Gilbert’s Coaching Tips

Aaron Shalosky, Southern Colorado Team, copied me on a launching trip their team took in December.  He wrote:

…We had a great launching trip to our outlying schools in Southern Colorado last week.  Looks like we have a new student leader who seems excited to take over leadership of the movement at Adams State.  He is a football player Bert worked with in Student Venture.  We launched an EveryStudent.com campaign there and seems like we surfaced about 10 potential students who are interested.  At Western State, we did some re-aligning of student leaders (gently) and things look promising with a new group of young leaders we were able to establish some relational ties with.

I asked Aaron if he would elaborate on how the trip fit into his overall plan and what it took to pull it off.  Here are his thoughts:

Vision. We have been doing our best to get our whole staff team a chance to visit our outlying campuses.  Right now, in Colorado Springs, there seems to be saturation of Christian ministries in the local area, but no one seems to be taking up a vision, burden, and responsibility for campuses south of Colorado Springs.  The Crusade ministry at Adam’s State in Alamosa recently died out with lack of student leadership, where about 3-4 years ago we were seeing a good number of students come to our Fall and Christmas conferences.  The CCC chapter at Adam’s state even won “Club of the Year” at the school a few years ago.  This all has created a burden on our team to help re-launch this campus.

Equipping. In terms of skills needed, a little decoding on the front end, the ability to cast vision to a new student leader on what a movement can look like and the ability to interact with school/campus life staff about details on becoming an recognized campus club.

Resources. Launching funds for transportation and lodging.  [The GPI Regional Team has set aside funds for missional teams to use in launching.]  Renting a big van so that most of our staff team could travel together was a great team-builder in itself.  We also used some of the EveryStudent.com flyers and an gmail account to receive interested student responses.  It also helped having several of the resources from GodSquad to develop a starter kit for student leaders.  Finally, it was very helpful having some funds to buy dinner for a student leadership team.  Treating them to dinner goes a long way in developing good will toward student leaders at our distance campuses.

Intentionality. Our desire is to visit our outlying campuses twice a semester.  We have not been able to do this very well so far, and visiting campuses at the beginning of December may not be the most strategic.  However, the timing does provide an opportunity to recruit for our Christmas Conference and we know if we could get a new student leader to the conference, it could go a long way in giving them a vision for launching a movement with us.  We recognize that it takes intentionality in developing good distance coaching habits, especially on our local level where we have a couple campuses in the city we live that are more traditional “staffed” campuses.  It can be easy to just get focused on a campus that is a 15 minute drive and where students are already invested.  So taking 3-day staff trips helps keep face time with outlying students and can help us develop and maintain good distant coaching habits each semester.

Aaron and his team are living with the tension about managing things at home and seeing the need to go distant.  They had the vision to go after those campuses.  They were equipped with some basic skills needed to set up potential leaders.  It does take some resources.  Some use FSKs.  Others use EveryStudent.com and other web resources.  Finally, they needed to put launching into their schedule.  There will always be things, good things, that will keep us for launching unless we are intentional about it.