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Greetings VARA Community,
As part of VARA’s young athlete development programming, Kids Today and What They Need From Us, this email is Topic 3, Part 2 - Doing Our Best by Our Kids. This section takes a look at the full scope of the sports and athletic environment. The section will take a look at how coaches, involved adults, and parents are showing up, teaching, and designing environments to help our student-athletes reach their highest potential.
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Introducing Elle Gilbert
Elle is a former VARA competitor; she grew up in VT and raced in the MVC council system. Elle competed for Suicide Six and Woodstock Ski Runners. A 2012 SMS graduate, Elle went on to compete for Middlebury College. Following a successful alpine racing and academic career at Middlebury, Elle coached for MMSCA. She later earned her Master of Arts in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver.
As a fully integrated Mental Performance Specialist at SMS, Elle is currently working with all five of the athletic programs on campus.
This topic is at the forefront of athletics and sports performance at all levels. I am super excited for Elle to share her work and experience in youth and sports psychology with the VARA community.
Please enjoy the series, take notes, and save them and discuss with your coaching team. We are planning a zoom follow-up at the end of the series and will include the date and time in one of the next email blasts.
Thank you!
Julie Woodworth
VARA Executive Director
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Doing Our Best By Our Kids
Topic 3, Part 2, of the Series
By: Elle Gilbert
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Doing Our Best by Our Kids: Part 2
Now that we’ve situated ourselves within the greater context of the sport industry and we’ve accepted our power of tremendous influence over our young athletes’ experience in sport, it’s time to look how we are showing up, teaching, and designing environments.
Creating the Environment They Need
A good place to start in tackling the staggering statistic of youth sport dropout (70% of kids are dropping out of sport by age 13), is understanding what underlies motivation and what factors determine people’s desire to persevere and stay engaged in a given task. Proposed back in 1985, Self-Determination Theory remains one of, if not the most prominent psychological theory of motivation (Deci & Ryan). It positions three universal psychological needs at the base of our intrinsic motivation to grow and persist in our pursuits: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness.
For the young athletes who make an early exit from sport (excluding extenuating life circumstances), we can be sure that one or more of these factors is missing.
Competence: The need to gain a sense of mastery over certain tasks and skills. When athletes feel they have the skills they need to compete and achieve, they are more likely to display the effort to move them towards their goals.
Autonomy: The need to feel in control of their own behaviors, decisions, and goals – athletes feeling they have the power and freedom to take action that will make an impact on their future or a specific outcome.
Relatedness: The need to feel a sense of belonging, connection, or attachment to others (their teammates and coaches).
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This simple framework of creating effective, healthy environments essentially poses the questions for us:
As coaches, how are we approaching our job on a daily basis that fosters and prioritizes all three of these things?
As parents, how can we prioritize and reinforce the development of these things (rather than outcomes and results) when we talk to our kids about sports?
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Mastery vs. Competitive Climates
These two basic motivational climates provide drastically different experiences for our athletes, and it’s probably not difficult to guess which one leads to more enjoyment, better sportsmanship, greater perceptions of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and ultimately, higher intrinsic motivation. This duality does not imply there cannot be competition involved in a mastery-oriented environment – it’s important to allow young athletes the opportunity to be competitive with each other in practice so they can explore their own intensity levels, their competitive instincts, and their ability to deal with pressure and manage themselves through it.
These different environments are defined by the ways in which coaches respond to various behaviors and the attitudes they take towards their athletes in various situations.
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Mastery Climate
- Hard work and improvement are praised and valued above all else
- Helping others and learning through cooperation is a priority
- Underlying belief that the contribution of each teammate is vital
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Competitive Climate
- Athletes perceive poor performance and mistakes will be punished
- The most highly skilled and top-performing athletes receive the most attention
- Comparison between team members and hierarchies are utilized and encouraged
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Time to ask yourself…
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Do you define success through personal progress or external comparison? How do you communicate the idea that success is self-referenced? Are you making sure your language and feedback is directed towards process and performance goals rather than outcomes?
- Are you providing opportunities in practice where your athletes can gain feelings of mastery over specific skills, regardless of overall skill level?
- Are you being intentional with the races and competitions you are bringing your athletes to so they have opportunities to experience some objective success in a sport that can provide overwhelming challenge? (i.e., Vermont Cup vs. FIS)
- If you’re using a timing system out on the hill (in alpine disciplines), are you being intentional about where you put it, how you talk about and use the information, and if athletes have free reign to scroll through their teammates’ times?
- Are you involving your athletes in conversations about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, asking for their opinions, and making it clear you value what they think is important and helpful to them?
- Are you being a leader that works hard to create a sense of belonging, support, and teamwork within an individual, often lonely sport (i.e., Are your athletes looping to carry each other’s jackets? Are they working together to pack the van? Are they all out on the hill during a b-net project? Are they lifting each other up and cheering each other on?). These may sound like simple things, but they carry tremendous power in creating environments of accountability and togetherness.
- Are you making the extra effort to get to know each of your athletes on a personal level to lay the foundation of trust, care, and unwavering support?
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Growth Mindset
Inherent in this conversation around creating environments that allow our athletes the opportunity to thrive and be motivated by their love for the sport, is the fundamental idea that our athletes have a great capacity to learn, grow and improve with time and practice. For those of us involved in sport these days, Carol Dweck’s famously coined term growth mindset is always on the tip of our tongues. In contrast to a fixed mindset where one holds the limiting belief that their talents and capabilities are fixed and cannot be improved, a growth mindset signifies the belief one holds that effort and practice can create meaningful learning and improvement even if the process takes time. Challenges are the path to learning, not something risky to be avoided. So, how do we coach and create environments that foster growth mindsets in our athletes?
The first step is to understand what it is we’re talking about and what it is not. We all think we have our minds wrapped around what it means to have a growth mindset, and most of us probably think we can solidly say we ourselves possess a growth mindset. But we get into trouble when our understanding of what this means is incomplete. First, we must realize that every single one of us has a mix of both growth and fixed mindsets, and they are often context and environmentally dependent. We can have one mindset that predominates in a given situation, but there will always be triggers that can invoke the other. Social comparison and excess challenge or discomfort are often very powerful in shifting us to a more fixed mindset. Having our athletes get to know what can lead them into a fixed mindset is not admitting to some sort of inadequacy or “failure” of mindset, it’s acknowledging reality and equipping them to identify and work with themselves through these moments. We can also find ourselves up a creek when we oversimplify and equate a growth mindset to pure effort. It is absolutely about effort, but effort has to be tied to the learning process and progress of some sort (banging our head against the same brick wall is not what we’re going for). When we throw out praise to make an athlete feel good when they are not making progress, we are inadvertently telling them this is the best they can do – we are not helping them strategize, reconsider, and find new angles of directing their effort. This empty, blanket praise that has become heavily utilized to protect self-esteem and make young athletes feel good, is working against the development of a growth mindset. We serve our athletes much better when our communication is specific and we ensure we are linking their effort to their learning process.
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Learning: Failure & Neuroplasticity
The importance of fostering a growth mindset in our athletes leads us directly into a conversation about the mechanics of the learning process. The brain is capable of learning through neuroplasticity: the process of growth and reorganization of neural connections and pathways that can occur through learning new skills or information, environmental influences, and internal events. In its simplest sense, neuroplasticity is the ability of our brain to be shaped and molded by our life experiences. The physical, structural “wiring” of the brain is designed through learning, and it is well known that this process is occurring automatically and rapidly through the early stages of a person’s life. To keep the timeline straightforward, this effortless, continuous rewiring is strong through puberty and then tapers off after we achieve a more or less fully developed brain by our mid-twenties. At this point, we are all still highly capable of neuroplasticity, but since we have already created a reliable representation of our world, it takes effort to deviate and mark something as important enough to change (just think of that dang bad habit you’re trying to break).
This incredible work of the brain means the young athletes we are working with are capable of tremendous, rapid learning. It also means that the most powerful method of learning is through doing. Sport is typically an environment where the learner naturally takes an active role in their own learning, but this experiential learning can be uncomfortable because it requires failure – lots of it. We see toddlers and small children jubilantly failing all of the time and getting back up to try again, but when these very small humans become larger small humans and eventually teenagers, this failure does not feel so harmless. When our young people begin to develop a more solid sense of self, they often learn to fear judgment, and they internalize failure as a personal attack and a confirmation of their inadequacy. This is when we begin to see athletes backing away from the challenging experiences that are bound to produce errors, and we see them interpreting and assigning meaning to their errors that actually stunts their learning. In some cases, we see excess pressure and emphasis on outcomes making failure feel intolerable, and athletes quit their sport.
If we can teach or otherwise convey to our athletes that errors, mistakes, and utter failure is not only tolerable but expected and desired, we can help them optimize their learning experience through a growth mindset. We don’t like the feeling of making mistakes, but repeated errors are exactly what allows for the altering of our neural circuits, and ultimately, learning. While it’s vital to create environments where athletes can experience growing competence and a sense of mastery over skills, it’s equally important we develop training environments where they will fail over and over again with the goal of being fully focused on increasing their “successful” failure throughout a session. With persistence, they will begin to make small improvements, adding a vital chemical (dopamine) to the “learning cocktail.” By teaching athletes to couple failure and feelings of frustration with a sense of progress and growth, they will be able to take subjective control of this dopamine release to encourage themselves to keep trying and tracking forward even when they don’t objectively see or feel progress. There will be times when it’s helpful to have an athlete take a step back – reflect, reconsider, and restrategize – but failure and frustration do not mean it’s time to stop. They are, more often than not, the signal that tells us we’re getting to the good stuff – time to dig in and keep going.
Flexible Coaching
A vital concluding note that must be included in any conversation around intentionally designing sport environments for our athletes, is the idea of flexible coaching. This might sound like a “duh” statement, but understanding our athletes, how they learn, and their specific needs becomes even more important when you consider the hidden challenges that have, do, or will exist within athletes on our teams. Many athletes have mental or physical impairments that are not apparent or visible, but that undoubtedly impact the way they show up as an athlete. Athletes may be more likely to share and discuss hidden physical challenges such as asthma, diabetes, or autoimmune diseases, but difficulties in cognitive functions may be held closer to the vest due to lingering stigmas or the belief that the information isn’t relevant for the coach. Examples include Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning challenges, and various psychiatric conditions. Keeping these challenges hidden can create misunderstanding and confusion, it can lead to labels and frustration, and is ultimately likely to create a situation where the environment and your coaching style is not matched up with a particular athlete’s needs.
We are talking about this not to lay out a comprehensive plan for handling each unique situation, but to highlight the reality that these hidden challenges exist on our teams, and it’s our job to be aware and adaptable enough to accommodate differences. Making a strong, genuine effort to get to know our athletes can go a long way in uncovering their challenges, but it can also make us more knowledgeable and mindful of our athlete’s needs if a neurological difference or diagnosis remains concealed. It’s important to remember, some of these challenges may still be unknown even to your young athletes!
It is unlikely that the same coaching approach applied to all athletes will be the best fit for all whether we’re talking about hidden challenges or not. It’s our responsibility to teach, talk about and represent concepts and ideas in different ways that tap into differing learning styles from tech talks to on-hill coaching to watching video. It’s important for us to allow for varying action and expression across different drills and training environments (including freeskiing!) so athletes have a diverse range of opportunities to practice and demonstrate their knowledge and capabilities. It’s also vital we work to create situations that invite different forms of engagement between the athletes and ourselves as coaches to capture a broader scope of relational desires and maximize feelings of connection. The more flexibility and creativity we are able to exercise in our coaching, the more athletes we will be able to reach and the more inclusive an environment we will create.
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References (and Resources You Should Also Check Out!)
Center for Self-Determination Theory
Educated Sports Parent
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An organization tackling a wide range of issues around youth sport, providing information and giving those involved with youth sports the knowledge and tools to make the sport experience enjoyable for every athlete. – http://educatedsportsparent.com/
Books:
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Sport Psychology: Concepts and Applications (Cox, 2002) [if you happen to be looking for a relatively comprehensive textbook]
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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – Carol Dweck
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Livewired: Inside the Story of the Ever-Changing Brain – David Eagleman
Articles:
Podcasts:
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