The Transition From Player To Coach

Today's blog was written by Sarah Voigt.  Sarah is a senior English major at Notre Dame and a student in the Social Foundations of Coaching course taught by Play Like a Champion founder Professor Clark Power and Kristin Sheehan.  Sarah is also the goalie on the Notre Dame Women's Soccer Team.  

After 18 long, amazingly rewarding years as a soccer player, it finally became time for me to hang up my boots. It was not a decision to divorce myself from the sport that has shaped me as a person and provided me with the opportunity to play in one of the best D-1 programs in the nation, but rather, to change my role in it. When I was a little girl, I had the dream of playing college soccer, and through the my own hard work and the careful guidance of many different coaches, I was able to make that dream a reality. I’m done with my competitive playing career (even though I don’t think I will be able to resist the allure of pick-up games or summer leagues.) However, I cannot see myself not being involved with the sport, so the decision to begin coaching was an obvious one.

This decision is far from unique. I think it’s quite common for athletes, especially athletes who feel that the sport they played shaped who they are today, to want to give back to that community that fostered their growth and allowed their success. That was my motivation, and I am currently about two weeks into coaching my first youth team, U(nder)13 girls. Our season has yet to start, but I feel that I have learned so much already. I felt pretty prepared, having had 6-7 different coaches over the course of my playing career that brought different styles and emphases to the game. But going from playing for a coach to inspiring players to want to play for you was a huge gap. It is taking a lot of evaluation and re-evaluation. I’ve had drills that work for my girls, and I have also designed drills that fall flat and not work at all. I’m learning that patience is key.

The most applicable coaching advice I have received is this: when things get frustrating, just step back and remember with whom you are working. Losing sight of the fact that we are working with kids is something that I have seen coaches do often in my playing experience. For me, it’s a lot more difficult to get upset with athletes for not understanding or being able to execute something the way I want them to when I remember the long game of coaching. The short game, so to speak, is winning the next game, tournament, or even State Cup at the end of the season (which we obviously plan to do). But the long game is to develop good people. To my memory, my best coaches were equally (if not more) invested in my personal development and my skill development. I’m only about two weeks into this coaching thing, and already asking and answering this question each time I do anything with my girls: How is this making them into good people?

Youth Sports: Work vs. Play and the Impact of Club Sports

Today's blog was written by Allison Griffith, a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame.  Allison is an English and Pre-professional studies major and a student in the Social Foundations of Coaching course taught by Play Like a Champion Founder Professor Clark Power and Kristin Sheehan.  Allison is also the manager on the Notre Dame Women's Basketball Team.  

Johnny is an eleven-year-old boy who has grown up playing basketball, soccer, and football for his grade school. Johnny’s sport experience thus far equates to playing with his classmates, who are now some of his best buds. He has always been talented at all three sports and enjoys playing them all, but he has recently grown to be a definite stand out on the soccer field. Together with his teammates, Johnny has even led the Perry Panthers to a few championships.

Seeing that Johnny could be a special player, Johnny’s parents learn of Elite, a club soccer program an hour from their home, which works with the most talented soccer players in the area and exposes them to other competitive clubs across the state at weekend tournaments. Johnny makes the team, and thus begins Johnny’s transition from “school athlete” to “club athlete.” Elite holds two practices a week, in addition to speed and agility training on Fridays and foot skills on Mondays. Weekends are spent at tournaments across the state filled with back-to-back games, usually 4-6 per weekend. The huge time commitment forces Johnny to quit football and basketball, his other two sports.

Johnny’s situation is all too familiar in the world of youth sports, and demonstrates the conflict of work versus play, and how this is both amplified and complicated by the popular trend of quitting school-sponsored sports and joining AAU or Club teams. At increasingly younger ages, kids are being convinced to move from playing for their school teams to playing for elite clubs that consist of rigorous, demanding schedules for both the athlete and his or her family.

What are the implications of this transition? What will happen to Johnny as he leaves his school teams to compete for Elite? It is a common situation that young athletes, particularly at the 4^th or 5^th grade level, are forced to choose between multiple sports due to the demanding schedules of one club team. Johnny was forced to quit playing football and basketball, sports that he also loved. He plays soccer 6 days of the week, sometimes all 7, and his parents spend the majority of their evenings (and practically all of their weekends) shuttling him to practices, conditioning, and games. How does this end?

Well for a few of the young club athletes, and some would even argue many, they will end up becoming solid high school athletes and maybe even be offered college scholarships. Even at the youth level, there are exposure tournaments that college scouts attend. I would argue that an athlete is definitely able to have a great high school career or even receive a scholarship without having played a club sport, but there is definitely something to be said for the higher level of competition and level of play of youth club sports that may increase the chances.

However, realistically, most of these young club athletes will not even go on to have great high-school careers. In fact, many, having had five or more years of playing a club sport, begin to grow sick of it and even end up hating the sport. Many quit playing the sport entirely before they even begin their freshman year.

The point I am trying to make, however, is not that club sports should be eliminated entirely. Done correctly, as I believe my experience was, you could maintain a healthy relationship with a sport on a club team. And it is true that an athlete can be just as apt to quit a sport having only played on school-sponsored teams. Instead, I am interested in answering, what is the point of youth sports at the grade school/middle school level? What is the meaning of sports at this age?

I believe a large part of this answer comes in discussing the difference between work and play.

Kids need to play. Besides psychological/developmental benefits, some of the best childhood memories are formed around play. Play, as Giamatti describes it, is “leisure, that is so important…because it is a form of freedom and is about making free choices” (22).  It is a space that kids can create to assert their agency, not because they are told, but because they want to. In contrast, Giamatti describes work as such: “Work is partner to duty, and brother to obligation. Work is the burden we assume, not the one we choose” (19). For kids who eventually quit his or her sport after years of rigorous club seasons, did the sport become a “burden” he or she “assumed”?

At the youth level, I would argue that many AAU and club teams promote the idea of sports as work. Think how scheduled Johnny’s life has become: he wakes up, goes to school, goes to practice, sleeps. And repeat. Add in games, conditioning, early morning foot skills, and he barely has time for anything else. Physically, Johnny often feels burnt out, and the amount he is playing puts him at a larger risk for injury. His coach seems to be more focused on results then fostering life lessons and camaraderie. He begins to miss his school buddies and winning school championships.

On the flip side, though there are exceptions to every case, I think that school-sponsored teams do a better job at keeping the importance of play in youth sports. There is something special about being able to wear your school jersey. There is something special about playing in your own school gym, changing in your own school locker-room, seeing friends and classmates at your games. With coaching, I have found that in my own experience, my youth coaches tended to integrate our practices with fun drills and positive life lessons. While winning is important, it was more about creating memories with your best friends. School-sponsored teams at the youth level ideally keep the player’s relationship with the sport a healthy one by maintaining that you are a student-athlete, and school priorities come first. Thus, the sport becomes an outlet for physical escape and a privilege, not a duty or an obligation. 

And here is where I would like to thank my parents for encouraging me to play for my school all the way through. The memories I have playing in my school gym and goofing off with my teammates and classmates are unmatched. Although I did play AAU basketball and club soccer here and there, it was kept at a healthy amount that never once made me dislike my sport. I think this is a very large part of why I played 3 Varsity sports all 4 years of high school, whereas I found most of my club friends quitting early in their high-school years.

Why should parents want their children to play sports? Hopefully it is with the intention of allowing them to do something they love, to learn lessons of discipline and hard work, to foster strategies to overcome adversity, to create lifelong memories with friends, and then to ideally win a few games while they’re at it.

Parents of kids- take notice and make sure you are not over-scheduling your children. Make sure their relationship with sports, at the youth level, is a healthy one. One that promotes play, not work. Coaches of kids- winning is fun, but having fun is also fun. Mold your mindset around the idea that these kids are kids, and they are playing. While talent and X’s and O’s are important, it is not and should not be the emphasis at this level.  

I still remember the motto of my school’s soccer team growing up which we cheered before every game and wore on the back of our warm ups:

“Play hard. Have fun. Win.”

In that order.

Causes for Concern

Today's blog was guest-written by Pete Piscitello.  Pete is the Executive Director of the CYO of Johnson and Wyandotte Counties in Kansas.  They CYO-JWA is doing a new series on trouble spots in youth sports, and we hope you will find his comments interesting.  

Dear Sport Community,

As parents, we all have decisions to make when it comes to what activities our children are involved in. For the majority of Americans this includes a form of sport. The common belief is that youth sports are great for keeping kids active, encouraging social interaction and developing character. It's an easy sell since children love games and they love to run around, making youth sports an easy hit. There's also a sport for every season. Mom and Dad can keep the kids busy year round and enjoy watching their son or daughter play on the weekends. For decades it seems the cycle repeated itself: sign-up for local league, drop the kids off at practice once or twice each week, game on Saturday, rinse and repeat. The kids would reach high school and if they had the talent, continue to play. It was easy to discern we were doing right by our kids because there was not much harm in sports.

If this sounds like a story from the good old days, you should know the good old days weren't that long ago. That was my own experience in youth sports and I graduated high school in 2003.  The times have changed.

A brief history of youth sports in our country may help to provide some context when considering current issues. For  the first half of the twentieth century, youth sport was a realm dominated by lower class families and immigrants in large American cities. City tournaments were about as high profile as competition got outside of schools. Scholastic sports also gained popularity with elementary, middle and high school sports spreading. The YMCA began to offer organized programs, but suffered during the Great Depression. 

It was not until after World War II that middle and upper class families got more involved and things became competitive outside the schools. Perhaps the best known national competition, the Little League World Series was first held in 1947 (though ESPN was not around to provide national coverage). Other sports soon followed. By the 1960’s families engaged in “pay to play”, which marks the beginning of the modern era of youth sports. This mirrors the path of our own CYO, which began in earnest in 1946 under the guidance of Tom Dorney as the first full-time director of CYO. It's interesting that our local CYO was going against the grain at that time by focusing on sports that based in the schools. Many elementary school leagues closed down when confronted by “pay to play” competition and fears over the safety of sports. Regardless, by the early 1970’s our program took off and it began to resemble what you see today.

For much of the period we’re calling the modern era, youth sports were played pretty much as described above. Families began to see more and more options for their children (particularly for girls) but participation levels continued to rise and kids switched sports by the season. Leagues were usually confined to a single season, games were played within the community, and practices were limited during the week so that kids could focus on schoolwork.

As far back as the 1960’s there was a subset of the population who began to see sports as an avenue to gain admission and receive scholarships to college. That idea became more prominent during the 70’s and 80’s, but seemed to reach a different level in the 1990’s. That bred more competition among parents and children to find the best instruction or the best team to showcase talent for recruiters. Not coincidentally, it’s also during the last decade of the 20th century that the proliferation of what we now call “club” or “travel” sports began to take-off. According to The Atlantic article referenced earlier, “in 1995 the Amateur Athletic Union sponsored about 100 national championships for youth athletes; about a decade later that number had grown to over 250.” The AAU, as it is commonly known, may be the most popular long-standing example of this new frontier, but it wasn’t alone. After the explosion of youth soccer in America during the 1980’s, the club soccer model used for years in Europe and South America became more popular stateside. "Premier” teams became a common goal for ambitious youngsters. With all the elite athletes in a community on one team, those teams now had to travel to find competition. This spurred a dramatic growth in the business of weekend tournaments as a sort of local tourism industry. It seems the 1990’s brought to the forefront what we had known since the 60’s: people will pay a great deal to take part in sports. In our efforts to “get ahead”, adults had created a world where sports were no longer just a kids game. These games were big business and everyone wanted a piece.

All this brings us to our youth sports culture today. In the past decade, community based “recreation” leagues have taken a backseat to expensive club programs. School based sports are a thing of the past in many communities. For example, a standout soccer player between the ages of 15-18 is likely to never play for his or her high school team. A basketball player may play high school ball, but in most places they consider that inferior to their AAU program. That’s where the college coaches recruit anyway. But it does not just start in high school, because these things trickle down. Now the competition is fierce just to get on the high school team or their club counterpart. This has led some parents to start training their kids year-round in a specific sport as young as 3-5 years old. That child can’t tie her shoelaces, but we have already decided for her what activity she’s going to spend 40+ hours each week perfecting for the next decade…

This isn’t to suggest that today’s sports culture is all bad, far from it. For one, there are many more opportunities for participation today than there once was (even if those opportunities have a price tag). There are also some great coaches helping boys and girls grow up and build virtue, just like they always have. Yet the good stuff doesn’t need fixed, it’s the concerns that need addressed. That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks here on the website addressing the causes of concern in youth sports today. More importantly, we're also going to consider how we go about changing things for the better. We’ll discuss the growth of specialization, the excessive pressures placed on young athletes, the “professionalizing” of amateur athletics, rising costs and growing injury concerns. We hope to provide some possible solutions while stimulating discussion in our parishes, schools and homes. Throughout this series, be sure to get on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels to share your own experiences and join the discussion.

We all want our kids to have the best childhood possible and we want them to have fun while participating in sports. The vast majority of parents are trying to do the right thing when they make decisions on youth sports. It’s just that making the right decision today is so hard. It should not be that way. Sports should be fun for the kids involved. It should also be fun for the families who get to watch children take part with a big smile on their faces. We hope you’ll join us over the next several weeks as we dive into the concerns, questions and  solutions to assuring a great environment in youth sports!