The Power of Mental Reps: Elevating Your Team's Performance
By encouraging athletes to engage mentally during downtime, you help them increase their 'mental reps.' This approach makes your practice sessions more efficient and fosters a deeper understanding of the game among your athletes.
Belief and Sharing a Vision
Coach, your team needs to know you believe in them. I’m not talking about blind faith, but real belief in their abilities to compete and be successful because you have created an environment of competition, growth mindset, and constant improvement. Set them up for success, then get out of the way!
Abusive Coaching
Our voice as “Coach” stays with our athletes long after they hand in their jersey for the last time. Our words echo inside their brains, the good and the bad. For example, I remember when my high school volleyball coach spent over an hour with me after practice preparing me for a job interview and sharing tips on how to dress and what to say. I also remember when my eighth-grade baseball coach yelled at me from the dugout to “just throw fu$&%ing strikes” when I struggled to get the ball over the plate.
The Importance of Knowing What Your Athletes Need
Sometimes to perform at our best, all we need is a pause.
Kids are not mini-adults
Every season, no matter the level of the sport, a different team shows up. Though the athlete could be coming from the same school as the year before, every season has its own culture and feeling. 6th graders are now 7th graders, juniors are now seniors, so on and so forth. A lot changes in a young athlete’s life between seasons, and as coaches we should not assume fundamentals are as sharp as they were the year before, or that the athletes are coming with prior knowledge.
Empowering Children to Find Courage
This story highlights the importance of coaches in developing athletes' physical skills, confidence, and self-esteem. Coaches can make a lasting impact on their athletes' lives beyond the game, and it is essential to encourage and show athletes that they are loved and valued both on and off the court.
Yelling vs Coaching
Teach your young athletes to know the difference between yelling to hurt and yelling to help and keep your own emotions in check. Use yelling as a tool and use it sparingly so when you need to get their attention on something important, it doesn’t sound like everything else you yelled to them.
Simple Basketball
If my team without a playbook is confident enough to shoot and I spend time teaching how to aggressively rebound I will beat your team with a playbook.
Playing in the Absence of Fear
As a youth coach I believe it is my job to model confident behavior for my athletes and coaches. It starts with intelligent preparation and ends not in winning (though that often is a by-product of great preparation) but in performing at the highest ability in which I am capable.
Parental Communication After a Loss
What do you say to a child after they lose a game? Tread lightly.