For 29 years, I preached to kids and parents: ‘Support the entire team, not just your child. I understand that your child is more important to you than the others are, and that you would rather see them do well more than anyone else…..it’s ok to feel that way, but it doesn’t have to prevent you from supporting the entire team.’ But, is that really as easy to do, as it is to say? Is it easy to get emotionally (and sometimes financially) invested in a team, when your child is not playing much on that team? I think that …
Category: Parents
My last post (What Coaches Want Parents To Know) was by far the most read post so far on this site, with over 8,000 views. With this post, I want to talk a little more about parents and playing time. I want it to be known, that as a whole, I had great parents. One of the benefits of this profession is all the people we get to meet, and I had lots of truly incredible people that had kids play for me. I really have had relatively few problems with parents. Off the top of my head, I remember …
‘It’s all political’, ‘he just doesn’t like my daughter’, ‘he has his favorites that he plays all the time’….. Sound familiar? I guarantee those three phrases have been said about every coach in the country in regards to playing time. I want to take a few minutes to discuss those quotes a little and discuss the parents’ role (or at least what my opinion is of the parents’ role) during their child’s athletic career. ‘It’s all political’.…..this is a phrase usually uttered by parents whose child isn’t playing as much as they want them to. Presumably, they are suggesting that …
I don’t know if I heard that phrase from someone else or not…..I actually think that it is one I came up with. Simply put, ‘false praise’ is when you tell a kid ‘good job’ when they didn’t do a good job. Usually, the intentions are good…..coaches and parents deal out false praise when they are trying to build a kid up. But, there are two problems with that in my opinion: I think it’s actually counter-productive to improvement. When you take away the sting or pain of failure, you take away some of the incentive to get better. It’s …
A saying doesn’t just ‘become’ an old saying….. …..there has to be enough merit to the advice that the saying is dispensing, to warrant repeating that saying over the course of generations. The old saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ cautions us against making judgements about something based solely on a superficial inspection of it. I think that, universally, people agree that this particular old saying offers up solid advice. Except, when it comes to athletics and coaching. Coaches and teams too often get judged based on a small, superficial snap shot of what they actually do……most of …