The idea of providing support to emerging afterschool leaders via coaching has been gaining lots of attention over the last few years. While there are many ways to approach coaching afterschool leaders, I think there are a few keys to avoiding traps and truly empowering the coachees. First, the coach must be someone who can access a wide range of experiences and resources to draw from to fit each coachee’s unique needs and dynamics. Second, the coach must be able to listen without diagnosing or jumping to conclusions. These first two steps help to establish trust if done right. Third, time must be taken to build a mutual diagnosis, prioritizing key barriers and strategies from the coachee’s perspective but helping them sort out what the more foundational issues are and the corresponding strategic order. Finally, ongoing implementation and re-calibration support along with re-diagnosis based on lessons learned is critical to the necessary follow-through to make new policies and practices institutionalized, expected and viewed as normal standards of practice. There are many more critical tasks and characteristics of effective coaching for afterschool leaders, but this basic set provides a good starting point, and illustrates that great coaching requires time, resources and a combination of unique skill sets. Otherwise it can easily fail to empower leaders and end up just being another time-consuming project that takes resources away from staff and the children.