if they are people of character and not just telling us what they think we want to hear.

At the same time, I want a leader who listens to us and becomes a public servant instead of once they are elected, they start with their own agenda and who has the most money for what. I’d like to think that whoever we elected remembered that they were voted by the people to be a leader. That has to be one of the most empowering things. But do you use that power to empower the group, the collective, or do you use it to empower yourself?

Q: It occurs to me that the world of sports provides a unique arena for leadership. Unlike most other places, when you’re in that spotlight, minute-by-minute, second-by-second, point-by point, people can evaluate how things are going. And if it’s not going perfectly in their eyes, they have a tendency to be second-guessers and give you immediate feedback from the stands. So I would suspect there are times when you’re under pressure to re-evaluate your own direction, both internally because of what you see happening on the floor and because you’re getting all this feedback, and you need to find a way to balance between being stubborn or caving in or doing what’s right. How do you maintain your focus on coaching in the style you think is best suited for that game and that situation?

A: I really believed that my job or my team was no more important than their job. It was just my job. My responsibility was to be a teacher, to teach skills, to create strategies and so forth. But when we got into game situations, it was all our responsibility to make it work. They had to buy into what I was doing and I had to support their questions and concerns that came up in a game that made execution difficult.

One time we were in a state semifinal basketball game and Shannon Stiles, who is Gonzaga’s soccer coach now, was my point guard. I was yelling something as usual, trying to get them to do something. Someone was shooting a free-throw and she came down to me and said, “I think we ought to run the ball defense.” And I stopped and I said OK. She went back and called it to the kids and it worked great and we got a big swing in momentum and things went great.

Somewhere in there is that whole idea, have you empowered the populace to think within the system, make suggestions to the leaders and leaders have room to listen? Sometimes in the heat of battle, someone sees or has information that would be really valuable to you. At the same time, you have to be careful that you’re not listening too much to people who aren’t shareholders in that particular situation. Everybody wants to tell a coach and a team everything they think they should have done.

But the reality is that those kids were at practice everyday. Those kids knew the system. Those kids and that coach go into battle as a team. A leader is a member. The coach isn’t separate from. The coach is a member of the team. You have a separate job. They have a separate job. But when those jobs can come together, then you got something special. I was lucky enough to have that in some teams. The kids didn’t feel it was my team they were playing on, it was their team. That’s really important for leadership to understand. The heat’s on you — it’s usually not on the kids sitting on the bench who play for five minutes — the heat’s on you. But at the same time, you’re just a representative of the bigger group.

I made mistakes and I was the first one to say, “Boy that was really stupid.” You make mistakes. We’re so afraid to say I made a mistake. This is what I learned from that and this is what I think I could do differently the next time. We never get it done. There’s always something else we’re supposed to be learning. But for some reason we think when we get in a position of leadership that makes us infallible. Sometimes the effort to hide the fallacies and some of our decisions creates a lack of trust in our populace and in our followers.

Q: How do you identify a Shannon Stiles? How do you spot the floor leader you can entrust leadership responsibilities with?

A: Part of it is position. Sometimes there are positions on the floor that can’t be that position unless they have that quality. I’ve had some great floor leaders that the second the game was over, or they walked out of the school environment, totally different kinds of personalities, didn’t fit into that mold at all. But because that was their job on the team, they gained some of that power and the kids gave them that power. If you’re the point guard and they don’t listen to the point guard then they can’t be the point guard. It doesn’t work, if your kids don’t follow that person.

The kids that have integrity lead by example. They walk their talk. If they ask you to do something, they’ve always done it first. Then we get some solidity and consistency.

Q: You talked about Dean Smith in North Carolina maintaining the idea it was the team even though he had a Michael Jordan out there. Sometimes there might be a player who isn’t up to his or her game and you don’t want to destroy their confidence, but sticking with that person is detrimental to the overall team’s success. Conversely, maybe you’ve got a Michael Jordan out there who is good and contributing, but you’re losing opportunities from the other. How do you balance the team’s well-being with the individual’s well-being?

A: You gain that over time with the kids buying into the idea that the us is way more important then the them. I had a wonderful player named Lori Lollis who played for us. She was the player of the year for two years in the state of Washington. Wonderful scorer. We were doing individual goals one time. They were supposed to say one thing they could promise the team for the rest of the season they’d be responsible for. We got to her and she said she’d play great defense.

I said, “Is everyone comfortable with everything?” A couple of the kids looked at me and said, “If Lori isn’t going to score, who is?” The kids already got that it didn’t make her anymore special. It was just her gift. And if she’s unwilling to do her gift, then that’s really scary to the rest of us. Lori hearing that didn’t make her more special. It was something she could do for us to all be successful. It was her gift and she was giving her gift to the collective. Then it made the whole thing work.

Kids do have bad days. Sometimes they just need to sit and regroup. No kid needs to hear everything they did wrong. There isn’t a kid on the floor who doesn’t know everything they did wrong in spades. That’s something you work on. If they are coming from the right place and they want the team to be successful, they’re willing to let that kid who’s playing awesome play in their spot for awhile. You keep working on it so they understand it’s the best for the collective.

Q: You said before that you liked practice more than big games. Why was that?

A: It was just us, doing what we did together. It could be a little more fun sometimes. If something was funny, you could just laugh at it. It was just lighter. When you get into a game, there’s all this other stuff — pressure for the kids, the parents.

I love the day to day watching things progress. Feeling really good about themselves and the experience. It was a day-to-day experience. Be clear about what you want and put the energy in that direction.

Q: Do you have brothers and sisters?

A: I have a brother and two sisters. I’m the youngest.

Q: Are there two or three books you’ve read that you’d recommend to people who want to be in leadership roles?

A: Definitely Dean Smith’s book “A Coach’s Life.” I read Phil Jackson’s book “Sacred Hoops” and I have a lot of respect for Jackson. He took a lot of super egos and turned them into team. I read “Golf in the Kingdom” which I adored. “The Inner Game of Tennis” I adored. It’s all about how to focus your own intention and sports is an outlet for what you gain from that practice. “Inner Game of Tennis” I recommended to my kids because it’s how to get over that mind talk so that your mind starts to assist you instead of being to your detriment.

Q: When you look back on your career, if you had the ability to go back and do something different in your leadership, what would you change?

A: A couple of times I allowed my own frustration and ego to come out. One time — it was a team that ended up winning the state championship and they were a wonderful group of kids working their fannies off for me — but they had won two games in a volleyball match against Ferris and then, for no apparent reason, we lost three straight. In the frustration of that, I ended up being very angry after the match and saying some things that I really regretted. What I learned from that is coaches should never talk to their kids after. They didn’t need to hear it and I didn’t need to say it. The next day, you go to The Onion with your assistant coaches and kick the dog and come back with a plan to fix it. The few things I really regret are the times I said or did something where I just should have the maturity or composure to say this isn’t the right time to address this, I’m going to get a little distance and get my emotions in check. In my plan how I wanted to serve kids, this wasn’t something I wanted to do.

Q: Could you immediately see kids who were born leaders within the group? How did you help them foster those leadership skills?

A: Yeah, I did. And some of them weren’t necessarily positive leaders. They were powerful personalities. The ones who had to learn to change the power of their personality into something that was constructive to the group. They didn’t always come from the most genuine place in themselves and they could be very hurtful in the things they said and the way they handled other people. Dealing with those kids and trying to teach them how to understand and use the power of their personality and use it for the benefit of themselves and the group. This wasn’t something that was going to go away when they graduated from high school. It was something I could see would start to affect relationships and the workplace. So we worked very hard with those kids to give them positive leadership roles within the team. And the kids learned how to give each other positive feedback. “When you say this, this is how I feel.” That’s a really good way to talk to each other because then it comes from a place of integrity.

Q: How does it make you when you had an impact on a kid who you saw as a potential leader and saw those changes?

A: Those are some of the highest parts of my memory, seeing those kids. It would have been easy to cut them, to say this is too hard. We didn’t do that. We hung with some kids that I know when they walked away, they walked away different people. They are functioning better in their lives as adults now than they would have had they not had adults who said, we can change this, you can fix this, we can make this a more positive aspect of your personality. They just knew we loved them.

Q: Was there a time in your career when you realized you had leadership skills?

A: Day one. The very first day, I was 22 years old and I walked into my first job in a sport I knew nothing about — volleyball — in California. These little eighth graders looked at me with these great big eyes and I went “Oh my God, this is the most serious thing that could ever possibly happen to me.” I was so overwhelmed by the responsibility of that moment that it just never left me and it was the best thing that ever happened to me as a coach. It was so clear that they were in my hands, for better or for worse, and there they were, these shining seventh-and-eighth grade faces and I thought how could I do anything that would hurt them? Somewhere in that, I scared myself so badly that the only things I regret are the times when I did say something or I did let that position of coach become not something I used to benefit someone else.

Q: You seem a little hard on yourself.

A: I had a charmed, magnificent career. I learned so much and I have so many wonderful memories. When you talk about the few regrets, there are so few compared with the wonderful moments I spent with kids over that time period. I was blessed. I had a marvelous career.

Q: Can you identify some of the traits of a leader?

A: It was the traits we wanted to have in our team leaders. They were kids you could trust. They were respectful of each other. They were responsible. They kept their agreements. They treated each other fairly. They were very caring and they took responsibility for the citizenship of their group. They were an active member of that collective. The two big ones: They had to tell us the truth and they had to keep their agreements. And that’s a huge risk for kids and we celebrated it daily with them.

Q: What impact do you think you have had on these kids who are now out there being citizens.

A: I hope I was a positive role model for them. When they think back to the experience of playing in my program or being in my classes, they felt like they were respected and when they left their experience had been worth it.

Q: Do they come back to you as adults and tell you?

A: You guys did a wonderful picture of me with my five kids who are head coaches in the GSL right now. That’s a wonderful tribute. Now they are out there touching all those lives. That’s what it’s all about. If I was a leader, it was to help other people touch other’s lives. We all have coaches who are a model in our head for being a coach. I hope the one I left for them is touching kids in a positive way.

Q: Who are the ones who still call you?

A: Julie Yearout (head volleyball coach at Lewis and Clark High School), Judy Kight (head volleyball coach at Mead High School), Stacey Ward (head volleyball coach at Ferris), Brooke Cooper (head volleyball coach at Shadle Park High School) and Shannon Stiles (head women’s soccer coach at Gonzaga University and Kirstin Votava, (communications professional).

Q: You mentioned earlier Betty Hammond, one of your role models.

A: Betty was my coaching model. I played tennis for her. I was a horrible tennis player. I ended up being an OK tennis player. I played tennis because I wanted to be competitive in high school and that’s all there was for girls, tennis and golf. I played for Betty Hammond at Shadle Park. We had so much fun everyday when we went to practice. We all felt like we were her kids. I loved her. I adored her.

Betty in the later years of her life started coming to my games. So I can relate when I go watch some of these other kids coach how that makes them feel. I’d always say to my kids, “My coach is here so play well.” I remember one time we had just won a district title out at Spokane Falls in basketball. We were in the locker room and here comes Betty Hammond. I introduced her and told them who she was. So she got up in front of them and said, “If you’d ever played as hard for me as these kids played for you, you’d have won a lot more tennis matches.” She always had a joke. She was a wonderful, light person.