Respect Relationships

Coaches get the benefit of a presumed level of respect the first time they meet players and parents. Respect is the basis of any relationship, especially between players and coaches. Coaches that lose respect with their team, can’t influence behavior and effectiveness. Therefore, it is critical that coaches earn respect as soon as possible, but it is never too late.

Play My Kid is a resource to help coaches and parents team together to build strong kids. The key to forming that team is a relationship based on mutual respect. Coaches need to take the lead in creating and maintaining that relationship because it is their team.

Start with a Parent Meeting

Probably the easiest way to establish a foundation of respect is to host a parent meeting. The parent meeting provides a time to answer many questions for parents. Yet if you’re not sure what you’d discuss in a parent meeting, it can be an awkward conversation. Therefore, you can get a sample parent meeting agenda here. Just put your name and email below and click on “Send Agenda”. It will help you cover all the right topics whether you have 2o years or 2 days coaching experience.

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Coaching Values

When preparing for the parent meeting by reviewing the agenda, there are five core values coaches need to embed into everything you do. The following values are important to understand before the parent meeting because it underlies to purpose of the meeting:

• Connect – Respect can only be gained from people who know you. So, make sure you connect with every parent.
• Expectations – Set clear and fair expectations because players and parents want to follow your lead. Therefore, make sure they know where you’re going.
• Evaluate – Share your plan for evaluating player progress because players need to know how you perceive their progress. While it may be obvious to you, explicitly describing your process will make it clear and allow them to ask questions if it isn’t clear.
• Integrity – You demonstrate your integrity in even the smallest matters. Therefore, the level of respect to earn will correlate directly to the promises and commitments you make.
• Listen – Make sure parents know you are listening closely at all times. Most of all, they need to know you are open to their ideas and want to address their concerns throughout the season.

Next Steps

Coaches that are effective at building strong kids focus on their reputation by earning respect. Moreover, the five core values listed above should be incorporated into everything you do, and it all starts with the parent meeting. There is a series of posts coming to go deeper into each of these values.

We recommend a parent meeting at the beginning of the season because it is a great way to initiate your relationship with the team. However, you still need to incorporate your values into everything you do throughout the season. The Play My Kid Club is a growing resource for strategies and ideas that helps you gain respect as youth coach.

Everyone has seen parents yelling in the stands at players, officials and even coaches during grade school or high school sporting events. In fact, I’m sure you’re already thinking about the “crazy” parent that gets on your nerves. The parent who yells, “Catch the ball!” then throws their hands up as if someone just insulted their mother. While I certainly understand the underlying frustration, these fans are the reason youth sports are too intense.

Fans are why youth sports are too intense

First of all, let’s clarify the term “fan”. We like to think it is an endearing term that implies dedication, enjoyment, emotion and commitment to a player, team or cause. All very positive and supportive qualities. In fact, marketing is intended to create and convert people into fans to build loyalty. Therefore, we want fans for our kids, right? If fact, if we want to be good parents, we should be their biggest fans! I agree 100 %! Yet, how did the most enthusiastic fan become the “crazy” parent? Now its easier to see how youth sports are too intense.

Remember, that “fan” is really short for fanatic. If you lookup the definition of fanatic, you will find something like “excessive or unreasonable devotion or enthusiasm”. This gives me pause to reflect… Do I really want to be a fanatic for my kids? Will that serve them best?

Supporters

Parents focus on being supportive and encouraging. Especially when it comes to kids experiencing sports. Kids play sports because it’s fun, social, active and humans inherently love competition. Parents and coaches need to foster and support kids because it is a learning experience. Parents realize mistakes are going to happen as part of the learning process. Why would they expect anything different of kids in sports? Kids need to learn how to react to mistakes while having fun. They need support and coaching, not disappointed fanatics.

Kids need support and coaching, not disappointed fanatics.

Fans in Education

Lets compare the learning process in sports to the traditional academic learning process. Imagine a scenario where parents were allowed in school, as fans, to observe their child during class instruction. During the lesson, kids try to answer questions posed by the teacher. Would it be acceptable for parents to yell out the answer or directions? A  well informed fan would be quick to offer guidance out loud. Moreover, what would happen if a kid made a mistake or didn’t even answer an ‘easy question’? A fan might yell “awe come on! that was easy!” The most egregious offense happens when another kid is misbehaving or breaking a rule and the teacher didn’t address it? Again a fan would yell, “WOW! Are you blind?”

Although, this is not a perfect analogy, we hope you see it highlights why commonly accepted fan behavior is not appropriate in youth sports.  Just as the fan behavior is not appropriate in any other educational setting.

Proposed Causes

There may be better suited experts and research data which may explain the development of fan behavior in sports, but we suggest the following factors have impacted the parental fan based approach to youth sports:

• Competitive Sports Fallacy – The fallacy assumes that if competition is good, then kids need to play the best competition to be considered successful.
• Media Coverage of Amateur Sports – TV and radio have glorified amateur sports as entertainment, including the ranking of teams, ranking of players, arm chair analysis and side games of chance. Parents associate success in youth sports as a path into the college and pro sports covered by the media and the implicit success.
• Entertainment Marketing – brands for professional and college organizations, originally marketed as entertainment, has morphed passion in sports that inappropriately transfers to youth sports only because they are the same game.

Next Steps

Most parents would admit to falling into this fan trap. However, now that you can see why youth sports are too intense, you can help change the spirit of youth sports. You can make help by changing the behavior of fans to behave more like supporters instead of fanatics.

The change starts with your reaction as a coach. Mistakes and errors by players, officials and follow coaches need to be addressed like a professional, not a fanatic. This shift it will help the kids on your team know what success looks like. They will enjoy and grow in a healthy youth sports environment. Be the change.

Secondly, share this message with the parents on your team. Start at the beginning of the season and repeat as needed.

Finally, it is critical that you share this message with other adults involved in youth sports.

Share this post with your parents and ask them to share it with their friends using the links below.

 

Focus – Teaching New Skills

Coaches need to teach with focus. They need to model that behavior for parents to avoid overloading kids with too much information. Coaches and parents that are constantly feeding young players directions like, “faster”, “keep you eye on the ball” and “be ready”, all at the same time usually have an overall negative effect.

Coaches that do this during competition is one thing, but behavior like this is during practice is not productive. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way. It doesn’t help because it doesn’t allow the kids to focus on improvement.

We are going to walk through the steps every coach should follow to teach new skills with focus.

From the first day of practice, coaches focus on classifying players based on their relative skill level. While that is a perfectly reasonable and effective first step, the real skill in coaching is how you respond to that evaluation.

Early in my coaching experience, I was eager to share all the techniques and skills I had learned over the years. I felt like I was going to burst at the seems with all the great knowledge. It was exactly what I thought I was missing when I was a kid.  I had so much to offer.

What I failed to realize is most young players are just trying to understand the game. They were not ready or even interested in all the insight I had. Many were overwhelmed by the situation. They were dealing with so many  other new experiences; new kids as teammates; other parents ‘cheering’ on those other kids; new coaches they didn’t know if they should trust; and other factors.

I quickly learned that kids don’t and can’t respond to overload. I needed to focus on one skill at a time. Therefore, I started at the beginning, focus on teaching the foundational skills first using the following process with each skill.

Step 1 – Baseline

Before the teaching began, it is effective if you use a common drill or game that can measure that skill. A simple example in basketball is shooting free throws.

Have each player shoot 10 free throws and record the score before you do any instruction to improve that skill. Coaches ,or players, should record how many  each player made. This will serve as a baseline for progress they will make eventually.

Step 2 – Teach Skills with Focus

Remember, kids are still learning the game. By virtue of their physical and mental maturity, they don’t know how little they know about swinging a bat, throwing a ball, shooting a basketball or even running. Moreover, we are all still learning about the biomechanics and performance. Therefore, you can’t teach a new skill by describing it in one long monologue, don’t try it. It won’t be effective because the kids get distracted  and stop listening.

Coaches need to show some patience. Dedicate time to teach one skill at a time. Allocate practice time to walk through the mechanics with enough detail for them to understand the purpose. It would be great if they could watch someone modeling the motion and understand what repeated success looks like.
Naturally, they still need to mimic the same motion, slower and more deliberately. Remind the kids, they are unlikely to have the same success initially. Your job as a youth coach is to make sure players are focused on earning success and not get discouraged.

Step 3 – Practice Skills

Once players have a reasonable understanding of the skill, they need repetitions. That is when coaches need to create the opportunity to repeat that skill as many times as possible but much closer to “real time”. The goal at this point is to provide more opportunities for trial and error. Players will learn how to adjust their positioning and adjust their movement, but you have to encourage that testing with focus on one skill.

Coaches only need to monitor, looking for success including correctness and alignment to the skill taught. When you see struggles or frustration, get them to think about how to fix it.

Again, you need to be clear to players, they will not dramatically improve in just five minutes of practice. We need to encourage hours of practice with focus.

Step 4 – Connect the Skills

The last step is the fun part. We need to put players in natural, game like, scenarios that allow them to connect the skill to the overall game. These opportunities should be just a natural part of the game. However, now you can alter the rules or scoring to highlight the successes in the skill you just taught.  For example, if you just practiced on passing in basketball, you can make perfect passes worth points when they are successful and are executed perfectly (or as close to ‘perfect’ you can expect).

Summary

In the same way, coaches need to provide focus when teaching skills. We, at Play My Kid, are not going to be able to give you everything to know about keeping parents happy and you should not be looking for a silver bullet.

Just like when you are teaching your players to be better players, it is your responsibility to make sure parents let their kids enjoy and learn how to play. Yes! I said, “let” their kids enjoy and learn how to play.

Objective evaluation of performance

How do you make your line up? Most coaches anticipate who can contribute to the team based on their talent. Then they eliminate the one kid who couldn’t hit the ball today at practice. Then you think about the player who kept talking and wasn’t paying attention during the 30 minutes of infield drills, and tell yourself, “She is obviously sitting on the bench, she didn’t work as hard as the others.” Is this really how coaches should decide who “earns” more playing time than the others? Reputation and anecdotal behavior? I don’t think it should be this way in youth sports at all. It’s extremely selfish and shortsighted.

Let me be clear, I was guilty of this on a regular basis early in my coaching career. It’s very difficult for coaches who want to be competitive all the time to keep things in perspective. Are you coaching for wins or looking to make these kids better athletes?

Parent goals

My softball coaching career started, right out of high school. I told myself I wasn’t going to be “that coach”. Yet, I fell into a rut the first season and put the same kids at the same positions, and kept the same order in the lineup. Of course that meant the same couple of girls had to be the substitutes. As I neared the end of the season, I realized I had fallen into this pattern. The pattern I told myself I wasn’t going to repeat. I had turned into “one of those coaches”.

Immediately, I decided to switch it up the last few games, and boy did I hear about it. Most of it was just from a few dads, they were upset that their daughter didn’t play the whole game. “How could you take her out? She’s your best hitter.”

I simply agreed,  “Yes, your daughter has had a great season, and  a lot of playing time. Now it’s time for another girl to get her chance”.

I wanted to yell, and argue with him. Where would that have gotten us? It would have embarrassed him, his daughter, me and the entire program. I needed him to see what I saw. There were other players on the team who could contribute, and I needed to give them a chance.

That was practically 20 years ago and it taught me a lot, not about the game, but how to deal with parents. (And that you can’t please them all, or can you?)

Bigger goals

How you decide to make your line up is the managers choice. There are a lot of things to consider, you want the athletes to perform well and be successful. You want these kids to go out with their heads held high and confident that they can make the play, hit the ball or pitch an inning. We stress so much about winning the game, is it the result that’s the most important? Does that really measure how good we are as a team? If the same kids sit the bench, and don’t get to play more than one or two innings then what are we teaching them? Why aren’t they getting a chance to play like the others? Isn’t it still just a game?

Coaches have to remember that this is a learning experience. If we want them to succeed, we have to give them opportunities to learn. If the same player strikes out at every at bat they could get discouraged. While it might happen, it means coaches need to work a little harder on those skills at practice.

Mistakes can be a good thing sometimes, as long as we can learn from them!

We have to get out of the mind set that errors force coaches to take them out of the game. Instead of doing that, let’s keep them in and encourage them to try again. Mistakes can be a good thing sometimes, as long as we can learn from them!

Good Teammates

Sitting the bench should be something that every teammate has a chance to do. It shouldn’t be looked at like its a punishment, it’s part of being on a team with multiple players. Everyone has a turn to play and a turn to sit.

So how and when do you explain that to the parents? If you start off the season with a team meeting this is a great place to start, informing the parents of your playing time rules. How you will handle playing time and your beliefs.  Being upfront with your parents will start the season off on the right foot, keeping your word and following through the whole season will end on a high note! Sometimes you really have to think as you are making up the line up, are you coaching to win? Or are you coaching to produce better athletes?

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