Name: Great Coaches Can Shape Our Lives Forever
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T16:30:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Great Coaches Can Shape Our Lives Forever' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Great Coaches Can Shape Our Lives Forever' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-12. Transcript available.

But one of the things my dad also did, he was a coach.
He coached rugby and stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I think particularly in the U.S.,
I've become really interested in the role of coaches.
So my basic view is that coaches, especially for boys,
we're actually seeing sports is going down for boys in the U.S. now.
Boys are less likely to play sports than in the past.
Is that true? Bring it up.
It's going up, yeah.
The Aspen Institute has a really good project called Project Play
where they actually track the data.
It's going up for girls and down for boys.
Now, it's always been higher for boys,
but sports participation is going down for boys.
One reason for that is coaches.
You need coaches to do that.
And we can maybe get into male teachers
because actually one of the things that male teachers do,
and my son has just become a teacher.
Oh, wonderful.
Yeah, he's teaching fifth grade in Baltimore.
And within a day of starting, someone heard his accent
because he's still got a British accent, heard his accent.
He's a soccer coach now.
And he actually is a good soccer player.
But the point is he's immediately a coach, right?
And I think that coaches are basically mental health professionals in disguise,
right?
I think they're doing a lot of the work that you'd otherwise do in terms of
mental health.
And you can kind of see, like, there'll be a line from the Aspen.
Okay, here we go right here.
It says, oh, we have fewer boys who are playing sports.
In 2013, half of boys aged 6 to 17 participated regularly in sports,
according to SFIA data.
Only 41% of boys did in 2023.
Right.
Girls aged 6 to 12 had 34%, and 13 to 17 aged girls were 38% played at higher
levels in 2023 than in any recent years.
Correct.
So girls is going up, like you said, boys is going down.
Correct.
Some of that could be attributed to also a lot more boys are like they choose
to become gamers and that sort of thing.
But more sedentary things.
It could be, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah.
I mean, ideally, you'd want to do a bit of both.
But then the question is, like, why are boys playing less sport than in the
past?
Right.
And what is this coaching thing?
And, you know, you can't get coaches.
I'd love to see something like a Coach for America program.
You know, there's this Teach for America program, which gets people into
teaching.
Because I think there's a lot of men who are struggling to know how to kind of
connect with their community or what they can do.
Oh, for sure.
Right.
Some of the older institutions, maybe they used to do that through church or
the scouts or whatever have maybe declined.
They have declined.
And so if there was a way to kind of plug those men into a coaching role, I
think that's important.
Because when you, I mean, maybe this is maybe your experience.
But, like, I think if you look at the image of a coach sitting on a bench, like
with a student, you know, a boy or a young man sitting next to him.
And he's like, how are you doing?
Right.
How are things at home?
You know, how are things with your mom?
You know, et cetera.
Is you kind of, that's counseling.
That's therapy.
But you're just not calling it that.
We've talked about male spaces and having, like, groups and spaces for men.
I think that's usually good.
Right, so starting one of those is good if you want.
Yeah, and if you're like, and you're seeing that.
There's this thing called the men's sheds movement.
Have you heard of that?
It's coming over from Australia.
It's just guys who get into it like a shed and start fixing stuff together.
Really bring it up?
Shoulder to shoulder.
The men's sheds movement.
Oh, I love this.
It's basically about, look, guys, and they get in a shed and they fix stuff,
right?
And it's very male because it's about fixing stuff.
U.S. Men's Sheds Association has partnered with Grouper to offer eligible
members age 65 or older payments for staying healthy and socially active.
Okay.
So the men's sheds.
Can you do an image of it?
Just U.S. men?
Can we just do men's shed movement images?
Oh, there's some fellas right there building a little.
What is that, a birdhouse or something?
Men have to be doing something else while they're being together, right?
Right.
It's just harder for us to just be together.
When was the last time a friend of yours said, let's just meet for a coffee and
then sit down and stare at each other for two hours?
Yeah, that guy is obviously trying to be like sexy buddies or whatever, I think.
And I think, yeah, you've got to find something to do together, paint something,
look for something.
Let's go look for something.
Be of service.
Yes.
Find service.
I think that's hugely important.
Boys and girls, like join your local Boys and Girls Club chapter.
You can volunteer there.
What's another one somebody said?
You can be a big brother.
Yeah, that was a good one.
I'm just going through the process for that myself.
Congrats.
Signing up to do that.
Yeah, I want to do that.
Being, I just, I know you talked to Scott about this, but just being a presence,
I think, is hugely important.
And like raising other people's kids, like there's this line, it takes a
village to raise a child.
That's true.
But here's the thing.
Some of the villagers need to be men.
And like we're in that village and we're helping to raise those kids, our
neighbor's kids.
You know, it does, that statement that it takes a village is right.
Oh, you don't realize as a parent, if there's a kid hanging out of your house,
sometimes one of your kids, friends or something, you have a ton of influence
on that kid.
Totally.
I mean, I got so much influence from most of my influence.
You realize how important, how many men there are out there who sometimes just
kind of need to be asked.
There was this example happened in a school.
I think it was a predominantly black school.
And they had this day where they were going to teach the boys how to tie a tie.
And the dads were going to come in with their sons and kind of teach their sons
how to tie a tie.
But then they realized that half the dads were not there.
Half the boys didn't have dads, didn't have fathers.
Or their fathers were in prison or they'd gone away or whatever.
And so they then really realized this was going to be a huge problem because
some of the boys were going to have their dad come in and do it.
And the others were going to feel left out.
So they just did a call out to the community.
I don't even know what it was, like a Facebook caller.
Like, could we get some volunteers?
We just need some men to kind of come in and help these boys.
They had something like five times as many men as they needed to.
These guys just all came.
It's really beautiful.
So men are looking for it.
Yes.
Just need to be somehow asked and called.
And the other thing I'll say, because we haven't had a chance to talk about
this yet,
is that the fact that male teachers have become so much less common, I think,
is a real problem.
It's gone from 33% male in the 80s to 23% male now, and it continues to fall.
And I think that's a problem for all kinds of reasons.
I think that for boys to sort of see men in the classroom, to actually have
them as role models,
also to see that education is a thing that, like, men care about as well.
Oh, that's a great point.
Yeah, one of my greatest influences was this guy, Charles Alder.
He was my teacher.
He was missing a finger.
How did he lose his finger?
You know what happened to him?
He was at a baseball game cheering on his son.
He stood up.
His wedding ring got caught on a piece of metal on the bleachers and pulled his
finger right off.
Do you know, I wish I hadn't asked now, but God bless him.
Pretty crazy.
And my dad was missing a finger.
And so I just related.
I was like, oh, God wants these men without fingers to love me or whatever.
You know, that's how I was thinking as a kid.
It was just crazy.
But that's how you think as a kid.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he was a huge influence on you.
Yeah.
Right?
Oh, yeah.
He was like...
Same for me.
I had this teacher, Mr. Wyatt, English teacher.
And up until that point, we were all like, you know, words and poems.
Yeah.
Wyatt's a book.
Yeah.
A bunch of 15, 16-year-old boys.
Oh, yeah.
And then we had Mr. Wyatt.
And Mr. Wyatt was a Korean War veteran.
He was a bus driver in part-time.
He was total curmudgeon.
And he had us reading...
Korean bus driver sounds very risqué.
No, no, no.
He was a Korean veteran.
He'd fought in the Korean War.
Oh, Korean veteran.
Sorry.
So he'd fought in the Korean War.
Yeah.
And he was just like this curmudgeonly guy.
But he had us reading this poetry.
And he loved it so much that we ended up loving it and getting into it.
And I was like, huh, maybe this whole writing words thing.
I used to be in remedial English way back before that.
But maybe it's...
Hey, maybe guys can do this too.
And it was a huge change for me.
And I mentioned before that my son is now teaching in Baltimore City.
That's one.
But we're like missing about a million men if we were to get close to gender
equality.
I'm not saying we'll get to that.
But I think that the best answer to some of the problems that a lot of boys
have got
is real living flesh and blood men in their lives.
Their dads, their neighbors, their uncles, but also their teachers.
And the other thing male teachers do, they coach.
Between 30% and 40% of male teachers are also coaches.
Much higher than for women.
For all kinds of reasons we could go into.
But the point is simply that for every male teacher, you get like half a coach,
right?
And so if we want more male coaches to be coaching our boys' sports teams, et
cetera,
we need more male teachers.
And I can't believe that we're just letting the share of male teachers
just go down and down and down and down.
And no one's doing anything about it.
Especially even we had a great TV show here called Prince Vice Principals or
whatever.
And that shit, you'd think what it helped, it was with Danny McBride was in it.
How long ago was that?
It's a couple of years ago.
So it might help a little bit.
But definitely it might have upped the vibes of some of these guys being
teachers.
And also like Abbott, do you know Abbott Elementary?
Yeah, people like that TV show.
That's got a bunch of male teachers in it too, which is like fun life.
So maybe you just need to influence that.
Like I remember when I was a kid, they had Coach was on and stuff like that.
Yeah.
But I guess it didn't really resonate that much.
But they had like, what was that TV, Art, Dead Poets Society or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, Robin Williams.
But I guess there was the one with, they set up with Ticker Man's, who's that
guy?
Malcolm L. Jackson or whatever that guy's name was.
No, it's, he looks like kind of older, but still, they set up with Ticker Man
600 years
to get out of the CF prison.
You know what I'm talking about?
I do not.
He talks like that.
No.
That was a good accent, but I don't know.
Thanks, he's in Shawshank Redemption.
You know what his name is, Morgan Freeman.
He played a school teacher.
Really?
Lean on Me, it was called.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But also there's this new one.
Lean on Me.
There's this other one, The Holdovers, just like a couple of years ago with
Paul Giametti.
Is that what I'm saying his name right?
Oh, yes, I saw that.
Yeah.
And again, it's like, really good.
And what those things have in common is there's this kind of relationship
between this kind of older
guy, this kind of younger man, and they kind of learn from each other, and they
go through some
stuff together, and it's like, it's really beautiful.
Yes.
It was.
That's a cool point.
That's a great movie.
And it's kind of, I was really pleased to see that, because it came up again
with this thing.
But one of the things that really frustrates me is that people will say, oh,
boys need more,
you know, we need more positive male role models.
And I'm like, we do.
It's actually, you can't create them out of thin air, right?
You can't just like add water and create male role model.
But one thing we could do is make sure we have a lot more men in our schools,
right?
That's something we could do.
We could have scholarships.
We could have outreach programs.
We could be incentivizing men.
We could also be making it much easier to become a teacher as like a second
career.
Because one of the things that we know is that men are much more likely to go
into teaching later.
Right?
They do something else first and then go.
But it's really hard to do that.
But it's really hard to do that.
But it's really hard to do that.
But it's really hard to do that.
But it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
But it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.
And it's really hard to do that.

Great Coaches Can Shape Our Lives Forever

But one of the things my dad also did, he was a coach.
He coached rugby and stuff.
Oh, yeah.
I think particularly in the U.S.,
I've become really interested in the role of coaches.
So my basic view is that coaches, especially for boys,
we're actually seeing sports is going down for boys in the U.S. now.
Boys are less likely to play sports than in the past.
Is that true? Bring it up.
It's going up, yeah.
The Aspen Institute has a really good project called Project Play
where they actually track the data.
It's going up for girls and down for boys.
Now, it's always been higher for boys,
but sports participation is going down for boys.
One reason for that is coaches.
You need coaches to do that.
And we can maybe get into male teachers
because actually one of the things that male teachers do,
and my son has just become a teacher.
Oh, wonderful.
Yeah, he's teaching fifth grade in Baltimore.
And within a day of starting, someone heard his accent
because he's still got a British accent, heard his accent.
He's a soccer coach now.
And he actually is a good soccer player.
But the point is he's immediately a coach, right?
And I think that coaches are basically mental health professionals in disguise,
right?
I think they're doing a lot of the work that you'd otherwise do in terms of
mental health.
And you can kind of see, like, there'll be a line from the Aspen.
Okay, here we go right here.
It says, oh, we have fewer boys who are playing sports.
In 2013, half of boys aged 6 to 17 participated regularly in sports,
according to SFIA data.
Only 41% of boys did in 2023.
Right.
Girls aged 6 to 12 had 34%, and 13 to 17 aged girls were 38% played at higher
levels in 2023 than in any recent years.
Correct.
So girls is going up, like you said, boys is going down.
Correct.
Some of that could be attributed to also a lot more boys are like they choose
to become gamers and that sort of thing.
But more sedentary things.
It could be, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah.
I mean, ideally, you'd want to do a bit of both.
But then the question is, like, why are boys playing less sport than in the
past?
Right.
And what is this coaching thing?
And, you know, you can't get coaches.
I'd love to see something like a Coach for America program.
You know, there's this Teach for America program, which gets people into
teaching.
Because I think there's a lot of men who are struggling to know how to kind of
connect with their community or what they can do.
Oh, for sure.
Right.
Some of the older institutions, maybe they used to do that through church or
the scouts or whatever have maybe declined.
They have declined.
And so if there was a way to kind of plug those men into a coaching role, I
think that's important.
Because when you, I mean, maybe this is maybe your experience.
But, like, I think if you look at the image of a coach sitting on a bench, like
with a student, you know, a boy or a young man sitting next to him.
And he's like, how are you doing?
Right.
How are things at home?
You know, how are things with your mom?
You know, et cetera.
Is you kind of, that's counseling.
That's therapy.
But you're just not calling it that.
We've talked about male spaces and having, like, groups and spaces for men.
I think that's usually good.
Right, so starting one of those is good if you want.
Yeah, and if you're like, and you're seeing that.
There's this thing called the men's sheds movement.
Have you heard of that?
It's coming over from Australia.
It's just guys who get into it like a shed and start fixing stuff together.
Really bring it up?
Shoulder to shoulder.
The men's sheds movement.
Oh, I love this.
It's basically about, look, guys, and they get in a shed and they fix stuff,
right?
And it's very male because it's about fixing stuff.
U.S. Men's Sheds Association has partnered with Grouper to offer eligible
members age 65 or older payments for staying healthy and socially active.
Okay.
So the men's sheds.
Can you do an image of it?
Just U.S. men?
Can we just do men's shed movement images?
Oh, there's some fellas right there building a little.
What is that, a birdhouse or something?
Men have to be doing something else while they're being together, right?
Right.
It's just harder for us to just be together.
When was the last time a friend of yours said, let's just meet for a coffee and
then sit down and stare at each other for two hours?
Yeah, that guy is obviously trying to be like sexy buddies or whatever, I think.
And I think, yeah, you've got to find something to do together, paint something,
look for something.
Let's go look for something.
Be of service.
Yes.
Find service.
I think that's hugely important.
Boys and girls, like join your local Boys and Girls Club chapter.
You can volunteer there.
What's another one somebody said?
You can be a big brother.
Yeah, that was a good one.
I'm just going through the process for that myself.
Congrats.
Signing up to do that.
Yeah, I want to do that.
Being, I just, I know you talked to Scott about this, but just being a presence,
I think, is hugely important.
And like raising other people's kids, like there's this line, it takes a
village to raise a child.
That's true.
But here's the thing.
Some of the villagers need to be men.
And like we're in that village and we're helping to raise those kids, our
neighbor's kids.
You know, it does, that statement that it takes a village is right.
Oh, you don't realize as a parent, if there's a kid hanging out of your house,
sometimes one of your kids, friends or something, you have a ton of influence
on that kid.
Totally.
I mean, I got so much influence from most of my influence.
You realize how important, how many men there are out there who sometimes just
kind of need to be asked.
There was this example happened in a school.
I think it was a predominantly black school.
And they had this day where they were going to teach the boys how to tie a tie.
And the dads were going to come in with their sons and kind of teach their sons
how to tie a tie.
But then they realized that half the dads were not there.
Half the boys didn't have dads, didn't have fathers.
Or their fathers were in prison or they'd gone away or whatever.
And so they then really realized this was going to be a huge problem because
some of the boys were going to have their dad come in and do it.
And the others were going to feel left out.
So they just did a call out to the community.
I don't even know what it was, like a Facebook caller.
Like, could we get some volunteers?
We just need some men to kind of come in and help these boys.
They had something like five times as many men as they needed to.
These guys just all came.
It's really beautiful.
So men are looking for it.
Yes.
Just need to be somehow asked and called.
And the other thing I'll say, because we haven't had a chance to talk about
this yet,
is that the fact that male teachers have become so much less common, I think,
is a real problem.
It's gone from 33% male in the 80s to 23% male now, and it continues to fall.
And I think that's a problem for all kinds of reasons.
I think that for boys to sort of see men in the classroom, to actually have
them as role models,
also to see that education is a thing that, like, men care about as well.
Oh, that's a great point.
Yeah, one of my greatest influences was this guy, Charles Alder.
He was my teacher.
He was missing a finger.
How did he lose his finger?
You know what happened to him?
He was at a baseball game cheering on his son.
He stood up.
His wedding ring got caught on a piece of metal on the bleachers and pulled his
finger right off.
Do you know, I wish I hadn't asked now, but God bless him.
Pretty crazy.
And my dad was missing a finger.
And so I just related.
I was like, oh, God wants these men without fingers to love me or whatever.
You know, that's how I was thinking as a kid.
It was just crazy.
But that's how you think as a kid.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he was a huge influence on you.
Yeah.
Right?
Oh, yeah.
He was like...
Same for me.
I had this teacher, Mr. Wyatt, English teacher.
And up until that point, we were all like, you know, words and poems.
Yeah.
Wyatt's a book.
Yeah.
A bunch of 15, 16-year-old boys.
Oh, yeah.
And then we had Mr. Wyatt.
And Mr. Wyatt was a Korean War veteran.
He was a bus driver in part-time.
He was total curmudgeon.
And he had us reading...
Korean bus driver sounds very risqué.
No, no, no.
He was a Korean veteran.
He'd fought in the Korean War.
Oh, Korean veteran.
Sorry.
So he'd fought in the Korean War.
Yeah.
And he was just like this curmudgeonly guy.
But he had us reading this poetry.
And he loved it so much that we ended up loving it and getting into it.
And I was like, huh, maybe this whole writing words thing.
I used to be in remedial English way back before that.
But maybe it's...
Hey, maybe guys can do this too.
And it was a huge change for me.
And I mentioned before that my son is now teaching in Baltimore City.
That's one.
But we're like missing about a million men if we were to get close to gender
equality.
I'm not saying we'll get to that.
But I think that the best answer to some of the problems that a lot of boys
have got
is real living flesh and blood men in their lives.
Their dads, their neighbors, their uncles, but also their teachers.
And the other thing male teachers do, they coach.
Between 30% and 40% of male teachers are also coaches.
Much higher than for women.
For all kinds of reasons we could go into.
But the point is simply that for every male teacher, you get like half a coach,
right?
And so if we want more male coaches to be coaching our boys' sports teams, et
cetera,
we need more male teachers.
And I can't believe that we're just letting the share of male teachers
just go down and down and down and down.
And no one's doing anything about it.
Especially even we had a great TV show here called Prince Vice Principals or
whatever.
And that shit, you'd think what it helped, it was with Danny McBride was in it.
How long ago was that?
It's a couple of years ago.
So it might help a little bit.
But definitely it might have upped the vibes of some of these guys being
teachers.
And also like Abbott, do you know Abbott Elementary?
Yeah, people like that TV show.
That's got a bunch of male teachers in it too, which is like fun life.
So maybe you just need to influence that.
Like I remember when I was a kid, they had Coach was on and stuff like that.
Yeah.
But I guess it didn't really resonate that much.
But they had like, what was that TV, Art, Dead Poets Society or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, Robin Williams.
But I guess there was the one with, they set up with Ticker Man's, who's that
guy?
Malcolm L. Jackson or whatever that guy's name was.
No, it's, he looks like kind of older, but still, they set up with Ticker Man
600 years
to get out of the CF prison.
You know what I'm talking about?
I do not.
He talks like that.
No.
That was a good accent, but I don't know.
Thanks, he's in Shawshank Redemption.
You know what his name is, Morgan Freeman.
He played a school teacher.
Really?
Lean on Me, it was called.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But also there's this new one.
Lean on Me.
There's this other one, The Holdovers, just like a couple of years ago with
Paul Giametti.
Is that what I'm saying his name right?
Oh, yes, I saw that.
Yeah.
And again, it's like, really good.
And what those things have in common is there's this kind of relationship
between this kind of older
guy, this kind of younger man, and they kind of learn from each other, and they
go through some
stuff together, and it's like, it's really beautiful.
Yes.
It was.
That's a cool point.
That's a great movie.
And it's kind of, I was really pleased to see that, because it came up again
with this thing.
But one of the things that really frustrates me is that people will say, oh,
boys need more,
you know, we need more positive male role models.
And I'm like, we do.
It's actually, you can't create them out of thin air, right?
You can't just like add water and create male role model.
But