Teaching Values & Skills: Better People Make Better Athletes

The last few posts have emphasized the importance for coaches to plan practices that “create a learning environment “ for athletes OF ALL AGES. One important “lesson” that should be taught, as early as possible, is that of setting realistic and reachable goals for athletes that also create an environment that motivates athletes to “strive” to achieve goals that are attainable. These practices, with proper effort, repetitive practice and the patience and guidance of good coaches will form the basis for improving the performance of each individual through teaching athletes to focus on the process of learning.

 By giving athletes a purpose for each practice, good coaching plans can “inspire” a true growth mindset whereby the focus is on the process of “how” to acquire, practice and perfect a skill that will end up increasing the athlete’s ability to perform skills that will ultimately make them better athletes.

Teaching athletes the importance of the process of practice and effort to attain foundational skills and movements IS  also “creating” a healthy and fun learning environment.  True learning takes place when young athletes are challenged to “give their best effort” in performing new movements/ skills and, through trial and error, finally master the task.

I was fortunate to “experience” this simple learning phenomenon early in my teaching/coaching career. I decided to teach my 7^th grade PE class to hurdle. Needless to say, many of the boys were not at all confident of being able to clear the 30” hurdle, so I asked or volunteers. My only teaching cues were to run and “get over” the hurdle by leaving the ground on ONE leg.  Despite what seemed like quite a while, one of the better athletes took off and cleared easily despite being far from mechanical efficiency.

The response, after applause and cheers, was a rush to line up to “try” hurdling. Within 15 minutes, every boy in the class had cleared the hurdle and class ended with an appeal to work on hurdling the next day.

What I remember most, however, was the confidence it taught to the “lesser” athletic kids and the pride of meeting the challenge and “learning “ a new skill.  WITHOUT KNOWING, I had created a true “learning” environment by giving them a challenge to try a skill none of them had done before. This made my following lessons on shot, discus, long jump, etc. SO much easier by instilling an atmosphere of excitement and “fun” towards the challenge of learning new skills.

We have heard all the positive reasons for participation in sport by our youth. ARE these positive, character-developing and physical-developing traits still the focus of youth sports programs?

International Olympic Committer member and former USA Olympian, Anita DeFranz recently posted (A Call to Action: Youth Sports Reform):

 “As an athlete, I believe that one of the greatest traditions of this country is the importance we ascribe to playing sports at an early age. The baby boomer generation grew up playing on the hometown baseball diamonds and basketball courts of America, a practice we've tried to pass down to our children so they too can learn important values like perseverance, respect, teamwork and integrity on the playing field, and develop healthy habits that will carry on through the rest of their lives.”

She goes on to say… “Earlier this month, ESPN released the results of a nationwide survey of parents conducted on behalf of espnW and the Aspen Institute's Sports & Society Program, gauging the respondents' opinions on issues in youth sports that could potentially shed light on this worrying trend of declining participation. They found that nearly 90 percent of moms were concerned about the risk of injury to their children in sports, particularly for those who play contact sports like football or soccer. Over two-thirds of all parents were concerned that their children were being taught a "win-at-all-costs" mentality, rather than a lifelong love for the game. A majority of parents also voiced fears about the quality and behavior of coaches, as well as unreasonable time commitments for practices and steeply rising participation costs.”
In one of his recent posts, Coach and Elite Athlete Martin Bissinger, made this note about LEARNING THROUGH SPORT in his post titled “Sound Mind, Sound Body”…”One can learn such valuable traits as sharing, hard work, and ethics through sports. So can teamwork, leadership and quick thinking. These are traits that are necessary for individuals to work well with others.”
What I thought was interesting was the quotation he inserted from Plato’s “Republic” that reinforces Plato’s emphasis on developing the “whole person”. Through proper balancing of body and mind each individual can develop the inner harmony to keep themselves in balance and become the best they can be. See if the passage below strikes you as something from Ancient Greek Philosophy.
“Have you noticed how a lifelong devotion to physical exercise, to the exclusion of anything else, produces a certain type of mind? Just as neglect of it produces another?...Excessive emphasis on athletics produces and excessively uncivilized type, whereby a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”

My first reaction was…”Maybe if the NFL would require athletes to actually graduate with a meaningful degree their arrest list would not continue to grow each year.”
Bissinger, in ending this post, has the most value to the message I think needs to be heard:  “Changing the world starts with the individual and coaches play a big role on athlete at a time. This is why it is so important to coach with the right goals in mind. You are not just helping improve performance, you CREATING INDIVIDUALS.”

So, in response to the 2/3’s of parents concerned about the quality and behavior of coaches, I would respond that parents need to take the time to search for the coaches who create “learning environments” that are “athlete centered” and “values based”.
One answer...it wouldn’t hurt for Universities to develop specialized curriculums for developing coaches who are adequately trained to coach both sport skills and character developing skills.
In the mean time, we need to start with developing growth mindsets and create learning environments where the emphasis is on the process of learning, value of effort and fun that can exist in learning new skills.

The type of coach YOU WANT FOR YOUR SON AND/OR DAUGHTER  is one who has learned the valuable lesson that coaches do not coach sports, they coach people!

Please read a great article written on this topic by 2 Time Olympic Gold Medalist and former World Record Holder Edwin Moses. Good Coaching... appears in the Pages column to the right of this post.