The grey area comes when an adults interpretation of what the sporting experience should look like differs from that of the child.
Watch this great video clip of a 4-year-old hockey player that was mic’d up during his practice. Do you think he had fun? Will he continue to have fun down the road?
Let’s hope so as he shows such enthusiasm…..
]]>Early in my coaching career, I was speaking with a parent of an athlete about the methods employed by the coach. The parent explained how the coach ruled by fear and demeaned the children, but they won a lot of games and the kids were getting exposure to great opportunities. The parent didn’t seemed alarmed by this behaviour.
I asked if the Coach’s behaviour was acceptable.
“Not really, but he gets results.”
A year later, that same parent brought the athlete to one of my soccer camps and asked me to use the week to help “fix” the athlete.
“Fix what?” I asked.
“I need you to undo all the damage the coach has done. She is lacking confidence, playing tentatively, and seems to not be enjoying the experience at all.”
What good would I do in one week to undo all the damage done by a coach who has had years with her? I was furious. The parent had to see the damage this coach was doing.
“You need to find a new coach.” I said. I couldn’t “fix” her in a week. Besides, the coach would simply unravel all I did with his first practice.
“I understand, but he is our best shot at getting into a good college, and he gets great results.”
This girl was 12.
I did my best to build this athlete back up, bolster confidence, and help with coping with stress that week. I knew all I had done would be gone within a week of being verbally abused and fear-mongered by the other coach.
Two years later, after my TEDx talk on the Power of a Coach’s Words, I got a message from that same parent.
She revealed her daughter was an emotional and physical wreck. There were signs of depression, lack of confidence, regular meltdowns, and an unwillingness to participate in sport. The child was broken.
The parent said, “You were right. I should have found a new coach years ago. It’s too late. The damage is done.”
The damage to this young athlete was done.
It was avoidable.
I cannot imagine what a parent must feel like in that situation. The guilt. The shame. The embarrassment of allowing her daughter to be treated so poorly, and her short sighted approach to sport. She risked everything for a few trophies and empty promises at future success. I cannot imagine the helplessness that parent feels now that her child is ruined and those promises are gone.
Further, I cannot imagine how powerless it must feel as a parent to sit back and watch this abuse happening…and feel like you cannot do anything about it! It would not happen in school, dance, or music. Why allow it in sport?
Just this week, we had another example of terrible, abusive treatment of an athlete, only this time the athlete was able to record it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Why do we allow this? Why would we go back to it after we have seen a better way to coach and treat children? Why will we not advocate for our own children just because someone gets a few positive results in the win column?
There is no place in coaching for adults who treat children this way.
The only way to stop it is for parents to stand up, not simply for the current athlete, but the future human being!
We fail our kids when we ignore the very real long-term damage of abusive coaching for the fleeting celebrations of short-term results. Besides, there are far more coaches who don’t verbally abuse players getting the same kinds of results, but also building up excellent humans too.
The belief that abusive behaviour towards children is acceptable as long as the adult goals are achieved can be dangerous. We see this across all youth sports at all levels of play. As long as the kids are winning, the unacceptable behaviour is not only permitted and forgiven, but in many cases it can be celebrated and rewarded. It is a short-term view. This is a sprint to the wrong finish line when we allow the wrong means to justify the wrong ends.
Science says that negative coaching is a short-sighted viewpoint.
Negative coaching provides, at best, short-term results. Any person may perform at what we believe is “optimum” output for a short period of time under extreme duress, but research shows at some point the stress will be too much for the performer. As the stress continues to increase the performance will no longer correlate with it. In fact, performance will subsequently “drop off the cliff” inversely with the amount of stress. (See the Yerkes-Dodson Law for more.)
The physical ability of the body can only sustain so much stress before it succumbs. It is not just the arousal-performance curve that proves this is short-sighted. Genetics plays a role. We tend to correlate successful outcomes in children with the adult-employed methods and techniques, though we should be cautious in taking credit at all times. We can scream at a group of 8 year-olds for ten weeks, demean them, pit them against each other, punish the ones who cannot perform and reward the ones who can, and see tremendous leaps in skill, but that does not mean it correlates with our coaching. Saying their success is a direct result of the coach’s work is akin to what Nate Silver talked about in The Signal and the Noise:
“Most of you will have heard the maxim “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagen-Dazs.”
In fact, genetics and normal childhood development may play a greater role than any screaming a coach. Some children develop faster than others. Some win the genetic lottery and perform well at young ages in comparison to peers. No outside force created the rapid development. It was mere biological development. They were more physically apt to perform the skills and progressed quickly.
Secondly, the change is more related to brain development than a screamer with a clipboard. The child’s brain is filled with billions of neural connections. At young ages, the brain is rapidly developing and changing as children interact with the world around them. Synaptic connections are either pruned or enhanced based on whether they are used. Use a certain neural connection more often and it fires more efficiently. This is skill. Build a neural pathway, use it more often, make it more efficient. Do not use it enough and the brain will prune that connection. Some children are building neural skill highways and that shows very clear skill development.
This also explains why some children can fare better than others. This is where the coach’s words can actually correlate with development. Some kids are simply ahead in the development process and can perform the requested skill. Some are not. The ones who perform well get encouragement or praise and will attempt it again and again to receive that praise.
Others fail at the skill and are ridiculed by the coach. The brain is stressed. The amygdala reacts, hindering performance. The skill is not “grooved”. Furthermore, they avoid performing the skill in the future to avoid the pain of ridicule. The neural pathway is neglected and pruned.
Sport is a marathon. Aim for the right finish line and there’s no need to sprint. Exercise patience, have empathy, and let sports develop what matters more than a few victories: values, life skills, habits of excellence, and behaviors that benefit children when the game ends.
What is the long-term damage?
Even if a coach is getting results with negative coaching behaviours now, those behaviours are detrimental to long-term success. Biology, brain science, and psychological adaptation may account for results in the first few years of exposure to this kind of behaviour, but in the long run, the system will break down under the stress.
What long-term cost will the negative words our coaches speak to our children have on them? Is this worth the “results” we see now?
Think of it like a fuel line in a high-performance vehicle. We add something to the fuel to give it a boost for short runs. We win a few races because our car is faster than the others, but that additive is building up in the fueling line. Soon that additive clogs the fuel line enough that less fuel is getting through. That clogging will one day not only prohibit peak performance, it could cause the entire engine to shut down.
The negative words our coaches use with our children are the additive to the fuel. Children are processing their own words, their parents’ words, their teammates’ words, and so on. The coach’s words, because of the immense influential power we hold, are the fuel additive. Positive words are clean burning and leave no “build up”. Negative words leave a residue.
They aren’t simply spoken and forgotten. They are remembered. They leave marks. They build up until the player no longer has a voice of his or her own. The player only hears the words of the coach. Those are the echoes they hear. The negative words will prohibit performance and destroy the engine in the long run.
Short-term results from destructive language toward children extracts a massive long-term cost. Are those short-term results worth it? (Here is a list of the actual damage done by verbal abuse)
What is a parent to do?
We must focus on the development of the future human and not the current athlete and results. What do we want for our children 20 years from now? When the ball stops rolling and life takes over, do their sport skills become life skills? Sports has that massive opportunity to shape character traits teach life skills but only if we make that the priority instead of “results”.
We must evaluate coaches and clubs on how they positively impact the future human and not whether they get these short-term results. We must hold coaches accountable to the same standards we would expect of any other adult who holds tremendous influence over our children.
We must be our child’s advocate. Instead of stressing over playing time or which team they made, we should be ensuring they are in the right environment to help them grow and develop into the amazing humans we wish them to be.
We must find a coach that keeps them loving the game. Remember 0% of children who quit sports get an athletic scholarship. First and foremost they must love the game and stay in the game, and negative coaching usually drives them out.
Think about the conversation you’ll have with your child in 20 years. When you look back on the sporting career and the lessons learned. When you evaluate whether it was all worth it. Will you be apologising to your child for not getting her away from that abusive coach sooner? Or will you be grateful she had an experience with an amazing adult who helped transform her into this truly wonderful human being too? Were the “results” of a few youth sports tournaments worth trading the future happiness and success of your child?
Nothing will change until we become advocates for the children in the game, whether they are our flesh and blood, or another’s. Take the long view, mum and dad, and choose to end abusive coaching.
We don’t need to feel helpless about the way coaches treat our children ever again.
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For many, who have no sporting background this can be incredibly difficult, but at WWPIS we believe every parent should have some idea of what this is and whether or not your investment of time and money is as fruitful as it could be.
Here are our top tips for what you should be looking for at your child’s coaching session. These are not hard fast rules but they certainly should be helpful and guide you in the right direction.
Sessions should be fun
This goes without saying and is probably the most important. The session should cater for all abilities and motivate all participants. If your child is having fun then they are more likely to want to return and continue with their sport.
Good adult to child ratio
There should be enough adults involved for the number of children participating to allow the environment to be managed safely and for your child to be given some feedback as opposed to being lost as merely just a number. For young children I would suggest around 1:12 would be on the larger side and anything less would be great, any more and it becomes more like a large babysitting exercise as opposed to a productive coaching session.
If you can find sessions that are well staffed, the improvement that you may see in your child could be significant. There is nothing like being able to work and be given huge amounts of attention and feedback.
Ratios can be much higher in well thought out environments that recreate the old playground/street environment which many of us grew up with, where coaches are encouraging peer to peer interactions and learning as well as facilitating the opportunity for young people to set goals and take a greater ownership of their own goals and processes.
Plenty of equipment
When you are watching the session you should feel that your child is busy, getting the opportunity to practise using the equipment and is on task as opposed to being distracted either by boredom of a lack of activity.
This is not about seeing all the latest professional equipment but more that the equipment available is used by all participants frequently throughout the session.
No queues and both structured and unstructured activity
The very best coaching sessions look slightly chaotic. That is fine so don’t panic and organised chaos is a far better picture to see as a parent than a long line of children waiting for a go behind a cone, regardless of whether that may look more orderly. Too much structure and the session will become tedious for your child.
Well planned and organised
The very best training sessions have a clear structure, clear objectives and flow beautifully. This is created by excellent planning and organisation by the coach. I will let you be the judge of this one the next time you are watching.
Clear structure
Most training sessions should start with some kind of warm up/starter activity(this could be a game), followed by a development phase looking at the objectives for the session. There should then be the opportunity to practise using a variety of different formats before a review at the end of the session recapping the key points and perhaps what the next session will look like.
Limited talking
I have witnessed so many sessions over the years with coaches doing too much talking. This should be limited, well thought out and delivered quickly throughout the session both individually and collectively as a group. This allows the session to flow freely and the participants to take on board and practise the feedback they have just been given.
Appropriate challenge
One of the biggest issues for children is boredom. The more talented in the group must be being challenged and not just repeating things that they can already so very easily. Likewise, if the bar is set too high for the weaker players then they will feel nothing but failure from their participation.
Opportunity to fail
Sessions should provide your child with the freedom to make mistakes and be creative without ramification. That is how children learn and the environment created must be a positive and encouraging one.
Safe – no risk
At no point during any session should you feel that your child is at potential risk from injury. All activities should have been well thought out in terms of space, equipment, opponents etc and if you did feel that something was out of control then perhaps you may need to step in.
However, do not confuse the above with risky play which is of huge importance for self-regulating and resilience – because emotional safety is really important, a safe-to-fail environment which also allows learning through trial and error.
One of the great things about the world of sport is that coaching is different and is unique to the coach delivering the session. As we said earlier there are no hard fast rules that must be obeyed and many great coaches are so flexible in their delivery and organisation that it is impossible to say that this is what you must see for it to be a great session. There are many different ways of delivery and each coach will have their own methods and beliefs.
However, we have done our best here to present to you some things that you may want to look out for the next time you are watching a session and perhaps give you greater confidence in demanding the very best for your child.
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If you are new to sport and signing your children up to sport for the first time then I hope some of the tips below will help you on your sporting journey.
Without having some understanding of the behaviours and traits that you should be looking for in an effective coach, you may well without realising it, be throwing your child into a sporting experience that is far from beneficial to them.
Many coaches at grassroots level are volunteers and many have just completed basic Level I entry courses into coaching and will be learning their trade. You must be understanding of this and not expect them all to be super heroes, as many great coaches do not coach in the way they did when they first started and many of these coaches will be giving up huge amounts of time unpaid to provide the service for you and your child.
However, there are a number of qualities that need to be brought to the table by your child’s coach if your child is going to have a fun, positive experience.
1. Do they care – not just about the result at the weekend, but do you feel that your child is emotionally and physically safe with them?
Do they speak to your child before and after the sessions, do they acknowledge them and get to know something about them away from the sporting environment? Crucially, do they create an environment that allows your child to foster positive and healthy relationships with the other children and other adults connected with the group. This is vital as one of the main reasons children stay in sport is to have fun with their friends.
2. Are they reliable – do they show up for sessions and matches on a regular basis?
There is no doubting that young children in particular benefit from continuity and familiarity in what they are involved in to get the most out of it. Are your child’s coaches on time or do they often appear when it best suits them?
3. Do they engage with you and other parents? – you are a key part of the sporting experience, never forget that.
Children get the most out of their sporting experience when coach, parent and child are all aligned and working positively together in the best interests of the child. It is important that you feel part of the process as you can also help support the coach and the work that they do by reinforcing some of their messages at home. If the coaches do not engage with you and you are unsure of what is expected of your child, then there is a chance that you could deliver conflicting messages and this will only lead to confusion and frustration for your child.
4. Are they approachable and willing to answer questions? – This is vitally important if you wish to place complete trust and faith in your child’s coach.
You should feel comfortable in asking and they should be able to answer questions such as how long have you coached for? What level of qualification do you have? How much experience do you have with this age group? What are your plans for the group you are working with?
5. Do they set a good example – are they punctual, dress smartly and appropriately and use suitable language?
Coaches are role models whether they like it or not and many are often key people in your child’s life. They need to be setting a good example, children will follow suit and behave according to the environment that is set and that they are involved in. If your child’s coach sets high standards then there is a good chance that your child may take an interest in following suit.
Does their language encourage your child? Does your child feel that they have the freedom to express themselves and be creative and make mistakes without ramification?
6. Do they inspire?
Children need to be inspired, does your coach give your child that thrill? Are they passionate about what they do and able to channel that passion to have a positive impact on your child’s development?
In looking for this as a parent you should also be checking that your child’s coach does not embarrass or humiliate. There is no place for this, it is certainly not building character and the alarm bells should go off if you witness this.
7. Do they coach the person not the sport?
Most parents when questioned would often have knowledge and experience as high up on their agendas when looking at coaches for their children. However, there is more to sport than merely the sporting outcomes. Does your child’s coach help with life skills through the sport? Do they help foster good communication, good etiquette, self organisation, decision making to name just a few……..
Decision Time
Once you have reflected and are armed with this information then we hope that you are able to make really informed choices for your child if their coach is right or not for them. Of course not all coaches are perfect 100% of the time and there may be momentary blips where they are unable to fill all of the criteria above.
However, if you are not feeling assured by using the information above then you need to have a rethink? Do not take your decision lightly, but remember it can only take one really negative experience for your child with a coach and they can be put off for life, that certainly requires you to put in the time to reflect!
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I feel safe when I climb, really safe. And it is not just the crash mats to land on if I fall or because of the harnesses and proper shoes I use. No my daddy makes me feel safe. He is the one that I know is always there to support me whatever happens. Never raises his voice just words of encouragement, different from some other parents who often shout. I wouldn’t like that at all.
I ask him what it was like playing sport when he was younger and he said that his coach told him learning was like making a cake. Get the right ingredients and everyone can enjoy a nice tasty slice with an appetite for more.
The recipe was made from things you can’t find in the supermarket. Add plenty of enjoyment with a touch of fun and laughter – after all which coach wouldn’t include these! This doesn’t mean it won’t be without challenges – I mean this week I nearly reached the top of the green route climb although I went higher than last week. The cake includes confidence. Confident to try new things and to use the confidence I got from achieving things I didn’t think I could. Dad talks a lot about effort, as long as I try my hardest I don’t worry about what others do. He says “what can you do now that I couldn’t when I first started?” I have a long list!
I feel secure however high I climb and when I fall my confidence dusts me down and I begin again knowing that this is all part of learning. Each week I try new skills, face challenges within my reach (when my arms grow longer I can reach the final hold on the purple route!). These skills will be really useful outside and in other sports I do. I never seem to stop, plenty of activities – we are always busy doing something that helps us and no one is left out. It’s great to work with my friends. We have our own little community and my grip on the boulders is as strong as the friendship we have built. One day we will climb real mountains and create more memories. My Daddy climbed a big mountain in Africa and the photos look amazing. He often just watches, let’s me find my own route and get me to think of things that may help. I made up something the other day where I imagined I was an icicle and had to remain still until the sunshine melted me and I jumped to the floor! We play a lot of games, make up ideas and always look forward to next week. I think I will always do this.
I wonder if my friends who do other sports would write the same as me.
