Mike Tomlin turned the longest-tenured head coach in North American professional sports activities this offseason — a feat that doesn’t occur accidentally. It takes an intrinsic drive to maintain going, and Tomlin defined precisely what fuels him.
“I ain’t gonna child you. I acquired a love affair with this recreation,” Tomlin mentioned through The Pivot Podcast on YouTube. “It’s an actual private factor for me. I simply love soccer. I really like each part of it, each part of the journey, man. I’m excited yearly due to that.”
If there wasn’t a real pleasure to maintain going, it might have been a pure for Tomlin to transition to the subsequent part of his life when Ben Roethlisberger left. Or maybe when the Kenny Pickett experiment failed and the media chatter about him shifting on acquired very loud.
It will possibly’t be simple to seek out motivation each morning to stand up and grind tape. Or to offer each participant and coach throughout the group the eye they should become the very best model of themselves. The job of a coach is, by nature, a giving position. The one option to have the motivation and power to maintain going after nearly twenty years is that if the job genuinely fills you up as a lot because it drains you.
For Tomlin, soccer isn’t only a job — it’s the place he feels most at residence. It formed him into the person he’s right now.
“Once I was younger, man, soccer was the one factor that was black and white,” Tomlin mentioned. “Life decisions was grey. Soccer made sense. I discovered self-discipline, construction, and a whole lot of issues by way of my experiences in soccer. And so I imply that after I say it, man, I acquired a love affair with this recreation. I couldn’t think about doing anything.”
On the finish of each disappointing season, media chatter picks up about whether or not Tomlin will step away from the top teaching job he has held since 2007. With out fail, he at all times solutions that query the identical approach. There’s nowhere else he’d reasonably be than Pittsburgh.
“There’s not a booster with a large enough clean test,” Tomlin mentioned in 2021 when requested about taking a job in faculty soccer. And I’m positive he would say one thing related about being a speaking head within the media.
Tomlin signed a three-year extension final offseason that ties him to the Steelers by way of the 2027 season. Count on him to remain at the very least that lengthy, and don’t be stunned if his tenure stretches properly into a 3rd decade with extra contracts past that. He’s married to the sport, and the Steelers have by no means wavered of their dedication to him.
