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COLUMNS
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COLUMNS FOR PARENTS AND ATHLETES What
advice would I give to parents? I think parents
should allow their young children to choose the athletic activities that
they participate in. Parents do need to provide some guidance, however they also
need to listen to what their children want.
I strongly believe that children should be exposed to many
different athletic activities rather than to be focused on
specialization in one sport. It
is very difficult to determine where the individual’s athletic
strengths and weaknesses will be while the child is still very young.
There is so much benefit for a child to participate in different
sports and be a member of several different teams as they become
teenagers. Young people who
like competing and playing sports will eventually—perhaps in high
school, or perhaps after high school---gravitate toward a specific
sport; they should not be discouraged from playing other (secondary?)
sports in order to achieve success in their primary sport. Parents also
should be supportive of their children’s coaches and teammates.
Youth athletes develop a much healthier attitude toward their
coaches and teammates if their parents help the youths understand the
roles of the coaches as mentors, teachers, authority figures, etc.
An athlete who develops a healthy and unselfish team attitude
will enjoy participating and competing as a team member much more than
one who puts his/her own needs ahead of those of the team. I believe that
it is very important that parents understand that hard work does not
guarantee that their young athlete will become a professional athlete,
earn a college athletic scholarship, or even compete in college sports.
God-given athletic ability plays a significant role in
determining the ultimate development of an athlete.
Even a high school athlete who devotes his/her efforts into one
sport throughout the entire year is not guaranteed a starting position
ahead of those who play multiple sports or are less dedicated in the
off-season. Parents should love their children unconditionally. Their children should not feel as though they have to succeed or excel in athletics in order to get approval from their parents. A very small percentage of young athletes get the opportunity to continue competing after high school, and even fewer become professionals. How
have parents changed over the years? How
have athletes changed over the years? In my
experience, athletes in general have become less resilient in the past
twenty years. Most of them
have more difficulty earning their playing time and success and also
have more trouble handling adversity than the athletes in the past did.
Thus, their confidence in themselves and in their teammates,
coaches and teams erodes too easily.
I believe that for the most part the athletes of the past had
what we call intrinsic self-confidence---that is confidence that comes
from within. That is a more
permanent self-confidence. Today’s
athletes develop their confidence extrinsically, from feedback of
others, and therefore it becomes a temporary confidence.
The athletes of the past had more of a tendency to look defeat in
the eye and compete when they were down than today’s athletes do.
Many of today’s athletes handle adversity and failure by
thinking negatively about their next game, performance, at-bat, etc. On the other hand, today’s athletes are generally better trained and more knowledgeable about the sports that they compete in, and their physical conditioning is much better than athletes of the past. Early Specialization In the 21st Century we now seem to have mini-professional athletes playing middle and high school sports. They aren’t getting paid, but they are dedicating so much time to one sport that the other activities they were once involved in are now just things of the past, memories. Some of these kids are quality athletes who are no longer representing their school’s teams; instead they are focused on specialization and becoming the best at some other sport. They believe that their dedication and hard work will be rewarded with a scholarship or a professional contract. Click here for the complete column Team Distractions Coaches
sometimes talk about distractions.
A distraction on an athletic team is something that interferes
with the progress the team is trying to make.
During the course of a season a team is usually trying to
accomplish a few things. Some of those could be things like improving sport skills,
increasing awareness of the game, becoming a more cohesive unit, winning
games and championships, striving for team success, understanding game
strategy, etc. Which
first: Confidence or success? Are
the attitudes of today’s young athletes any different than those of
ten years ago, or twenty years ago?
If so, what are the differences that you see?
And then of course, if they are different, what has caused them
to have different attitudes? Politics
in High School Sports? Occasionally
we hear people complain about politics involved in youth or high school
athletics. Even grown men
sometimes look back on their athletic careers and claim that their
opportunities were limited because of politics. Reasons kids play sports
Why did your
children begin playing sports? Did
they watch you play when they were very small?
Were they watching sports with you on television?
Did you take them to games? Did
you take them out in the back yard or the driveway and play catch or shoot
baskets with them? How did
their interest in playing sports develop? Defining Success
One of the age old
questions in every aspect of life is the question of success.
How is it defined? In
sports, simple ways to determine success are statistics, win-loss
percentage, and championships won. But
in today’s sport culture, especially when it has to do with children and
high school athletes, are those the only measuring sticks of success? HOW IMPORTANT IS WINNING? Just
how important is winning? Are there other priorities in youth sports that some might
consider to be just as important or even more so than winning?
Where do we place winning on our list of priorities when we are
involved in youth sports. What are we sacrificing in order to win?
Can we make winning a priority without devaluing other important
aspects of our children’s involvement in youth sports? JV and Freshmen
teams Some time ago a
friend of mine said, “Isn’t the purpose of the JV to prepare the
players for the varsity?” That has led to several interesting discussions in the past
month or so. Most of us who
have had children play high school sports have had the experience of being
a freshman and/or junior varsity parent.
Just what is the purpose of high school junior varsity and freshmen
athletic teams? Parents and Coaches
Do you remember
the first time you saw your children in athletic team uniforms?
The first time they competed in a sport?
Do you recall the first time they experienced failure in an
athletic event? Or the first
time they sat on the bench for a majority of a contest, or even for an
entire event? How did that make you feel?
How did you respond? Curve balls for Kids? There is more than one
school of thought when it comes to the philosophy of youth baseball
pitchers throwing curve balls. I have my own opinions, some based on
reading articles from doctors, some based on being a college coach, some
based on coaching boys from the ages of 9 through high school, and some
based on my experience as a parent of a pitcher.
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