Winning with kids
The World Cup-winning coach on life, leadership and sports
Research in the United States suggests that of the 40
million children who play sport when they start school, 28 million (70%) give
up by the age of 13. When asked why, it was not the sport that kids didn’t like. Rather,
their experience in the sport, with the main culprits being their coaches and
parents’ behaviour.
Interestingly, the 70% of kids who give up sport at school is mirrored to some
degree in business. Research by three leading HR companies (Forbes, Gallup,
Saratoga) on over a million employees from 200 corporations and over 60
different companies suggest that 74-84% of employees want to leave their jobs.
When asked why, the main reason was ‘because of my boss’
– people leave bosses, not companies. It seems coaches, parents and bosses
might do well to pay closer attention to their athletes and employees’ needs
and experiences. After all, happy people are more engaged and deliver better results
than their unhappy or disengaged counterparts.
When it came to coaches, there were common behaviours
that kids highlighted as being problematic, with an over-emphasis on winning
being the most significant. It causes coaches to yell at kids, to favour the
talented, to react badly to mistakes, and that compromises fun.
Kids reported that they were tired of being yelled at.
It’s a simple equation, no child, or adult for that matter, likes being shouted
at. It’s worth asking why coaches do in fact shout at kids around sport
participation? What are we trying to accomplish?
Shouting seldom helps and is often done to satisfy the
coaches’ needs to vent their frustration when kids does not meet the coaches’
often overly high expectations of perfection. Directly related to being yelled
at is that kids stopped playing sport because they fear making mistakes.
Kids also gave up due to lack of participation and
opportunity, which happens when coaches favour more talented kids because they
have a better chance of making their team win – and thus of making the coach
look good.
Underlying many of these problems is a clash of agendas.
Most adults want to win -- which satisfies their own ego and personal agendas
-- and kids mostly want to have fun because it satisfies their primary reason
to play sport. In fact, two of the biggest school sport studies revealed that
kids rated winning as eighth and 11th on their list of priorities. When it came
to lack of fun, lack of fun at practices and training was the biggest culprit.
Although most parents mean well and do their best to
support their kids, the same United States schools research mentioned above
revealed that 36% of parents hurt their kids’ development. I suggest these
statistics are not unique to the United States and that Indian parents are not
immune from them.
As with coaches, the main contributor to parents
undermining their kids sporting experience is an over-emphasis on winning, and
the associated behaviour which creates pressure, anxiety and fear of failure.
Often-times parents have unrealistically high expectations of their children’s
sporting acumen. They expect them to never make mistakes, with some parents
expecting their kids to be as good as they wish they had been when they were
young.
Interestingly, kids cited parents coaching them as more
of an annoyance than a support. In fact, parents coaching their children rated
as more detrimental than parents criticising their children. My 11-year-old
daughter plays soccer and is an accomplished surfer. In the car on the way to
competitions, I always ask her what she wants from me as her parent she is
aware that I have some knowledgeable of coaching). Every time she tells me the
same thing, “I just want you to be there to watch me.” And in keeping with
advice from experts, she is also very clear that the journey home is not the
time for a coaching workshop. My job is to be her dad.
Some recommendations to avoid being one of those 36% of
parents who ruin their kids’ development include: don’t over-emphasise winning;
give your child the same love and support whether they win, lose, play well or
have a bad day; let the coach do the coaching, never criticise your child; and
ask what support they want from you as their parent, then deliver on that.
However much we think we know about sport, and however
well we want our kids to do, the best thing we can do is to simply love
watching our kids participate, and then tell them that. After all, they are
kids who mostly play sport for fun, to get exercise, and to be with their friends.
Where possible, try and find a coach who does not yell,
who does not make a fuss when kids make mistakes, who believes more in helping
your kids learn, grow and have fun rather than driving them like an army
sergeant to win, and who not only teaches your kids to improve their game, but
helps them learn to make decisions for themselves.
Our children will be faced with a greater array of
decisions as teenagers and young adults than we ever faced. Included are that
many of the decisions will be alluring yet harmful and dangerous. Traditional
sport coaching has seen coaches doing all the thinking for kids and delivering
instructions as to what to do. This does not teach decisionmaking, which is a
more important skill now than it has even been.
Source | Mumbai Mirror | 18th
September 2019
Regards
Mr. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @ 9665911593
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