Your kid wants to play his/her favourite sport! That's awesome right? Give up a few days a week and sit back and enjoy the games. :) Truth is that the demands of sports are pretty powerful. As a player you are nervous, anxious, worried about impressing your parents and coaches and trying to build your own identity at the same time. And then you have the parents who have concerns about their kids being successful and happy. As coaches, you believe your identity is tied to wins as you live in a culture that puts so much emphasis on wins and losses.
Now think about this ….. Are coaches putting so much emphasis on winning that they are taking the fun out of the game? Aren't the kids the whole reason to coach in the first place? Since sports will always be valued in our society, we have opportunities here. We have an opportunity to change the way people treat the children that participate in sports. We have an opportunity to guide a child's character development. We have an opportunity to instil confidence, increase self-esteem for the child and to set them up to become leaders of the future.
When you become a coach, it's important to remember that you can be tremendously influential in a child's life. Each moment can elicit strong emotions for the child. As coaches, you can derive meaning from these moments that can shape a child's life. A huge problem in youth sports today is the fact that most coaches enter into their role without proper training. They take on the role just because their kid is on the team and feel they are doing a huge service to the team by donating their time. Today's coaches have come to emulate the "win at all costs" attitude we see in professional sports because this is where they turn to for coaching strategies and styles. There are fundamental differences between professional sports and youth sports. Professional sports has paid employees - the athletes. It is all about providing entertainment value. Youth sports is all about education and development of skills, which include human skills for the "athletes". Only a handful of coaches realize this. The rest emphasize winning to the point that it encourages poor sportsmanship. Aggression and cheating are increased in this environment. Coaches will favour their "star" players in order to put themselves in a position to win. This could be to fulfill a childhood dream or vision that they had for themselves, or their coaches' unfair demands on them. You see coaches these days yelling, screaming, throwing their arms in the air to embarrass the child. These coaches don't teach on the bench, they demean. Such conduct by an adult can have serious ramifications for a child. Nancy Swigonski wrote in the Journal Of Pediatrics: “It can impair social and emotional development and cause substantial harm to mental health. When this bullying occurs in an athletic setting, those harmful effects are augmented by the stress kids often feel as a result of athletic competition.” Does a coach's tirade do anything to help with the child's confidence for next time? No, it creates anxiety and frustration. It takes the fun out of the game for the child. WIth the drop off in numbers that most sports experience around the age of 12, a key contributor is the fact that coaches have become too competitive and selective. They have successfully removed the fun from the game. Fun - the whole reason that children entered into the sport, is being taken away from them.
In the hard nosed culture of competitive sports, the human element gets lost. If the goal is to build confidence, self esteem and create young leaders for the future, then we need a culture change in how youth sports is coached. Sure, the goal of participating in sports is to win. But there's a more important goal that coaches need to focus on. That goal is teaching life lessons to the children. Help children focus on improving their own game, AND in helping their teammates improve their game. The goal as a coach is to build leaders from within and thereby improve the game as a whole, one player at a time. Will we still lose athletes year after year? Sure we will, however research has shown that attrition rates are 80% lower when coaches provide a positive experience for their young athletes.
Coaches need so stop putting pressure on children to perform and make them worry about making mistakes. They need to stop trying to give kids technical advice while they are already feeling anxious or frustrated. It's all about putting kids in a position to succeed, and not putting them in a position to fail. Children learn from trying and failing. They learn when encouraged to get right back out there and apply what they've learned. They don't learn from being "punished" for their mistake or by being yelled at. A coach has power over the players' athletic lives, and in frustration with practice or play, or just out of hostility, may bully a player. Bullying behaviours from coaches include intimidation, insulting, ridicule (making fun of bad play or lack of skill), humiliation (singling out a player), and benching. The impact of these kinds of actions on adolescent age players can be performance anxiety about making mistakes, hesitant play, loss of confidence, believing mistreatment is deserved, loss of enjoyment, and quitting the sport.
Children can control three things when they participate in sports: the effort they put forth, the experience they take away from each play, and how they respond to having made a mistake. Sports provides so many opportunities to make a mistake. These mistakes should be a coach's dream since they provide teaching opportunities. A child knows exactly when they've made a mistake, as a coach you don't need to harp on that fact. The mistake is your opportunity to get the child to get back out with renewed determination. You need to teach kids that it is okay to make a mistake. How often do you see a child look to their coach or parent when they've made a mistake? As soon as you see this happen, you know the parent or coach has been bullying the child. The role of the parent/coach in that situation is to get rid of the mistake immediately and work on rebuilding the child's confidence to get back out there and try again. This is what makes the child play better and focus on the next play. Some coaches will justify their behaviour on the bench and call it "being tough". Yelling at the child is not tough. That’s just your lack of impulse control. It drains the child's "emotional tank", making it difficult to take on challenges or perform well. Coaches need to learn to recognize this and adjust accordingly. The ideal ratio of positive to negative remarks to a child should be 5:1. Fill up the child's emotional tank. Make them feel good about themselves. Don't drain them. Why don't more coaches follow this 5:1 formula? It takes effort to do it well. It's the lazy coach's way out to "be tough" rather than take the time to become a better coach, a better person to his players. Coaches need to observe players closely so they can offer specific and honest feedback. Each player is wired differently and has differential learning styles. Learn how to communicate effectively with each player. The key is not to withhold criticism, but to deliver it in a way that is helpful. If the child is angry or sulking or defensive, he/she’s not going to be listening very well anyway.
People coach the way they were coached. This is not about you, it's not about how you were coached anymore. Let it go. By becoming a better coach, you will not only do your players a favour, but since your kids will grow up being coached with this model they will coach the way you've coached them. The impact your role has on society is huge. You're not here to develop big-league athletes, you're here to develop big-league people.
Any parent that has a child in sports knows how much of a blessing or curse a coach can be. As parents, it’s our job to protect our kids from bully coaches. Swigonski offers several tips on that front, among them: Sit in on practices and games to observe the coach; confront the coach if there are issues; and, if that’s not helpful, scrutinize the sport's code of conduct and talk to the administration. If things get really out of hand, she advises calling child protective services. Bad coaches always get into the spotlight. The good ones make truly lasting impressions amongst the children. So coaches, you have a choice to make. You can be the "bully coach", or you can decide to become a person that helps shape a child's future. It's a simple choice, choose wisely.