In this episode High Performance Consultant Ivi Casagrande joins Gordon MacLelland to discuss creating the best environments and support for young female athletes to thrive.

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• The importance of consistent messaging to young athletes from parents and coaches
• Providing autonomy, encouraging exploration and developing decision-making skills
• The differences in how girls and boys experience puberty
• The coach and parent role in shaping positive body image perceptions
• The importance of educating young girls around strength, movement and neuromuscular coordination from an early age
• How to take advantage of hormonal fluctuations to optimise performance by tracking the menstrual cycle
• Effectively managing social media and technology
• Holding our young people accountable without being overly authoritative helping to foster responsibility and independence

Ivi is an expert in women’s football and the founder of Casagrande Coaching. In a world where many clubs still apply men’s football models without understanding the specific needs of female athletes, Ivi’s female-centric whole systems approach is rewiring the system to benefit everyone: coaches and athletes of all genders.

She is positively disrupting outdated norms to forge a more flexible, resilient and sustainable ecosystem in football, and beyond. Over 20 years spent in dressing rooms, first as a professional player and then coach, Ivi went from underdog outsider to become a pillar of the global sports community challenging the status quo. At an elite level, Ivi has worked as a performance coach with three national teams: Ireland Women’s Team, Brazil Women’s Team and US Youth National Teams.

She now focuses on both early career and seasoned coaches via International coach education programmes, grassroots projects and progressive frameworks that create better environments for everyone to thrive. Currently Ivi delivers coach education for the Football Association of Ireland via a grassroots programme supporting young female football players, and with FIFA and UEFA as a Technical Expert delivering workshops for teams around the world.

Raised in Brazil, Ivi played professional football at Atletico Mineiro before continuing her scholarship-enabled education and athletics in the US where she transitioned into coaching. Her professional women’s coaching career started with Orlando Pride in the US and then Brighton & Hove Albion in the the UK Women’s Super League.

While Ivi’s specialisms run deep, her practice is future-facing and always exploring new learnings beyond the boundaries of sport. At a time when the long suppressed women’ s game is transforming the sport worldwide, Ivi is an active changemaker shifting perceptions of high performance while establishing a new baseline for what’s valuable, aspirational and acceptable.

By being a member of WWPIS, parents, coaches and athletes can access all of the exclusive content including blogs, videos, podcasts, expert interviews, webinars and downloadable resources.

This includes the unique content in the Parent Zone, Coaches Corner and the Holistic Development Area.

The Parent Zone

The ‘Parent Zone’ is the ultimate resource for all sporting parents whether your child is involved at grassroots level or in an academy/pathway programme.

The articles section is written exclusively by the team here at WWPIS and covers a wide range of topics from ‘The car journey home’ to ‘Understanding how our children learn.’

There are regular guest blogs from leading practitioners from around the world as well as a video series, helping support parents further on their sports parenting journey.

The ‘Expert View’ series has been a real hit with parents joining us to ask experts for answers to all of their questions around a range of different topics.

‘Meet the Parents’ brings into your home some real life stories around sports parenting from parents going through the experience with their children. Stories include those in grassroots sport all the way up to those who are playing professionally.

‘Dad – it doesn’t help!’ brings an authentic look at life as a sporting parent with plenty of humour written for us by Australian author Mark Macguire, whose son currently plays in a Major League Baseball franchise.

Website Members’ Area – Holistic Development

The ‘Holistic Development’ area provides specialised information on a variety of topics from leading practitioners in their field, completing a 360 degree guide for parents to help provide the best levels of support for their sporting children.

This area is headed by Maimee Titmuss Morris (UK Sports Institute Performance Lifestyle Coach and well-being lead for the World Class Programme with British Gymnastics) and Jane Holden (UK Sports Institute Lifestyle coach and pathway well-being consultant / mental health instructor for TASS).

Website Members’ Area – Coaches Corner

In ‘Coaches Corner’ there are lots of supplementary resources for the book ‘Engage’ to support coaches with their parental engagement strategy. 

Here are a few examples of topics that have been covered:

• What does an ideal parents’ meeting look like?
• Preparing the ground for crucial conversations
• Setting the tone and allowing parental engagement to thrive 
• Creating a strategy for effective communication with your parents
• Is your organisation aligned to allow parental engagement to thrive?
• Are parents part of your team or do you leave them on the bench?
• Do you know your players’ parents?
• The playing time conundrum

CUSTOMISED PLATFORMS

The WWPIS website platform can be fully customised by sporting organisations and is already being used extensively across the world. This includes an area for organisations to add their own specific content for their sport and their membership.

This is allowing sports to resource entire communities ensuring maximum impact on the ground.

Individual membership is available for just £9.99 a year, less than £1 a month, with new content being added on a regular basis.

If you would like to become an individual member today then click here.

If you are interested in finding out more about customising the platform for your sporting organisation then please email workingwithparentsinsport@gmail.com

In this episode, author, head of mentoring at the True Athlete Project and Olympian Laurence Halsted joins Gordon MacLelland to discuss the True Athlete Project, its philosophy and where sport currently fits in society.

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• ‘The True Athlete Project’ and its philosophy
• What it was like for Laurence growing up in a house of Olympians
• Laurences’ motivations for writing ‘Becoming a True Athlete’
• Ethics in elite sport
• Having a ‘human first, athlete second’ approach and how this does not need to compromise performance
• Using sport to as a vehicle to equip young sports people with skills for life
• The power of sport in society and how it can bring communities together
• Laurence’s first memory of being inspired by sport

Laurence Halsted is a two-time British Olympic fencer and multiple European medallist, who competed in the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Games. After more than a decade of performing at the highest levels of sport, Laurence hung up his swords and took on a role as the Performance Director of a national federation alongside becoming the head of mentoring at UK non-profit, The True Athlete Project. In 2021 Laurence published his first book – Becoming a True Athlete – which introduces and describes a practical philosophy for flourishing in sport, one that goes far beyond the results and medals to rediscover the true value of being an athlete. 

Having done some work recently with the WSL academy staff around the ‘Retain and Release Process’ recently I got thinking about how sports present their programmes to parents and young people.

Deep down I am pretty sure that we know that the chances of young people becoming Olympians and professional footballers or sportspeople are incredibly slim, but many sports parents still do dream and have those expectations.

“There are about 10,000 athletes in the Summer Olympics. With the world population at about 7 billion, the chances of making it that far are about 1 in 562,400,” says Bill Mallon, past president and co-founder of the International Society of Olympic Historians.

In the US, surveys show that 67 percent of parents hope their kids earn college scholarships while 34 percent dream that they make the Olympic team or play professionally.

It’s one thing to fantasise — it’s another to be convinced. Fully 40 percent of parents with young athletes are “certain” or “fairly sure” their gold medal and pro contract ambitions will come true.

According to NCAA statistics, only a minuscule percentage of high school athletes go all the way to play professionally.

• 1 in 610 (.16%) will get drafted by a Major League Baseball team.
• 1 in 10,399 (.0096%) will get picked by an NBA team.
• 1 in 12,873 (.0077%) will be chosen by a WNBA team.
• 1 in 3,960 (.025%) will get picked by an NFL team.

I have always been very open in the WWPIS workshops when talking about my own children and how I know that I have more chance of being hit by a meteor than my son playing professional football.

This is despite signing a Category 1 football contract at the age of 9.

This is in no way about stunting dreams and children should be encouraged to reach for the stars, it is better for young people to have their dreams than none at all.

However, it is our responsibility as the adults to ensure that we always have these statistics in the back of our mind when making decisions or supporting our young children.

Whilst I used the meteor analogy, I enjoyed something said by Tony Fretwell (Barclays FAWSL Academy Manager) who described it slightly differently, but it certainly painted another very clear picture.

When we are sold a holiday and we get the brochures it is 99% about the glamour of the trip, the hotels, beaches, sea, swimming pools and attractions and then there is a very small disclaimer that tells us of some of the potential issues (the plane crashing etc.), the package is a fair reflection of the chances of this happening.

In sport and specifically in football, we have very similar odds of children turning professional, but we sometimes sell our programmes in reverse. We sell the dream and the glamour when actually would we be better selling the journey and the wider parts and benefits of our programme?

We must do and show more about how we are going to develop young people with perhaps the final 1% saying there is a chance of becoming a professional footballer at the end of the journey.

In a number of the clubs that we work with, many are being proactive about this factor. Speaking to parents early in the journey, talking about release and encouraging parents to almost expect to have to deal with it at some point in the future is really helpful. In effect, trying to help pave the way for the disappointment that may follow whilst assuring parents that they will work hard to develop both the person and the player to the best of their abilities.

Both sporting organisations and parents have a key role to play.

There is something extremely powerful about sporting success, how we see it as a population and how this is fuelled and portrayed by the media.

Do we place too much emphasis on it as parents?

I am sure this will differ from household to household and sport to sport, but if we realistically know the odds of success and are supported positively – does it give us a better chance of managing our own expectations and those of our children?

Many involved in sport often cite parents having unrealistic expectations as a major issue within the groups that they work with. I am afraid that it is a parent’s prerogative to be slightly biased towards their own children, that is human nature.

However, do we do enough as sporting organisations particularly early in the sporting journey to help align their expectations?

We want parents to have expectations of the right things, progress for their children both physically and holistically, character development, life skills and positive interactions with coaches and their peers.

When we buy a lottery ticket, we know the chances of winning the jackpot are slim so when the results come through and we get the email or go into the shops we are excited for that moment. The build-up and moment when we click on the email or hand it over at the counter in the hope that we have won millions.

More often than not we have won £10 or less and we are able to move on extremely quickly as our expectations of winning the big one was in perspective to the chances of being successful.

Yet in sport our reaction to similar odds can be very different.

Parents – there are many great reasons to play youth sport that don’t involve scholarships, Olympic medals, or professional contracts – focus in on those and I am confident that you will celebrate more wins on the way and not run the risk of being disappointed by the final outcome of the journey, whatever that may be.

I am also pretty confident that your children will get far more from their sporting experience if we can adopt this approach.

In this episode gymnastics parent James Porter and Gordon MacLelland discuss the world of gymnastics and James’ experience of parenting three sons all involved in performance level gymnastics.

Here at WWPIS we recognise the importance of having these conversations with parents on the ground, who often share similar thoughts and feelings. This can often help us all reflect, manage and shape the environments that we create around our young people on their sporting journey.

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• The power and influence of other siblings
• The positive influence of the gymnastics club in nurturing the children’s potential both in and out of the sport
• Managing levels of expectation and going with the flow
• Treating each child as an individual and understanding their motivations
• Harnessing positive relationships with the coach
• Ensuring that they remain parents and give the coaches the space to coach
• Managing the competition experience and having strategies as a parent to manage this
• Sibling rivalry 
• The importance of enjoying the ride of the sports parenting journey and not getting too caught up on the destination
• Giving children the space to take ownership of their sporting journey