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Doing Our Best by Our Kids: Part 1
So far, we have taken a deep dive into understanding both ourselves and our teen athletes with the purpose of using the knowledge to 1) step up and meet them where they’re at, and 2) take on the responsibility of influencing their sport experience in a way that effectively helps them navigate the sticky and beautiful thing it is to be a teen in our world. Now we’re pushing a little bit further to broaden our perspective of the environments our young athletes are in and the power we have to influence and shape these environments into spaces that facilitate our athletes thriving.
A Critical Look at the Institution of Sport
Admittedly, this is a tough place to start. We have so many organizations taking innovative steps to improve the sport experience of their athletes, so many coaches pursuing education and development opportunities, and we have so many young athletes who are deriving all of the tremendous benefits sport has to offer. When we start exploring this topic with a careful eye, it’s not to criticize anyone sport or institution, it’s simply to look at sport as a whole (specifically in the USA) – to look at it for what it is and consider the impacts of its structure and environment on our youth. To do our best by our kids, we have to have our eyes wide open to the greater systemic influences.
In his speech at the Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000, Nelson Mandela spoke these powerful words:
"Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination."
He is right, of course, but there is a caveat. If sport also has the power to sew division, inspire cheating, excuse the inexcusable, harass and threaten, abuse our youth, and be the breeding ground for severe mental health challenges, it cannot be sport itself that carries this tremendous power of positive impact. It is the people involved in sport who bear this burden. It’s us.
Many of us adults have succumbed to the seductive belief that sport is a good thing for our kids. Much of the time, it is – look at all the life lessons our kids are learning, look at the discipline and hard work it requires, look at the friends they’re making, etc. We often don’t question any of this because, throughout history, sport has positioned itself as an intrinsically healthy thing. It’s time to challenge this and break ourselves free from the cultural fallacy of the inherent goodness of sport. Sport is only a positive experience for our youth if we make it one.
The Context of Sport
Sport organizations (from grassroots to world-leading) make a lot of promises with their rich, deep mission statements about what sport is supposed to stand for and the experience it promises to provide that will meaningfully shape the youth that pass through. Excuse me as I speak generally here, but as a society, we are not living up to these promises. We are working with an innately vulnerable population within our roles in youth sport, and history has simultaneously built a context around sport where we have grown to accept behavior and treatment that in almost any other environment would be considered egregious (even illegal).
Look no further than the scandal with USA Gymnastics to see attentive, caring adults who missed signs that something was seriously wrong because it was all veiled in the glittery context of sport. Zoom out slightly to look at the pervasive win at all costs mentality which perpetuates abusive practices (physical, verbal, and emotional) and even frames them as acceptable and necessary for success. Consider the encouragement of illegal performance enhancing drugs necessary in some sports to be competitive, or the perpetuation of disordered eating to meet weight classes, conform to aesthetic norms, or simply to gain a perceived (or even real) competitive advantage. What about the welcoming back of players accused and convicted of domestic violence onto the biggest, most celebrated stages of the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL competition? You may even be able to look around you to a local coach or parent to find a demonstration of unacceptable or even shocking behavior that the community lets slide because it is occurring within the context of sport. Sport creates a protective bubble, not around the athlete, but around the sanctity of winning. The athletes are often the ones that face the very real physical and emotional consequences. We have an obligation to look critically at ourselves, at the sport environments our kids are practicing and performing within, and at the sporting systems at large in order to pop this bubble.
Sport is a Business
Even at the youth level, money makes the world of sport go round. As a business (youth sport is a whopping $17 billion dollar business), teams and organizations see a financial payoff from the success of their athletes. The better their athletes perform, the more recruiting power they have, the more growth and respect they garner. Now they have more kids paying more money to be a part of it. An increasingly steep pay-to-play model has burdened families and inevitably creates socioeconomic and racial barriers, leaving the beautiful sentiment about equality from Nelson Mandela a string of empty words. Our young athletes involved see and feel the financial pressures on their families as well as the pressure to achieve coming from every angle. The message is if they’re not achieving, it’s not worth it.
This reality of sport as a business is also feeding the early professionalization of our kids. We are asking athletes to specialize at younger and younger ages, and at the same time, we have a whole host of creative systems in place that inadvertently and explicitly tell kids they either have what it takes or they don’t. In addition to the deficits in physical literacy and the increased susceptibility to injury early specialization subjects our young athletes to, the amount of time our youth has to enjoy the purity of athletics and play sport for fun, is decreasing. We turn them into little professionals who believe tremendous sacrifice is required and who feel the pressure of the world as they strive to achieve. Perhaps they see sport as their ticket to college (and beyond), they feel like they can’t disappoint all of the people that support them (parents, coaches, etc.), or they have been defined by sport so entirely that they see no other option.
There is a cost to everything – that’s just the way of our world. This becomes a problem when it throws up barriers to participation, when adults see young athletes with dollar signs attached, and when excessive pressure results in unhealthy consequences. The unfortunate reality is physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion cause about 70% of kids playing youth sport drop out by age 13. Staggering.
What’s your role in the system and what do you see happening around you? How much pressure do your athletes feel? How much do you emphasize the fun of sport in your communication with your athletes and in the various environments they practice and compete in?
Sport as Identity
I once sat in a group of about 50 middle schoolers as they introduced themselves to each other at the beginning of the winter. They went around the circle saying their names and reading a sentence they’d prepared describing the important components of their identity. Not one athlete deviated from some simple version of, “I’m a skier,” or “I’m an athlete.” Not one. Never had it been so clear to me that our young athletes see themselves as athletes first and foremost if not exclusively. Sport has squashed their identity into something singular: they are what they do. When injury, retirement, or other life circumstances get in the way of sport, athletes face the message from society that when they stop doing, they stop being. They’ve spent years learning to attach their worth to their achievements, so their worth becomes conditional and their identity remains unexplored.
Even at the highest level, we see conversation around the mental health of our athletes becoming more and more prevalent. The Tokyo Olympics was a stage many athletes utilized to push back on the messaging from the sporting community that their humanity must come second to their athletics. The best of the best are bravely reclaiming the permission to be humans first. It’s our job to teach our young athletes their worth is unconditional, they are so much more than what they do, and their wellbeing as a person always comes before athletics. This will allow our youth to reap the tremendous benefits of sport, and perhaps even allow our next generation of elite to carry their robust identities with them like shields and safety nets onto the largest stages.
The Priorities of Sport
The temporary adventure of athletic competition that has our youth wound up tighter than a drum is a problematic definer not only because it has an inescapable end, but also because they have to work so hard day in and day out to continue proving themselves worthy of their identity. How do they do this? Achievement. Results. Through our classic narrow definition of success. At the end of the day, sport is about winning – this is a message from which no athlete is spared. This is driven by the money wrapped up in the industry and the financial stake adults hold in the performance of our kids. When sport is about outcomes, our kids lose.
Our athletes are not in danger of losing their desire to achieve and win (that’s pretty baked into their competitive DNA), so our job is to provide a different perspective rather than add fuel to the fire. Broadening our traditional definition of success and stepping back to look at sport for what it is (long slippery boards to slide you down the mountain, a small ball in a big net, a big ball in a small basket, you see where I’m going with this…), we can be intentional about the messages we’re sending to our athletes about the priorities. But first, we have to believe it. Time to ask yourself what you believe the priorities of sport are. What are the priorities you’re projecting to your athletes? In what ways are you still communicating results are what matters? Let’s look beyond outcomes and results…
What are your true priorities?
- Developing interpersonal skills and building connections
- Encouraging teamwork, sportsmanship, and leadership
- Providing valuable life lessons and discovering personal values
- Inspiring dreaming, striving, and improvement
- Promoting fun, joy, and a sense of play
- Building competence, autonomy, and self-esteem
- Practicing courage and resilience
- Allowing freedom of self-expression and individuality
- Promoting wellbeing, fitness, healthy lifelong habits, and love of sport
I’m not implying results are not important, I’m simply saying our athletes don’t need the reinforcement from us to make them a bigger deal than they already are. Make the effort to show excitement about a specific aspect of an athlete’s performance rather than the result itself when they do achieve. When they don’t objectively achieve, do the same. Provide honest feedback and make sure your priorities are on full display. We are allowed to want to see our athletes perform their best while also making sure they know at the end of every day, who they are is more important than what they do. If we can do this, we can help our athletes experience the true goodness of sport.
Sport is not the end goal. Sport is the vehicle to building extraordinary humans. When we approach our roles as coaches and parents with sport as the end goal and we measure success in results, we aren’t taking full advantage of the opportunity to build extraordinary humans. We are actively diminishing the importance of who they are and who they are becoming. We are missing the opportunity to intentionally develop healthy, agile minds that will propel them forward well beyond sport. We want to shift the focus from mastery of their sport to mastery of themselves through their sport. Sport is unquestionably important, just not always for the reasons we have learned to believe.
The Hard Questions
When we fall into the mistaken belief that sport is inherently good, independently working to productively and healthfully develop our children, it gives us the excuse to not look critically at our own behavior and the systems we’re operating within. Whether you are a parent, a coach, an athletic or strength trainer, an administrator, or you fill another role adjacent to youth sport, it is your responsibility to face down some hard questions.
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Who is your primary stakeholder? If it’s not the athletes, how does your commitment to this peripheral stakeholder (the administration, the board members, the parents, yourself) impact your behavior with and treatment of the athletes? What are the downstream effects of your decisions on the athletes?
- How does the financial cost of participation in your sport through your organization impact the messages your athletes may be receiving about the importance of their success?
- How do you intentionally set up environments to foster fun and healthy competition?
- What mechanisms of unhealthy social comparison do you see your athletes engaging in, and what steps have you taken to address it?
- What efforts do you take to get to know your athletes outside of sport, to show them you care about them as people, and to let them know how they show up on a daily basis always outweighs what they are able to accomplish?
- Ask your athletes: How much does your athletic environment and the adults involved emphasize…
- …fun and the freedom to play?
- …friendship, sportsmanship, and leadership?
- …self-expression and unconditional acceptance?
- …a healthy balance between sport, academic, and social engagements?
- …wellness and health come first, even if it’s at the expense of the sport?
- …courage and effort above performance and perfection?
- …learning, progress, and development above results and winning?
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References (and Resources You Should Also Check Out!)
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