A Coach's Diary

Youth sports is about fun, creating an active life-style, and teaching lessons through games. It is important to teach competition and to teach early on that there is a winner and a loser, but its important to do that within context.  Teach winning and losing in terms of strengths and weaknesses, in terms of work ethic and commitment, and in terms of how to humbly deal with success and how to appropriately bounce back from defeat. As long as a kid keeps playing, as long as a kid keeps improving, and most importantly, as long as a kid keeps having fun, then good things will happen.

1 – Have Fun The number 1 goal for a youth league should be that the kids have so much fun that they want to play again next year.  The league, the referees, each coach, and each parent should understand their role in making sure that their kid has a great experience.  While keeping score is important, and understanding early that there is a winner and a loser is important, the most important thing is just having fun playing the game and learning to love the game, learning to love being active, and learning how to play with their friends.  A big part of that is helping them learn how to handle both success and failure.  We have to teach the kids how to accept success in a way that is gracious and humble and in a way that encourages continued hard work to continue to have that success.  We have to teach and model for them how to accept failure and adversity as teaching tools for life, and to use setbacks to teach them the importance of working hard in practice ...

On a random Facebook post on the topic of implementing Ralph Miller's 8 Drills For a Fundamental Practice, someone in the comments mentioned a book regarding Ralph Miller's college basketball coach, the legendary Phog Allen.  In the book it states how the inventor of basketball, Dr. James Naismith, ‘ was very much against sport being anything but a human development tool to enhance physical well-being, social acumen, and spiritual growth, truly the educational model. ' After doing some research on Dr. Naismith’s beliefs on the true purpose of sports, I ran across this article from Aleteia.org in which it discusses in good detail Dr. Naismith's vision and mission for athletics and the role it can play in developing young people's lives, especially in relation to becoming a better Christian. The articles states that Naismith was convinced that, “ he could better exemplify the Christian life through sports than in the pulpit ” and sought to “ develop the ...