Morgan Sullivan writes: Coaching youth sports is an honorable service, yet I’ve watched many practices conducted where the athletes were no better than before they showed up. Here are my tips on how to became a more effective coach.
Youth sports coaches – the men and women who volunteer their time to make the lives of young athletes better. Most of these volunteers are former players– some from the high school, or college, level. It’s an honorable sacrifice and we should all remember that before we begin to criticize.
However.
As I’ve coached in Alabama, Georgia, Michigan and 4 different counties in Ohio, I’ve watched many practices and games conducted where the athletes were no better than before they showed up. This mostly seems to be due to ineffective and, at times, damaging coaches. Below is the short list of the most common/most damaging teaching practices and techniques used by youth coaches.
Courtesy Momsteam
1. Wasting time during practice.
First, when you’re working with kids, having them stand around while others conduct the drill or while the coach is talking, and talking, (and….talking) kills their motivation and bores them. When you’ve got kids that spend all day in a classroom, and then you get them to practice and talk to them more like a history teacher than a sports coach, how interested do you really think they’ll really be?
Then the coach turns around and chews a kid out for making a mistake in a game, that the coach ‘clearly’ went over in practice, saying that the kid “didn’t pay attention.” Really, coach?
2. Resting on what we think we know.
The common response to this is usually one of two things. I often get, “That’s the way we did it when I was playing (20 years ago) so that’s how I’ll do it now.” The other response I get is, “It was good enough for my coaches so it’s good enough for me.” To that I often provide the sarcastic response, “At least you didn’t think about it before you did it.”
So much has changed in the last twenty years: Kids are different now, techniques have changed, the processes have changed, regulations have changed, medical advances have occurred, and more importantly, conditioning and stretching changes have been found. One common thread among all tenured coaches is this: they change with the times.
While your junior high basketball coach made you run suicides at the end of practice, it’s been identified that using that conditioning method prevents athletes from working harder during practice as they unconsciously “save their energy” for end of practice running. And when your high school football coach made the whole team run when you fumbled, it’s not really teaching you to not fumble, as you already knew that. Its actually just breeding resentment and anger.
3. Not learning new techniques.
This is something I see in baseball more than anything else. On every sideline you’ll hear, “swing level,” or “keep your back elbow up.” Those are both examples of things I was taught when I was playing youth baseball, 25 years ago. There have been MANY technological advancements in that period which afford us the opportunity to slow down the swing and examine it more in depth. We’ve found that a “level” swing is not optimal for power and contact, and the back shoulder raised creates a back shoulder dip in younger athletes with their muscles not well developed.
Coaches, get up to speed on the current teaching and scientific advancements in the sport you coach. You owe it to your players.
Coaches, please remember that you are often one of the adults that the kids will remember forever. Youth coaches have an amazing impact on the lives of young athletes. You can more than likely remember your little league baseball coach or your first football coach. You’re an important part of the young athletes’ lives. Take just a little time each week to surf coaching blogs, attend coaching clinics, read books written by prominent coaches and chase YouTube for drills.
Saying, “I only coach in a youth league. I don’t need to do all of that” is not sufficient. The kids are that important.
