Coaching

In the course of my life, I've tried out various things to see if they suited me, the way a shopper tries on an article of clothing to see if it fits.  Some of these activities have turned out to be avocations, or even vocations.  Coaching youth sports teams turned out to be neither, but I did it for a while anyway.

When my kids were younger, they were not the type who eagerly sought out the opportunity to play competitive sports.  But they played anyway because we parents signed them up for it; my wife and I had a vague parental notion that playing competitive sports is good life preparation for children.

And in fact, once their parents buy them the uniforms and equipment and they take the field, most kids do seem to enjoy competitive sports at least mildly, and some of them take to it like a fish to water.

In this local suburban area, the first competitive team sport for many boys, and not a few girls, is soccer.  Our local park district's house soccer leagues start as young as kindergarten (three on three, playing on a quarter of the field, no goaltenders) and run through middle school.  Kids with talent, or parents who wish their kids had talent, can take it to an entirely different level of time commitment and cost by having their kids join travel teams; these latter families' weekends are fully consumed with the logistics of getting to the tournaments, hanging out and watching the games, the post-tournament activities, and then getting back home again.

None of my kids were exceptional or even above-average athletes as children; we are a house league family.  The same was true for me in my own childhood playing youth hockey in the 1960s and 70s.   By the time high school rolled around, I had dropped competitive sports.  I don't believe that, outside of gym class, my wife played competitive sports at any level as a kid.

Around here there are many kids who want to play house league soccer (or whose parents want them to play it).  It's fair to say that this is an integral part of suburban culture, and it's very common to see children in their soccer jerseys on weekends, not only on the pitch but also trailing their moms or dads around the grocery store or hardware store.  Some of the house league players are very good, and probably should be on a travel team but for various reasons aren't; most are somewhere in the middle; a few are well behind the average. 

Our house leagues, like many house leagues around the country, rely on parent volunteers to coach.  (The coaching positions on the travel teams are paid, professional positions, and some of the travel clubs are for-profit organizations - these are things which I find troubling, but that's beyond the scope of this post.)  But most parents lack the time, ability or inclination to be a volunteer coach, so the house leagues are chronically short of coaches.  So the very first time I signed up one of my children to join a house soccer league, the park district official who walked me through the registration process offered me the opportunity, or perhaps I should say begged me, to become a coach.

It's not that I was unwilling.  I am somewhat of a joiner.  When people ask me to help out, I'm not one who always finds a reason to say no.  It's just that, as a person who grew up in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, I didn't know diddly about soccer.  On my elementary school playground during lunchtime, we played a version of soccer, but inevitably someone would get frustrated with the whole passing-and-kicking-the-ball requirement, so he would pick up the ball and run with it, and then someone else would tackle him (on the blacktop surface, mind you), and the game would devolve into something resembling rugby.  We didn't understand soccer, but American football was in our genes.  Nowadays, tackling someone during recess would earn one a trip to the principal's office, but that was a different time.

But the park district guy pleaded with me so piteously that I agreed to be an assistant coach, despite (a) not knowing anything about soccer or the rules and (b) not knowing anything about coaching.  No problem, he suavely assured me, you'll pick it up.  Thus began my coaching career, which ran for 5 or 6 years, first as an assistant coach and then a head coach, and covered parts of the athletic careers of my three youngest children.

I suspect my initiation into coaching as a perfect coaching idiot was not unusual, so I've related this rather minor chapter of my personal history as prelude to this New York Times article by Jennifer Etnier, a distinguished professor of kinesiology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  The article's headline perfectly encapsulates its major thesis: "Your Kids' Coach Is Probably Doing It Wrong".  Speaking for myself: I made many mistakes, mostly because I entered the role in a state of ignorance; many of the players on my first team knew more about the sport and its skills than I did - and they were seven year olds.

But the park district official wasn't completely wrong: over time, even unprepared rookie coaches learn, or should learn, some do's and don'ts.  But some coaches have bad habits and - I don't think there is a kinder way to put this - character flaws which surely detract from the kids' enjoyment and quite possibly harm their athletic development.  What Etnier describes are similar to some things I observed during my coaching stints:

These inexperienced coaches often focus on winning rather than learning and development. I have seen my sons’ coach make the players run wind sprints after losing their second game during a three-game weekend tournament and walk off without a single word of encouragement after a loss. I have watched coaches scream at their team of 10-year-olds that they weren’t aggressive enough. I’ve observed instructors give the most talented kids the most attention and playing time.
I’ve also witnessed coaches set aside the team’s attendance rules to allow stronger athletes who have missed practices to compete. And some coaches encourage one-sided competitions — I saw one continue to run a full-court press during a basketball game even when their team was winning by 20 points.

I saw a fair amount of this sort of thing.  Probably the abuse I observed the most was coaches favoring their own kids over the other kids on the team: giving them more instruction, paying more attention to them, playing them more minutes, even to the point of neglecting the other players.  I'm pretty sure that at least some of these volunteer parents got into coaching strictly in order to help their own kids develop into better players.  Typically, these parent-coaches had played competitively themselves as children, and had a fervent desire that their progeny should follow the same path - perhaps even reaching higher vistas of athletic accomplishment than they themselves had achieved. 

I wasn't hamstrung by that history and those expectations; my own youthful athletic exploits were exceedingly modest, and I simply wanted the kids whom I coached to learn and have fun.

Also, I was not one of those win-at-all-costs youth coaches who plays his stars the whole game while the less-talented players languish at the end of the bench.   After some time as a head coach, I got fairly good at rotating all my players in and out of games, and I tried to make sure that everyone played roughly an equal amount of time.

But there were other points which took me a few seasons to get the hang of.  When I started as a volunteer assistant, the head coach was one of those guys who exhorted and barked out instructions to his players on the field ("Get back on defense!"  "Pass to Maddie, she's wide open!" "Keep your back foot planted when you throw in!"  "You're on the wrong side of the field!").  Dopey neophyte that I was, I concluded that this was the essence of coaching, and so I followed suit and shouted frantic instructions to the players throughout the game.  I kept this up for a season or two, until one day a head coach turned to me in exasperation in the middle of a game and told me that the players couldn't hear him yelling at them when I was also yelling at them.  So I stopped yelling. And at some point I concluded that yelling at the players was counterproductive.  After that, the only things I ever called out to players on the field during games were occasional words of encouragement, and congratulations when they scored a goal or made a nice play.  The time to give them instruction was in practice, and I said plenty to them then.  When I became a head coach myself, parents remarked that they had never seen a coach with such a quiet demeanor on the sidelines.  I wasn't quite Tom Landry, but generally I let the kids play the game.

I never was a great coach, or, arguably, even a very good coach.  When I had kids on my team who were good soccer players, we won a lot of games.  When I had kids who weren't very good, we lost most of our games.  As my kids got older, they and their teammates needed more advanced skills training, and I didn't know enough about the sport to provide it, so I hung up the whistle.

Etnier points to the damage that bad coaches can inflict:

More than 45 million children are engaged in youth sports, but an estimated 70 percent will drop out by the time they are 13 years old. Not 5 percent, not 15 percent, but 70 percent ...

In a 2018 article from The Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, Peter A. Witt and Tek B. Dangi reviewed evidence from a 1993 survey of 10,000 U.S. kids and from more recent studies of competitive swimmers and reported that a lack of fun, negative coach behaviors and an overemphasis on winning were among the top reasons children drop out of sports.
The effects on children are worrisome: Coaches, the adults directly responsible for the athletes’ experiences, are taking the fun out of the game. My own children have asked their coach to let them shoot layups on three basketball hoops instead of one, only to have the instructor say that he has to watch each child shoot each shot. Some coaches treat their practices like military drills — demanding that the athletes pay strict attention and work hard for every minute of every practice. They discourage joking around and expect kids to behave like adults. A 2014 review published in The International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching summarized studies showing that children who drop out of sports often report that their coaches are controlling and autocratic.

Dr. Etnier calls for training and coaching standards, which seem worthwhile - except that adopting these requirements surely would make the shortage of volunteer coaches even more acute. 

I continue to believe that, with the right leadership, competitive sports can teach children valuable life skills.  Etnier points out that "youth sport should be about having fun while learning to work hard for a common goal, to prioritize developing skills over winning, to persist in the face of adversity, to be a good sport and to be competitive." She mourns that not nearly enough coaches embrace this approach.  I think she's right.