Coaching kids is no different because youth athletics is a continually renewing process.

The crucial art of coaching kids takes its strength many separate openings, yet we often fail to respect the power of sport’s commencement, particularly when evaluating physical skills.  Too often coaches, new to the task, expect young players to perform as if they already possess the physical and intellectual skills required to play a game.

If we disregard the import of underpinnings we must not be surprised when our kids are less capable than we want.

From the moment we first take the assignment to coach a team of children, until those wonderful moments years later when we watch them as high school athletes or meet them in casual settings, the relationship between you, the coach, and your little league athlete is a distinctive one.  The glory of the coach/athlete relationship can be improved in today’s coaching environment if you recognize five important things.

5 Things Every Youth Coach Must Understand

1)  Yesterday’s coaching styles are old news.

We are compelled to talk to athletes today differently than we did a few years ago.  I will get into those influences another time.  During a wrestling tournament last winter, I was leaving the mat with one of my boys and we passed an old-school coach who was letting his athlete know how poorly he thought of the kids’ performance.  He was direct and he was coarse.  There was no mistaking his message.  He was not pleased with how his boy wrestled.  I would never speak the way he spoke but I heard that kind of coaching many years ago. It will not work today.

2) The success of your team requires new ways of doing things.

You must think in new ways if you are to be an effective youth coach.  Not only are you working to improve their ability to play a game but you are also bringing them along emotionally.  Social interaction, ability to play with kids, to engage in team play, to exercise their large muscles and cardio vascular systems are all part of your job.  You must address these issues because they affect what happens in your team and during their games.  You must learn to place emphasis everywhere.  Not just on the score of the game.

3)  The evolution of sports technology is revolutionary.

Video tape is just one of the ways that technology changes coaching. I would love to see myself wrestle or play football but that tape does not exist.  You can use video tape to show the skills of your athletes, help them improve, and watch accomplished players in action.  Youtube and the internet allow you to let grandma and grandpa see the great plays as well.  Use technology to help your athletes.

4)  The equipment used twenty years ago is laughable today.

Safety is more assured than ever before through helmets and padding.  Pick up an old wooden bat and hit a few pitches then pick up an aluminum one and swing away.  Every piece of sports equipment has changed as much as titanium bats versus wood ones.  You must understand those changes and know that equipment.  Become a student of it.

5)  Sports nutrition and what your children eat are not the same things.

Teach your children what to eat on game day and what to do to overcome the action of sugar and sedentary living.  Here are six ways to help them now.

1) Challenge them to eat colors; red in apples, green in grapes, yellow in bananas, etc.

2) Stop drinking soda.

3) Eliminate energy drinks.

4) Analyze their diet.

5) Help their parents start reading food labels.

6) Become a student of nutrition yourself.

You can make no assumptions about where your students are in terms of their physical capacity, knowledge of the game or ability to be part of the team.  Your role as youth coach must include all of the above recommendations and more.  It is a continuing process.

I had a great Saturday last weekend watching a high school track meet.  Kelly Poppinga, NFL linebacker for the Miami Dolphins was sitting with us.  His wife is a former runner at our school and the current coach for our distance squad.

I asked Kelly what it was like growing up in little league since he obviously did something right. Poppinga was a starter at BYU and is now preparing for his second season in the NFL.

He had two unique experiences that most kids will never share;  he was the youngest of three boys and grew up in a small western town.

Rough physical play was normal for him.  Both of his older brothers play in the NFL and outdoor play was standard rather than the exception.  More than once, Kelly’s mom went looking for him and his playmates at dusk, because her boys were not home yet.  She generally found them wandering through the hills outside of Evanston, Wyoming.

Most of the kids that we coach are more sedentary than physical and yet we, as coaches, fail to accept the reality of their lack of physical play.  Coaching today’s young athlete necessitates that we consider their level of physical capacity, accept it rather than scorn it, and work with the kid to develop better physicality.

I am no longer surprised at the decreasing number of children who grew up in conditions anything like those of Kelly and the Poppinga boys.

But then the odds of any of the kids that we coach become professionals in any sport are slim to none.

According to Andrew W. Miracle Jr. and C. Roger Ree’s 1994 book Lessons of the Locker Room, only 4 of every 100,000 white males, 2 of every 100,000 black males, and 3 of every one million Hispanic males will achieve professional status in any sport.

I always maintain that the reason for sports among our children is not to prepare them for professional careers. A scholarship in college will be available to very few kids.

90 percent of the kids on your t-ball team will not play high school baseball let alone pay their way through college.

According to one report less than 5% of high school football players continue playing at the college level and most of those will not complete their four years of eligibility.

The reason for kids’ involvement in sport is much more than a college or professional career. I welcome the conversation and enjoy the articulation of what it means for kids and their futures when they are engaged in a quality program that is mentored by a competent and well meaning adult.   It is a dialogue that I always welcome even on a sunny spring day at a high school track meet.