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!

A common question I receive from youth sports parents is why some kids who display above-average athletic skills seem to struggle with focus and motivation.  Of course, there are many reasons why this may occur, but one reason that is usually overlooked is the interest level the kid has in playing sports.  In other words, some kids are good at sports, but simply don’t love playing them!

Admittedly, it’s difficult to accept that a talented young athlete might have little (if any) interest in playing a particular sport, but this actually happens more than you might believe.  Kids who are especially good at a sport, yet are indifferent about playing that sport, seem to present the most frustration for parents.  The faulty assumption some parents make, unfortunately, is that if the kid is good at playing sports, he must also love playing sports.

There are a number of reasons why an otherwise athletically talented kid might not like playing sports, including the following:

• For some, it simply doesn’t interest them – there’s nothing more to read into it than this.
• Some kids like playing games, but do not enjoy the commitment to practices, extra training, travel, and all the other responsibilities that often come with being an athlete – in fact, the child may even be experiencing sports burnout.
• Some kids feel as though the time commitment with sports take away time they might have devoted to other things, like academics, other activities, and social endeavors.
• Some kids don’t “connect” with their sports friends, and would rather spend their time with their friends who might not be involved in sports.
• Some kids do not enjoy all the intensity around sports these days – in other words, they like playing the sport, but don’t like how it feels like a job to them because of all the outside expectations by others.

Kids who don’t enjoy playing sports (even if they are good at them) are not good or bad, right or wrong.  Just like how we as adults like to do some things and don’t like others, kids are the same — and in some cases kids show a natural talent toward something, yet have little interest in the activity.

Of course, a little parental coaxing to get a kid to have more fun playing a sport isn’t a bad thing, but be careful to not push too hard, or to continue signing your kid up for sports if it’s clear he doesn’t want to play.  While it might not be the easiest thing to do, it’s almost always a better move to work with your child on future decisions rather than continue pushing him because he has an above-average athletic talent.

Sport Success 360 is a great tool to use when helping provide your child with the best sports experience possible – pick up your copy today!

www.drstankovich.com

Millions of kids each year compete in youth and interscholastic sports, and there are many different reasons why they elect to devote their time and energy to playing on a sports team (Sport Success 360).  For some, they play sports to be with their friends, while others enjoy the identity that comes with wearing a sports uniform and being part of a team.  The main reason kids play sports, however, is actually a pretty simple one – to have FUN!

Every research study I have ever read has clearly shown that the number one reason kids play sports is to have fun, and, as you might have guessed, the number one reason why kids voluntarily quit playing sports is when they no longer have fun.  Interestingly, while many adults might guess that “winning” is a big reason why kids play sports, in most cases it doesn’t even make the top ten lists of the polls surveyed.

As adults, we sometimes forget this most basic lesson about why kids play sports, and the result of our oversight can lead to a less-than-exciting experience for kids.  When adults make youth sports a very serious experience and at the cost of having fun, kids often lose their motivation for playing – and usually quit a lot sooner as a result.  Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to think about the many ways in which you as a parent or coach can make youth sports a fun (and meaningful) experience for kids:

• Bring your “A-Game” when it comes to attitude and emotion!  When you get excited about sports, kids will, too.
• Make sure to keep sports interesting and find ways to offer your positive reinforcement and hearty praise whenever possible — even if it’s just for effort.
• Balance instruction with fun, especially with the younger kids you coach.
• Laugh and have a sense of humor.
• Ask the team what things you can do that would make the sport experience exciting for them – you may not be able to do everything they suggest, but if there’s an idea or two you can make it happen it can really make a difference!
• Do fun team bonding things outside of sports if you can – like taking the team to a college or professional sports game, or establishing team dinners.
• Create a team identity the kids can be proud of, maybe a team nickname or a slogan that matches your team’s character.

Obviously there are many different things that you can do to make sports a fun experience for kids, so be sure and do your part and capitalize on the number one reason they play – TO HAVE FUN!!

The Parents Playbook is a great resource for helping kids maximize the sport experience – pick up your copy today!

www.drstankovich.com

Parents always want the best for their kids involved in sports, especially when it comes to playing time and the ways their child is used within the team structure.  So it goes without saying that there will always be some degree of dispute between what parents think the coach should do, and what the coach decides to do based on his or her coaching evaluations.  In most cases, upset parents keep their opinions to themselves – but sadly, this is not always the case, as evidenced by a breaking story about a high school basketball team in Michigan.

Regarding this latest story where head coach Wayne Gigante stepped down from his high school coaching position, it’s impossible for us to know all the reasons that led to his decision.  Maybe the parents were out of line, maybe his coaching style had inherent problems, or maybe it was simply a bad combination of both.  Regardless, there has been a disturbing trend in American youth sports for many years now, one that illustrates the powerful influence some angry parents can have on a team — even to the extent of pushing coaches out.

Assuming Gigante didn’t do anything out of line and was simply trying to use his coaching judgements to get the most out of his players, it’s sad to see him leave because of parental interference.  Gigante seemingly reached his “tipping point,” where the enjoyment he got out of coaching kids eventually became outweighed by some parents who lost sight of the effort, dedication, and complexities involved in being a coach.  As we all know, it’s a lot easier to “coach from the sidelines” than it is to actually be the one on the front line having to make the tough decisions.

Each year we see fewer adults want to go into coaching, as evidenced by the rapidly shrinking number of teachers who want to coach.  In just the last 20 years alone, we have seen a dramatic spike in the number of non-teacher coaches (over 70% of high school coaches today), prompted by the fact that schools in America simply cannot find teachers in the building who find the job of coaching worthwhile when considering all that comes with it.  Sadly, if more stories like the Michigan basketball story emerge in the future, there may be even fewer people (teacher-coaches and non-teacher coaches alike) interested in coaching.  This is a terrible concern for Athletic Directors nationwide, trust me.  With fewer adults interested in coaching, more schools will be forced to consider the unthinkable – the possibility of cutting the athletic team altogether.

Unfortunately, too many parents today are unaware of this changing landscape and the reasons why fewer adults are going into coaching.  Instead, there seems to be a modern-day template for some parents that presumes some kind of “ownership” over the team and the decisions that the coach makes.  The pressure from parents can be overt in nature (i.e. yelling obscenities from the stands), or covert (i.e. creating some behind-the-scenes backlash against the coach).  In either case, it creates a toxic coaching environment.

It’s unfortunate when good coaches are pushed out because of uninformed and/or irresponsible parents, but it’s also becoming more of the norm.  Interscholastic coaches don’t make much money coaching — they go into coaching for the love of the job.  Sadly, when the “fun” element gets removed (like in Michigan high school story), many good people decide to walk away as a result.  Why would a coach making very little money and devoting enormous amounts of time and energy into coaching continue to stay around when the parents involved are doing everything to make his life miserable? Perhaps it’s for this reason that we all need to take a step back and appreciate all that goes into coaching, rather than try and run coaches out of town who don’t coach the way we would like them to with our kid.

www.drstankovich.com

Staying in the Game: Combating Athlete Burnout – pick up your copy at Championship Productions today!

ESPN premiered “The Marinovich Project” last week, offering up close and personal views of the way Todd Marinovich was raised to play football under his father Marv’s relentless training.  This story was especially interesting to me, as I am about the same age as Todd, and even back in the 1980′s (before the internet!) I remember hearing about this “bionic QB” being built out in California by his dad.  Unlike today, where high school athletes are regularly talked about on ESPN and other national sport outlets, for us to even hear — much less watch video — of a high school quarterback from the west coast was simply unheard of.  I remember seeing Marinovich on television and hearing about all the hype surrounding how he was literally “built” to play football – and how his dad controlled his every meal and put him through unbelievable training workouts.

Since first hearing about Marinovich in high school, I continued to watch from afar as he went on to play college and professional football, and I went on to graduate school to study human thinking and behavior.  While I never obsessed on Marinovich, he was always in the back of my mind, especially later in my professional counseling career when meeting with parents at my office that seemed to be obsessed with their kid’s athletic development. After watching Marinovich burn out from football, his story (sadly) served as an example I used with parents who were clearly going too hard with their kid.

What one famous behaviorist once said…

Interestingly, I remember in graduate school learning about the famous behaviorist John Watson, and specifically learning about his claims that if he could control all the surroundings of a kid from birth onto adulthood, that he could essentially develop the kid into anything he wanted (i.e. a doctor, artist, accountant, etc.).  His argument was that environment, not genetics, play a much bigger role when it comes to human development.  In the Marinovich example, one could easily say Watson’s theory may have held up – at least for a short while.  While Marv did seemingly develop his kid into an elite-level QB, the price they both paid for the efforts seems to have been a hefty one indeed (ESPN revealed their personal struggles in the program – Todd with drugs, and Marv with failed marriages).

Some of my other observations from the Marinovich program included:

• This was a perfect example of erroneous human thinking – we often believe if somebody is “good” at something, they must also love doing it.  Todd admitted he liked playing football, but to objectively parse out that he “loved” playing was rather difficult, especially with his militant-style father never giving him a chance to experience life without football.
• The pursuit of playing in the NFL seemed to serve as a utopia for the Marinovich’s, leaving Todd in no-mans land once he finally made it to the league.  What do you do for the rest of your life once you have played in the NFL at the age of 21??  Todd struggled with this, and admitted on the program he really didn’t know what to do “next” as this was his end-all, be-all lifelong pursuit.
• Marv Marinovich appeared to be a very loving and caring father, but also a troubled one.  He clearly obsessed with Todd’s development, even to the point of losing jobs and marriages.  Supporting your child is one thing, but living your entire life through your child is another.
• It was really no surprise for me to learn about the drug usage Todd admitted to while playing football.  Of course, it’s never advised to recklessly use street drugs, but in the case of Todd Marinovich it’s easy to see why he would turn to drugs (or anything for that matter) that would provide a respite from all the pressure and expectations placed upon him.  Again, this doesn’t excuse or endorse the behavior, but instead hopes to explain it.
• I found Todd to be a very interesting, thoughtful, and caring guy.  Most of us simply saw him as some kind of super-human machine when we first heard of him in the 1980′s, but after all that he has been through he came off in the program as a level-headed and cerebral guy.  No bitterness, no animosity, and no hatred toward his dad (or anyone else).  If anything, he appeared more confused by all that has happened the last 25+ years of his life – almost as if he had been on the sidelines watching his life play out based on a story written by his dad.

I’m sure there are other parents out there today similar to Marv Marinovich, obsessed with their child’s athletic development to the point where all other life pursuits are thwarted.  This is unfortunate for a number of reasons, the least being the fact that even with 24/7 training the pursuit of one day becoming a professional is still an unbelievable long-shot for most kids (even if John Watson would think differently if he were alive today!).  Not only are the odds against “making it” (even Todd Marinovich admitted to his God-given talents being just as, if not more important as his training was), but leading an imbalanced life as Todd did often sets people up to be unprepared in many other important ways.  Even in the best-case scenario when an athlete does “make it,” the average professional sports career is only 3-4 years, making holistic life skill development that much more important than exclusive sport training.

Every sports family should watch the Todd Marinovich story and talk openly as a family about the tradeoffs that often come part and parcel with 100% devoting to sport development.  At the end of the day, we should, at minimum, learn a few basic things from this story:

- While it sounds great in theory, John Watson’s original idea of creating a persona (i.e. a football quarterback) is really more of a talking point for balancing nature vs. nurture when it comes to personality development. To try an control a young persons surroundings like Marv Marinovich did is not only unhealthy, but potentially dangerous.

- When people feel overwhelmed, pressured, and don’t see a way out of their circumstances, it is very common for them to turn to drugs, alcohol, or a number of other reckless and dangerous behaviors.  The short answer for this is that they provide a temporary “break,” or respite, so that the individual doesn’t have to continue to stress out over his or her circumstances.

- Perhaps the biggest oversight by Marv Marinovich was that while he taught his son how to succeed on the field, he apparently stopped short of teaching Todd how to use his athletic skills off the field.  When an athlete compartmentalizes all his learning through sport into only being useful in sports, he has missed an incredibly invaluable learning opportunity.  Ironically, Todd Marinovich learned countless athletic transferable skills (i.e. discipline, teamwork, goal setting, etc.), yet was never taught how to parlay those skills into everyday life experiences (like learning how to successfully deal with stress).

Check out our entire line of sport and life skill products at the AHPS website!

www.drstankovich.com

Being a youth or interscholastic coach can be an awesome experience filled with countless exciting life experiences, including building healthy relationship with kids, pursuing team championships, and coming together as a team when faced with stress, adversity, and dealing with losses (Sport Success 360).  Unfortunately, for some coaches, the experience quickly becomes overwhelming as they become an unfortunate victim to things like their own perfectionism and control, inability to work with kids, and unwillingness to build relationships with parents.

Coaching, like most things in life, is really what you make of it. Successful coaches have realistic personal expectations and team goals, and make sure to prioritize their own health and family before their role as a coach. Of course, there’s more to it than just those simple reminders, including a few more ideas to consider below:

• Make downtime a priority. Today, even youth and interscholastic coaches are at-risk for burnout as it is becoming commonplace to see these coaches put in unbelievable amounts of time into their coaching.  Similar to college and pro coaches, amateur coaches sometimes go too hard for too long, resulting in a host of physical, emotional, and social problems.  Consequently, it is vitally important to keep a schedule that allows you to take breaks and get away when needed.  Sure, this may not be easy to do, but if you don’t do it not only will coaching soon become a lot less fun, but your team will also likely suffer as a result.
• Keep up with training. There are so many changes in youth sports today and many leading sport psychologists, sport educators, and sports medicine personnel have developed important educational training to help meet these needs.  While some leagues and states require specific training, it is important to consider going above the minimum in order to stay abreast of emerging trends – like sports burnout.  Unfortunately, some coaches only do the minimum when it comes to training, and view anything above that as “punitive” rather than educational.
• Teach kids about athletic transferable skills. I talk about these skills a lot, and that’s because they are the essence of the youth sport experience!  Be sure the kids you coach do not minimize the value of the skills they learn in sports, nor falsely assume that all kids have learned the same skills.  Be sure to talk regularly about how things like mental toughness, confidence, discipline, and resiliency are not only skills for sport success, but also life success.
• Involve parents. Quite often the #1 complaint I hear from coaches is “parents.”  The main reason coaches feel this way has to do with how parents feel their child should be used compared to how the coach is actually using the child.  The disconnect seems to exist on every youth and interscholastic sports team to some extent, making it an issue coaches need to be proactive with when deciding upon their personal philosophy.  Successful coaches often have pre-season meetings to kick off the start of the season, and talk about their coaching philosophy and how parents can be a positive and active part of the team.  Some coaches even set up ways for parents to ask constructive questions about their child and how he/she can improve, and possibly even earn more playing time in the future.  Regardless of how you develop your philosophy, one thing is certain — when parents feel disconnected and under-appreciated, they often let their feelings be known, which can in turn make for a very long season.
• Emphasize the positives!!!! High fives, emphatic praise, and a general positive attitude can go a long, long way when it comes to sports.  Choose your daily attitude and be sure to “catch” kids doing things right, especially when they give great effort (even if the results aren’t always great).

For more information about youth and interscholastic coaching success, check out Sport Success 360 or visit Advanced Human Performance Systems today!

www.drstankovich.com