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By TrueSport Expert, Ian Goldberg

As a coach, you witness a lot of sport-related decisions and coaching strategies: You may see other coaches in your area encouraging athletes to specialize in one sport or to train year-round with no breaks. You may also experience parents who are dreaming of college scholarships and professional sport careers. And then there are the athletes themselves, who may have their own reasons for playing and internal pressures to succeed.

But a smart coach knows that a balanced approach to sport is critical for athlete health, longevity, and even success on the field. Here, TrueSport Expert Ian Goldberg, coach, sport dad, and founder and CEO of iSport360, reflects on how coaches can encourage balance in youths sports.

Get Over FOMO
Fear of missing out—colloquially known as FOMO—leads a lot of coaches to make decisions that aren’t necessarily in the best interests of their team or the individual athletes, says Goldberg. The FOMO may be coming from hearing what other coaches are doing with their athletes: extra tournaments, travel-heavy schedules, or expensive private skills training. Presssure from FOMO can also be coming from the athletes’ parents, who see what other teams are doing and are afraid their kids are missing out. Social media makes this even tougher, since coaches, parents, and athletes are no longer comparing their programs to other local programs but instead have a global view of the ‘highlight reels’ of other teams.

It’s impossible to keep up with, says Goldberg. And the best thing that you can do for your athletes is to help them understand that no matter how many extras they add, there will always be something else out there. They’re chasing an impossible standard, and rather than helping them get ahead, it’s costing them in the long run.

Bust the 10,000 Hour Myth
“Multi-sport athletes are the most successful athletes out there,” says Goldberg. “Every college football coach will tell you that the athletes they want to recruit for their football teams have played multiple sports in high school. Many were three letter athletes, because that’s what makes a young athlete the most well rounded, strongest, balanced, fit player.”

Unfortunately, the “10,000 hour” concept popularized by nonfiction author Malcolm Gladwell has made many coaches, parents, and athletes believe that a singular focus is the only way to find success. According to the “10,000 hour” concept, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is what it takes to become an expert. But that doesn’t mean a seven-year-old should be spending 10 hours per week working on their soccer skills in order to speed up the process of becoming a soccer superstar. “In sports, especially at a young age, it’s actually better to train multiple sports and practice moving your body in different ways,” says Goldberg. “But there are the parents and coaches who are still thinking along those Malcolm Gladwell lines and it’s hurting our athletes.”

Add in Free Play
“We know from the research that kids want to play sports primarily because it’s fun and they have friends there,” says Goldberg. “But coaches and parents tend to be focused on winning and success and other outcomes rather than fun. It’s obvious that we have taken a lot of the fun out of our kids’ sports.”

So even within your practices, make space for athletes to simply play and have fun, says Goldberg. Youth sports used to include much more ‘free play,’ where athletes were the ones organizing into small teams, creating new games with different rules, and scoring themselves. Now, Goldberg says, many kids have lost the ability to simply enjoy a few minutes of free play on the field, but it’s a valuable way that a coach can inject fun into practice while also giving athletes a chance to experiment with different tactics and even work on their leadership skills in the process.

Shut the Team Down
It may be difficult to consider taking a full offseason for your team if the other coaches in the area play year-round, or you’re being pressured by parents to keep it going. But Goldberg encourages coaches to get their players to play multiple sports—and this only happens if there’s an offseason. “It takes courage for a coach to say that they’re shutting down for an offseason,” he says. “There’s the fear that athletes will find other teams, or even that they’ll play another sport and not come back. But if that’s what you’re afraid of, you need to consider what your team is offering. Why are you afraid the athletes will leave? What aren’t you providing for them?”

In fact, encouraging athletes to try other sports often results in the athletes coming back next season fitter and more refreshed and eager to play. “I want athletes on my team who are doing other sports,” says Goldberg. “I see a huge boost in fitness from it: An athlete who does swimming in the winter may need to refocus on her soccer skills in the spring, but her fitness and overall strength will be much higher than if she’d done soccer year-round.”

Set Expectations with Parents and Athletes
Female coach talking to youth athlete team on field.“When I started coaching my daughter, by the time she was seven years old and starting to play travel soccer, I saw a real breakdown between myself as the coach on the team and the parents of the kids,” says Goldberg. He quickly realized that in order to successfully coach happy, healthy athletes, he needed to set boundaries with parents. It was key to set expectations for the amount of travel the team would do—Goldberg maintains a ‘no plane travel’ rule for his soccer team—as well as to establish boundaries around communication. Can parents text, or should they email? What is expected of parents during competitions, as they watch from the sidelines?

Travel teams in particular need boundaries, since it’s easy to get swept up by a travel schedule that goes from a couple of weekends away in a season to a three-month stretch of plane travel and long drives almost every weekend. And Goldberg says that there are benefits to traveling as a team: The bonding that takes place when athletes are staying together in a hotel and spending time together can create lifelong memories. But it shouldn’t become the norm for most teams. “I don’t believe most teams need to spend thousands of dollars to get hotels, rental cars, and flights unless they are at such a high level that there’s just no good competition in the local area,” says Goldberg. “Unless your team is winning everything by such a massive margin that the kids are bored playing, you don’t need to travel every weekend.”

Encourage the Multi-Sport Approach
The most important thing you can do as a coach is to promote a multi-sport approach that allows athletes to explore other ways of playing and moving. Specifically, push your athletes to consider seemingly unrelated sports. Goldberg is a fan of sports that make athletes better in any other sport, such as cycling, track, swimming, and martial arts. “It would be silly for a coach to tell an athlete on their team to drop martial arts, especially in the offseason. Martial arts like Jiu Jitsu just make you stronger, more confident, more disciplined, and a better all-around athlete. Something like cycling helps develop the aerobic engine, while track makes your athlete a better runner.”

These individual sports can be especially beneficial to an athlete who’s used to team sports. “There’s something really great about being part of a team, but to truly be challenged and push yourself, you need to try those individual sports too,” says Goldberg. “It’s great for athletes to have the opportunity to experience a sport where they have no one to blame but themselves when they lose and no one else to credit when they win. And that’s a great skill to learn.”

The reason coaches often are slow to suggest this approach, Goldberg believes, comes down to fear. “I think the problem is coaches are nervous that they’re going to lose their player to another major sport,” he says. “So, if the kid on your soccer team says they’re going to play baseball this season, the coach worries that the baseball coach will ask the athlete to play year-round, so they say no.”

But if you’ve created a thriving, fun environment on your team, it’s also likely that your athlete will come back when baseball season is over… and be stronger from their time there.

Takeaway

As a coach, you can fight the narrative that youth athletes should be specializing in one sport, playing year-round, and receiving specialized training in order to succeed. Try to help both athletes and parents understand that the research is clear that the winning approach is a multi-sport one that prioritizes rest and allows athletes to develop at their own pace.

​By Dr. Patrick Cohn

One of the more difficult juggling acts that you have to learn to pull off as an athlete if you want to most consistently be a peak performer is how to effectively use and balance your goals and expectations. Before I explain, let’s start with some simple definitions: Goals & Expectations: What are they? Even though these have slightly different meanings, I’m going to be using them interchangeably for this article.

Goals and expectations are related to the OUTCOME. They are always FUTURE oriented. They reflect what you WANT out of your sport, from a particular season or from this immediate performance. Goals and expectations reflect what you hope to accomplish and what would make you feel successful as an athlete.

Having goals or expectations for yourself is absolutely critical if you want to go anywhere in your sport. Your goals/expectations serve as a TARGET to aim for. They give all your training efforts a MEANING and a DIRECTION. They also provide the FUEL and ENERGY that you’ll need to consistently move forward towards success and turning your athletic dream into a present day reality. Without well-defined goals, your overall training will be haphazard, misdirected and disorganized. Without clearly defined goals your efforts will be inconsistent at best. Some days you’ll train hard, others you’ll just go through the motions. Goals serve as a source of motivation to keep you keeping on, especially when the going gets rough and discouragement sets in.

When you have goals and expectations for yourself, you are setting a higher standard of performance. You are internally demanding more of yourself. You are challenging yourself. Such high standards and challenges are necessary for you to take your training to the next level. It’s these inner demands that you place on yourself that will ultimately propel you forward towards your dream. In the end, the hope is that the demands that you place on yourself will make you a much better person and athlete as they move you towards personal excellence. In this way, your goals and expectations help you “push your envelope” and step outside of your comfort zone.

Your goals and expectations tend to function in your brain much like a guided missile system does in a rocket. The system programs the rocket engine towards the target and keeps it on track. If the missile gets blown a few degrees off its’ course by strong winds, the inner tracking system automatically corrects and reorients the missile so it gets back on target. Without this inner guidance system, the missile would just fly aimlessly around and around until it crashes, runs out of fuel or the engines break down. Your goals and expectations function in much the same way. They will organize and direct your training efforts. They will keep you moving in the targeted direction. If you get knocked off track, distracted or temporarily sidelined, your goals and expectations will help you find the strength and discipline to get back onto the proper path.

But more than this, as I mentioned, your goals and expectations also serve as an all important fuel for that guided missile system. It’s your goals and expectations that keep you motivated to train. Your goals provide you with an important answer to the often-asked questions: “Why bother?” “What’s the point of all this hard work?” “Why am I making all these sacrifices for anyway?” “The coach isn’t looking now, why should I keep going hard?”  After such a devastating failure, why should I continue to try?” Having goals and expectations for yourself helps you get through the sometimes very rough patches of your athletic career and the oftentimes tough, daily grind of training. They are your answer to all of these “why” questions. Simply put, your goals and expectations, if they truly belong to YOU and are genuinely important to YOU, will provide you with a compelling enough reason to sacrifice, work hard and discipline yourself. If your goals don’t really belong to you, if your parents or coaches force them on you, if you’re just doing this to make others happy, then when the going gets rough, your reaction will be to want to pack it up, hit the road and bail out.

One of the key points that I want to make here is that taking your goals and expectations with you when you go to practice is critical to your ultimate success as an athlete. In practice they represent an extremely valuable piece of training equipment. If you can ask yourself, “How is what I’m doing today going to help me get to my goals?” whenever you train, then the quality and intensity of your training will always be high. As a result you will be more focused, your practices will have more meaning to you and therefore, you’ll accomplish far more than those who don’t have a clear purpose in mind whenever they train. Asking yourself this one simple question in practice, over and over again on a daily basis, throughout the course of the season can easily make the difference between success and failure, winning and losing, successfully reaching your goals or not. But this is only one part of the championship formula when using goals and expectations.

The other just as critical part is to know when it’s time to mentally set your goals and expectations aside. Perhaps one of the more common and costly mental mistakes made by athletes at every level is to take their goals and expectations with them into the competitive playing arena. It’s this mental mistake that leads to choking, tight, tentative performances and bitter disappointment. Walk on the basketball court, as an example, for a big game with your expectations under your arm (“I’ve got to score at least 12 points!”) and you’ll be sure to leave an unhappy and frustrated underachiever. This is one of the cardinal rules in sports psychology and peak performance. Take your goals with you whenever you practice and train, but NEVER, EVER when you compete and it counts. Let me repeat this because it is so important. DO NOT BRING YOUR GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS WITH YOU WHEN YOU COMPETE. Why?

While your goals and expectations may motivate and focus you in practice, they rarely work that kind of positive way in competition. Concentrating on your goals when you compete, focusing on how important this game, match or race may be, thinking about the outcome of the contest and how you really need to beat this opponent or that one will distract you from what you need to focus on in order to perform to your potential and make you nervous at the same time. At competition time, your goals and expectations will weigh you down and sink you. They will tighten your muscles, kill your nerve and fill your heart with dread. It’s this outcome focus on goals and expectations that is so poisonous to the athlete’s performance.

An emphasis on outcome, (goals & expectations), right before you compete will always crank up the level of seriousness of the performance and what’s at stake, while simultaneously killing your fun and enjoyment. This is a deadly one-two combination that will KO your performance! If you’re not having fun going into and during a performance, then you will be physically and mentally tight and it will be IMPOSSIBLE for you to play to your potential. Regular readers of this newsletter know that THE secret to playing your best is being loose and relaxed while you’re performing.

So take your goals with you when you train. Think about why you’re training and what’s at stake. Try to connect what you’re doing right now in practice with your ultimate goal. However, understand that when you go to compete you must leave your goals back home. Do not bring your goals and expectations into the competition. Forget about what’s at stake, who your opponent is, how important this competition may be or who’s in the stands watching you. If you get it into your head that you “have to,” “got to,” “need to,” “must,” in relation to your performance in this game or match, then you are overly focused on outcome and, as a result, will be much more likely to choke your guts out.

Keep in mind that the way to get that all-important victory is a paradox. If you really want to win then winning must be the farthest thing from your mind at game time. If you really want to kick your rival’s butt, then you must banish thoughts of him/her from your mind and instead concentrate on yourself. If you desperately want to impress the coaches or a scout watching, then your focus must be on YOU and NOT on THEM! You will get what you WANT when you DON’T focus on it during\ competition. Similarly, you will get exactly what you DON’T want during competition when you focus on what you WANT too much.

When I work with athletes and teams I will frequently suggest to them the following simple exercise a few days before a big competition: “Write down everything that you want to have happen, all your outcome goals and expectations. Put them all down on paper and take one last good look at them. When you’re done examining them, take all those outcome goals and lock them in a drawer, out of sight. Do NOT take them out and look at them until AFTER the competition is over!” This is the best way to insure that you have the best chance to perform at your best. Goals and expectations are part of your practice “equipment.” Like Sammy Sosa’s corked bat, they are only to be used in practice and NEVER when it really counts!

Award winning parenting writer Lisa Cohn and Youth Sports Psychology expert Dr. Patrick Cohn are co-founders of The Ultimate Sports Parent. Pick up their free e-book, “Ten Tips to Improve Confidence and Success in Young Athletes” by visiting http://www.youthsportspsychology.com

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We support Right to Play, an international organization dedicated to making a difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives through sport. From their website:

Right To Play’s ultimate programming goal is this: Encouraging behaviour change. This complex process involves more than simple knowledge and awareness building. It involves adopting and maintaining behaviours and attitudes such as self-esteem, resisting peer pressure, problem-solving and building a capacity for communication.

Right To Play improves health, teaches basic life skills and helps children and youth to develop skills to resolve conflict peacefully in some of the most disadvantaged areas in the world. Role models, family, Coaches, teachers, peers and our Athlete Ambassadors all play an important role in helping people adopt new behaviors. Through sport and play, they learn about team work, co-operation and respect – the best values of sport.