Keeping young athletes engaged and focused!

For the last six years I have been volunteering to run the town’s prep league. The Prep league is a developmental league that teaches young people the fundamentals in basketball for each Saturday morning. Often times I get asked after a session, by coaches, and parents “wow, how do you keep their attention and have over 90 young people so engaged?”  I typically just smile and say “thank you” understanding that this is really a rhetorical question.  But as I ended this session on Saturday more and more parents and coaches actually wanted the answer.  

You see, many parents in Braintree donate much of their free time to helping coach in the town leagues like basketball and soccer and are not certified coaches or child development specialists; they are people who want to provide a positive playing experience for their children and the children in this community.  So the question: “How do you keep 90 young people engaged and attentive?” is a real question that deserves a real answer.

I first started coaching youth in 1989 when my mother insisted that I didn’t need to learn how to earn money, I needed to learn how to serve others. So while other kids got summer jobs, my mom pushed me to volunteer wherever I could. She wanted me to understand humility and humanity and only then did she believe could understand what hard work really meant. She was right.

I started out volunteering for the little league in my town and it was my responsibility to teach boys and one girl how to throw a baseball. My first session was terrible.  I mean terrible. Kids running everywhere, balls being flung at each other – CHAOS  - utter chaos. Then I thought I should be the “mean” coach and just punish them every time they were standing around misbehaving…until I realized that some kids were not afraid of me and I spent more time making them sit out as punishment then teaching. I was so frustrated.  Finally, one day as I was pontificating on the mound about how to properly throw a baseball a young boy said, your arm and hand look like a snake. And before I lashed out at him to pay attention, I looked back at my hand in the ready position, and indeed, this young boy was correct, it looked like a snake. So I asked everyone to make his or her hand into a snake with the ball. Then we all named the snake, and when we threw the ball we we make the snake make a hissing sound  and it dawned on me what I was supposed to be teaching them.

The fundamentals I was charged with teaching these young people had NOTHING to do with the sport itself. The fundamentals were curiosity, creativity, connection, and fun. And the sport was just there to help me facilitate that learning.

So let’s get back to the question now that we understand the lens in which I approach coaching.

How do I keep all those young people engaged and attentive?  

1)                Love the spontaneity & creativity of young people. Don’t try to stifle it or force them to conform. Smile and give them space.  

If you ask everyone to stop during a drill and one kid is still running around -- because it is so much fun to do that especially when everyone else has stopped-- give them a second to feel that and then ask them to rejoin the group.  

2)                Be prepared and be flexible. This seems contradictory, eh?   Its not. Coaches should know exactly what activities they will want to do for the day, but they need to understand where their players are. Don’t become so rigid that you are just running drills and not meeting the developmental needs of your athletes. For instance, they may be having a hard time focusing, so spend more time doing the activity then speaking about it; let them feel it.

3)                Be curious and listen. Kids tell us what they need, even if they never say a word. They tell us when they are frustrated by their body language.  And they tell us what excites them, what scares them, when they can take risks and why they may not be able to. We need to listen with our eyes and our ears to what they are telling us by observing and being curious with our questions. Instead of reprimanding athletes for making a bad pass, ask then why they made it and listen. What did they see and how did they interpret that?  And if there is a flaw in their thinking, ask them questions to help them see how they might have done it differently and give them space to practice it without fear of punishment.

4)                NEVER EVER EVER take the actions of young people personally. The very second you get angry at a young person because of his or her actions, you have now moved to a place of clouded judgment, subjectivity and ineffectiveness.  You will no longer be able to see or hear what he or she are saying and be able to help him or her  overcome the challenge that may be contributing to his or her behavior.  I always approach a young person through a lens of love and understanding. If they are being unsafe, you can address the actions that are unsafe, but do so letting them know it is their action, not them you are frustrated with and then provide them space to regulate themselves before you need to take any actions.

5)                Keep activities moving  - and eliminate lines. NO LINES – please please please !  Lines are the MMA rings of youth sports, they are a breeding ground for conflict and ensure that you will have inconsistent engagement with your players. If they are all moving, all the time, they must always be attentive to you. If you move quickly from one activity to the next, they have time to learn it but not time to become bored with it. It more fun to move from one activity that builds upon the last activity, then drill and drill skills.

6)                Stop trying to manage behavior and just learn to guide it.  We spend so much time trying to manage behavior that we end up causing more problems. Remember these young people have only been on the earth for 6, 7, 8, 9, years!!  Some of us have socks older than them; they need to learn and understand how to behave in specific situations  - so teach them. For instance, the other day I noticed that the kids wanted to yell a lot. And it was hard for me to get their attention so I went with that and told them every time the ball is in the air they can yell as loud as they want, but the minute it got into my hands they had to stop. We did that 4 times, until they got it…ball is in my hands, no talking. And we had FUN learning that!

7)                Love teaching! Anyone who tells you coaching is 90% motivation and 10% skill either only knows 10% of the skill or gets most of their coaching techniques from the TV.  Coaching is about teaching first and foremost with a playful and loving lens.  If we want kids to learn sport we have to teach them. Not teach them how to win games…. teach them how to PLAY games. Winning and losing happen and we can’t control it. NONE OF US. And if you think you can, then you should write a book, because even the best coaches lose and I bet they would love to know your secret.

But I digress…  I love teaching, and I spend hours and hours thinking about new ways to teach the same skills. You know why?  Because not everyone learns the same way and its FUN.  

8)                Work on consistency with routines.  Like any of us our anxiety is reduced when we have an idea of what is happening next. If they know the patterns then they know they will get a chance and won’t be cutting the line or stepping out of turn. If they know what is expected they will meet those expectations and you will know why those days they have challenges doing do. In basketball the first thing I teach them is “jump stop”. Now every time I need their attention I ask them to jump stop, it’s a fun way to reinforce a skill and get their attention. And it’s a consistent way for them to know what behavior is expected of them.

9)                Focus less on competition and more on collaboration. I think competition at an early age (before 12) hurts our kids’ interest in sport so much.  Kids need to learn to collaborate and connect before they can EVER learn how to compete. Do they compete anyway?  Yup, they sure do.  Which is why we don’t need to create artificial environments that increase the pressure, stress and anxiety far beyond what is developmentally healthy.  We need to teach young people to work together, to support each other’s development and to appreciate everyone around us. This isn’t just a skill for being a good teammate; it’s a skill for being a good human.

10)             Play.  Stop being an ADULT and start playing. When they see you engaged then they stay engaged.  The greatest way to tell a child you see them and that they matter is to play with them.