Chris Sharp

Alamo Heights High School Girls Soccer/soccer (San Antonio, Texas)

Double-Goal Coach Award Winner

Chris Sharp, Girls Soccer Coach at Alamo Heights High School has won Positive Coaching Alliance’s coveted National Double-Goal Coach® Award presented by TeamSnap for her positive impact on youth in sports.

Sharp is one of 50 national recipients of the Double-Goal Coach® award, named for coaches who strive to win while also pursuing the more important goal of teaching life lessons through sports. The award includes a $200 prize, a certificate, and mention within the websites and newsletters of Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), a national non-profit developing Better Athletes, Better People through youth and high school sports. Sharp and the other coach winners will be recognized at PCA’s National Youth Sports Awards Dinner and Benefit Sponsored by Deloitte to be held on April 28th, 2018 at Maples Pavilion on Stanford University’s campus in honor of their 20th Anniversary.

“Chris helps his players win on and off the field” said Trennis Jones, Executive Director of PCA-Central Texas, the local Chapter of Positive Coaching Alliance. “By creating a positive, character-building youth sports experience and serving as a Double-Goal Coach®, Chris helps youth develop into better athletes and better people.”

Coach Sharp has been coaching at Alamo Heights nearly 18 years ago and he’ll often run into former players who still enjoy playing the sport. His approach to soccer has always been to create a love of the sport and to teach life lessons, so seeing girls still play many years later tells him he is doing something right. He was nominated by the parent of a player who said of Coach Sharp, “he has a positive attitude that allows the girls to play at a higher level than they thought possible. He gives the girls the opportunity to play different positions and encourages them to strive for excellence without fear of failure.”

Sharp uses activities outside of sport like getting the girls together to volunteer to make blankets for children in the hospital, sponsoring a soccer camp for elementary aged girls, or putting on an annual car wash to raise funds for their own buses for travel to out of town games to build team chemistry. Soccer can be a grueling sport and the season can run long, so building these connections among the players allows them to lean on each other during the difficult times. They have each other’s backs and don’t want to let each other down.

The girls also learn about sportsmanship, good character, respect and leadership from Coach Sharp. After watching other club coaches who had a “win-at-all-costs mentality, and through years of experience, he came to the realization that with soccer, “there’s got to be something bigger and better than what we’re doing. It really came to light about life lessons - how can I parallel this to the real world? It’s just like being in a job with a manager where you might have people in your office you don’t love but you’ve got to work together to form a team.” Teaching girls how sports translates to life and how it can help develop them for the real world is an everyday part of coaching soccer to Chris Sharp.