The Sports Doc Chalk Talk

I believe the time is now that we make concerted efforts to better educate and prepare families for their child’s eventual sport retirement.  With sports being as big as they are in this country, its a shame that so many athletes are still left to themselves to figure out who they are, what their talents are beyond sports, and what future paths exist for them when in the midst of the sport retirement transition.  Fortunately, most athletes do not fall into the worst-case scenarios of suicide (as with the recent passing of Junior Seau), but literally millions of athletes from various sports, backgrounds, and types, experience great distress during sport retirement – often resulting in depression, anxiety, role confusion, and poor future planning.  In order to cope with this distress, many athletes turn to drug and alcohol abuse, aggression, and reckless behaviors (like gambling).

The message I am sending today is designed to promote more action in the ways of better educating sports families about the athletic identity, and how kids often develop an exclusive athletic identity that hinders them when they end their careers in sports.  With so many kids now specializing in one sport and playing it nearly year-round, it becomes easy to see how athletes develop their self-worth around “athlete.”  Their social identities (or how others view them), are also constructed around the athletic identity, too (like when we immediately ask about the game before anything else).  None of this is “bad” necessarily, but it all leads to the fact that most kids never play beyond high school (only about 5% do), making the sport retirement transition usually an abrupt and unplanned one. Without better educational efforts, families will continue to struggle when their kids (who are often just teenagers without great coping skills due to their youth) experience distress during this period — making it that much more important that we make things better.

Help is Here!

One approach that we have developed is Sport Success 360, a licensed educational system designed to help schools and youth sport leagues by providing key psychosocial information, tips, and strategies designed to help kids have a safe, fun, and meaningful athletic experience.  I encourage you to learn more about Sport Success 360 by watching this introductory video — Sport Success 360 includes a broad range of topics (including sport retirement), complimentary videos, and free downloads of Sport Success 360 and Sport Success 360 PLUS audio program.

If you are reading this blog, then it can be assumed you have an interest in youth and interscholastic sports (probably as either a parent, athlete, or coach).  While you may not be a decision-maker in your school or youth league, you can help raise awareness by mentioning Sport Success 360, or other great sport education programs out there that can help kids not only better prepare for sport retirement, but also learn about key psychosocial issues like the dangers of performance enhancing supplements, youth sport burnout, hazing, and many more issues.  In all likelihood you have also experienced more traditional issues, like playing time, cuts, sportsmanship, tough coaches (or parents), and travel leagues – Sport Success 360 covers those topics, too.

Education Helps On and Off the Field

Mental toughness is needed on the field, but it’s not limited to just wins and losses — we need to help families learn the culture of sports today, and successful strategies to help kids cope with the pressures they commonly experience in sports.  Just as important as the X’s and O’s are, we need to help kids with performance anxiety, as well as the resiliency needed to bounce back from adversity.  Ironically, these are really life skills and not limited to sports, making these kinds of sport education efforts that much more vital.

Better and more prevalent education does not imply that sports are bad, or that all kids who play sports have terrible experiences — far from it.  Instead, we need to realize that the days of a handful of casual summer games played on the local sandlot are long gone — replaced by high-level, intense, pressure-filled travel league sports schedules for kids who sometimes struggle to keep up.  Of course, these are not bad kids, either – they are just that, kids, vulnerable to kid mistakes when trying to deal with pressure.

Helping Kids – Even the Ones that Don’t Speak Up

Kids don’t always speak up when they feel pressure – be it from their parents or team expectations.  In some cases kids have a talent for a specific sport, but don’t love playing the sport — yet still refrain from speaking out because the see the time, money, and energy being invested in their athletic career.  Some kids have a lot of trouble multi-tasking other activities – like school and social activities — while others have difficulty dealing with resiliency that sometimes manifests into unsportsmanlike behavior and/or uncontrolled aggression.

When we view youth sports through the lens of it being an often intense, complex, and radically different experience than generations of the past, it helps us better frame the educational approach to youth sports as being one of “keeping up with the times” than one that needs to be done because of “problems.”  Introducing new and more advanced ways of delivering contemporary sport education is not an admission that an athletic department or youth league has gone out of control, but instead an example of sports leaders making important budgetary decisions that go beyond the traditional basics.  Of course, finding new revenue streams is never easy, but when issues become important enough people become resourceful – this is often referred to as a “tipping point.”  Are we there yet?  I think so, and from my experiences with many sports people, it sounds like there is increasingly more support to improve future efforts.  I personally believe this will happen, and I hope you do, too.

www.drstankovich.com

Sport Success 360 is the premier sport education system, designed to improve the culture of your youth or interscholastic team/league!

I have been involved with many discussions this week around Ron Artest, and the overall big picture of sports aggression.  As I wrote about earlier this week, it’s not the emotion that gets players in trouble, but how they manifest their energy.  When players allow their emotions to take the form of negative actions (like hitting another player), bad things happen.  On the other hand, when athletes learn how to more effectively channel their emotions into positive and facilitative actions, good things almost always follow.

www.drstankovich.com

Learn more about mental toughness and how it can help athletes improve their focus, concentration, motivation, and resiliency – check out Mind of Steel today!

Athletes commonly experience an emotional roller coasting while competing — perhaps put no better than the late ABC Wide World of Sports weekly introduction that depicted the sport experience going from “the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat.” The point is that sports prompt athletes to become emotional — and herein is where aggressive and unsportsmanlike acts often originate (Sport Success 360).

Examining the recent Ron Artest incident where he blind-sided James Harden with his elbow —moments before the elbow, Artest felt excitement — and subsequently made a cognitive decision about how he would demonstrate his emotion. Rather than giving a positive and emphatic fist pump to the crowd, he decided to channel his emotion into a terrible cheap shot.  Think about what a “teachable moment” this can be for kids when they begin to learn that the emotions they feel from playing sports are great, but how they channel their emotions makes the difference between being a positive leader or getting thrown out of a game for displaying unsportsmanlike behavior.  Ironically, and simplistically, the direction in which Artest threw his elbow made all the difference — had it gone in the direction of the crowd rather than the back of Harden’s head, he likely would have helped his team continue to pick up energy, confidence, and mental toughness – variables linked closely to sports focus and athletic success.

Sports parents and coaches can teach student athletes to develop the sport psychology mental toughness skills needed to control emotions while competing and re-direct negative thoughts (that often lead to negative actions) into positive, facilitative, team-building emotions and actions (like giving high-fives to teammates).

Young athletes can learn early in their careers that how they think on the field will directly impact how they play.  By understanding that mistakes will happen, games will be lost, and possibly injuries will be experienced at some point, kids can prepare emotionally ahead of time by developing positive thinking routines to use when these situations eventually occur.

When adults take time to process with kids the teachable moments commonly experienced in sports — like effectively handling adversity — many really terrific things usually occur.  Perhaps the biggest change you will notice is a surge in confidence, which often triggers motivation, focus, and goal commitment. As you might guess, these are the athletes that reach their full athletic potential as a result.

The next time you go to your child’s game, keep an eye out for when a young athlete throws a glove, curses, or pushes an opponent after a play ends.  Remember, that same energy you witnessed in those acts could have all been turned into much better outcomes, like smacking a glove emphatically, telling the team “lets get them next time,” and helping an opponent up in the spirit of sportsmanship. Your child can learn vicariously from these experiences (meaning she can learn by watching others rather than being directly involved in the unsportsmanlike act), and quickly improve her mental toughness through your teachings.  As you help kids make these pro-social thought-behavior connections, talk about the many other ways these skills can be applied (or transferred), like toward academic success.

www.drstankovich.com

Got an iphone, ipod, or ipad?  If so, be sure to check out our high performance sports apps just to the right of today’s column!

We have all seen it before — “that” parent in the stands that yells profanities, disrupts a game, or even worse aggressively acts out by fighting with other fans, coaches, or even his own child.  Of course, nobody wants to be “that” parent, but it seems as though with every year that passes there are even more parents who don’t seem to be able to control themselves at youth sports games.  This leads to the million dollar question: Why?

I’ll bet you have never met a parent in your life who intentionally goes to youth games with the goal of being a jerk.  The truth is parents do not typically go to games looking for trouble, and in the vast majority of cases when parents do “lose it,” they often regret their actions terribly the next day.

Heres another fact that may surprise you — there really aren’t many truly “bad” parents who attend games, but instead adults who temporarily lose their cool in the middle of a game and snap.  Of course, this does not justify anyone acting out (especially those who cause physical harm), but it may be a nice segue into better understanding why some parents ruin the experience for everyone when they do stupid things at games.

While this may surprise folks, the truth is we are all potential candidates to be the next adult who says or does something at a youth sports game that we later end up regretting.  The reason for this can be summarized in the following points:

• We are all human, and as humans we are apt to make mistakes – including having brief, momentary lapses of reason at youth sports games
• Think of emotions and logic being on opposite ends of a line.  While you might be in a very logical mind-state sitting at home reading this article now, it’s likely your emotions will trump logic when your kid’s game starts later today.  Youth sports can be an incredibly emotional experience, and when we get emotional we simply don’t think logically.  Of course, this doesn’t make us bad people per se, but suggests that we sometimes struggle keeping things in check when we see our child miss a play that we know she can do.  Sports are fluid and often move very fast, and so do our emotions — it is for this reason that we don’t always think logically when we are excited about what we are experiencing.
• Probably the biggest reason why parents sometimes “lose it” at games has to do with the cumulative efforts many families make so that their child can be successful at sports.  Just think about all the time, energy, and money many parents put into their child’s sports training — and then with all their hopes hanging in the balance they witness their child miss plays on the field that they know he can do!  It is in that moment that some parents simply crack, and the result is usually an off-color comment, negative body language, or even an aggressive act.

Please remember it is never appropriate to act out at youth games, and the intent of this article was to simply explain some of the things that contribute to those unfortunate times when parents lose it for a moment (not justify them).  All people are apt to make mistakes, and it is the emotional part of sport that often supersedes human logic when parents temporarily lose control.  It is also a different time today, one where some families spend unbelievable amounts of time and money devoted to sport development and training for their child.  With so much riding on their child’s athletic success, it can be especially frustrating to witness anything less than success.  The result, unfortunately, is often an unexpected loss of emotional control.

Fortunately, there are ways to safeguard against future problems — be sure to check out our expanding educational product line, including Sport Success 360, The Parents Playbook, and our audio products for parents!

www.drstankovich.com

When athletes allow anger and frustration to manifest into full-blown outbursts while playing their sport, they almost always end up playing far below their potential (The Parents Playbook).  While it is obvious that athletic performance suffers when athletes completely “lose it” (the ones who break equipment, start fights, etc.), did you know that even the smaller, more controlled anger disruptions can still negatively impact athletic potential and success?  Controlling emotions is a big part of mental toughness development, and can be the difference between success and failure if not dealt with in a healthy way.  Sport psychologists know this, and so should you.

So just how does uncontrolled anger directly impact athletic performance?  The answer is in two, inter-related ways:

• Cognitively – When an athlete becomes angry about the last missed or bad play, focus is usually the first thing to go.  In other words, rather than doing what he should be doing (focusing on the next play), he will likely instead continue to dwell on the previous bad play.  Naturally, this only compounds the problem, as it becomes that much more likely that with poor focus will come more bad plays – and more uncontrolled anger!
• Behaviorally – When we become upset and angry, our bodies respond in a number of physiological ways (i.e. increased heart rate, more rapid breathing, and constricted muscles).   When these body changes occur, the athlete is usually left to deal with a higher arousal level that will need to be controlled and tempered in order for perfect mind-body synchrony to once again develop.  In sports where precise muscle movements are paramount (like golf, pitching a baseball, or shooting free throws), the increased tension athletes feel when over-aroused can dramatically throw off the synchrony needed between the message the brain sends to the body and the ways in which the body carries out the brain’s instructions.

Many athletes deal with anger, frustration, and poor coping when it comes to sport stress (Mind of Steel).  Unfortunately, most athletes (and coaches) do not properly identify and accurately frame the problem, and end up doing what they think will help – simply practicing more. Of course, extra practice will never hurt an athlete, but it is an example of working harder rather than smarter if we are talking about controlling emotions, improving mind-body synchrony, and developing better mental toughness.

To further illustrate this point lets use the following example — if an athlete struggles in games with frustration on the basketball court, prompting her to simply “practice more” in typical practice-situations will likely not solve the problem (the most obvious reason is because it’s not a real-game situation).  Instead, the athlete will benefit far more by learning simple coping skills that can help during games, like learning how to moderate breathing, using imagery, or having a cue word to revert to when times are tough.  Learning how to respond to failure and frustration is the key, and can only be fully developed by learning skills designed to help combat negative emotions experienced in games.

Negative emotions, especially anger, can rob an athlete from reaching his or her full athletic potential.  Learning how to channel negative emotions into competitive, healthy emotions is key – and the good news is every athlete can improve in this area!

www.drstankovich.com

Check out MIND OF STEEL, the premier audio collection designed to help athletes reach their FULL athletic potential!

Kentucky head basketball coach John Calipari is in the news for chewing out one of his freshmen players (all of it caught on video, of course), later following up the incident with apologies posted on both Facebook and Twitter.  This incident in and of itself may not be that big of a deal, but it did prompt me to dig into the sport psychology and sport philosophy literature and think about the histrionics and anger some coaches display, and whether it is all needed in order for players to compete harder (Sport Success 360)?

It is fully understood that sports are an emotional experience, but does that make it excusable for coaches to swear, embarrass, humiliate, and berate their players, opponents, and referees?  Does mental toughness really improve by being yelled at by a coach?  In my opinion, no.  There are other life experiences that are also very emotional (like parenting, counseling, and teaching), and I would again say that control can be exercised so that positive results occur.  Unfortunately, it has become “normal” to expect coaches to yell and scream, making it difficult to examine the magnitude and effectiveness of this type of approach.

As a counselor, there have been plenty of times where I have sat with a client and wanted to yell and scream out of frustration because the client did not comply with our agreed upon strategies.  Similarly, when I teach college classes and see the class perform below average, yelling my head off at them would probably feel good in the moment, but I know it’s not the right thing to do.  My point is that all people get frustrated, but the real skill is to take that frustration and find unique, creative ways to transform it into “teachable moments.”  Like the old saying goes, you will attract more bees with honey than you will vinegar!

www.drstankovich.com