A Flashlight in the Dark
I have experienced firsthand both the baseness and the beauty of sports. As a ten-year-old springboard diver, a coach threw a chair at me while I was in the water. I left the sport and did not return until four years later when I was a high school freshman searching for a sport I might have a chance of excelling at. Fortunately, there was a new coach in town and he made all the difference. Morry not only helped me become a state champion but also a more resilient, confident, and empowered young man. He was strict and demanding but loving and caring. He profoundly and irrevocably changed my life for the better.
Many sports are experiencing a continual decline in youth participation. The primary reason for this decline is inferior coaching. Untrained, ill-prepared and ineffective coaches create a disinviting environment that turns kids off to sports. While some of these young athletes endure and even manage to reach the elite level, even at the elite level we see problems.
For example, in a recent (preprint non peer-reviewed) study examining mental health, harassment, and abuse of athletes participating in the 2019 FINA Aquatics World Championships, Mountjoy et. al. (2021) found 24.6% classified as depressed, 35% reported an eating disorder, and more than 40% stated they wanted or needed psychotherapeutic support for mental health problems. Moreover, 14.9% reported experiencing harassment/abuse and 9% had witnessed it in another athlete. Typically, many aquatic competitors at the World Championships also compete at the Olympic Games, so it isn’t too far a leap to assume that these same results could be found among athletes at the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.
So how do coaches at all levels create a safe and accepting atmosphere that promotes sound mental health, youth sport participation, and prolonged sport involvement? In my book Applying Educational Psychology in Coaching Athletes, I provide coaches a variety of approaches based on tested theories, empirical research, and sound data. In the purest sense, coaching is teaching, whether it is in the classroom or on the pool deck, basketball court, or field of play, and we know quite well the many empirically documented characteristics and behaviors of teachers and coaches of excellence. Here are just a few.
Create The Salivating Athlete
Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, coaches can create salivating athletes passionate about their sport and everything associated with their sport. Through repeated pairing of a neutral stimulus (your sport) with positive unconditioned stimuli such as praise, friendliness, acceptance, and fun, your sport eventually elicits positive conditioned responses such as like, joy, and excitement. Respondent conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or classical conditioning) is perhaps one of the most important but overlooked theories for motor learning and performance. I spend an entire chapter on this theory in my book.
As you might imagine, when Morry first took over the local program, there were only a few surviving kids on the team. After several years, however, he had almost one hundred—kids who would sneak in early for practice and have to be kicked out at the end of practice because they didn’t want to stop! Morry reserved time for deliberate play and made practice demanding but friendly, accepting, and fun. Even at the elite level, deliberate play and fun should always be part of a coach’s practice plan. As I told my athletes, teams that work hard and have fun are far more productive and successful than teams that simply work hard.
Use Humor And Genuinely Care
Part of creating an inviting, warm, and welcoming training environment that promotes good mental health and passionate athletes means using humor and letting athletes know you genuinely care about them as human beings and not just as athletes. As the saying goes, they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Athletes who know you genuinely care about them are devoted to their coaches.
Humor is important because it keeps things, such as arduous training and stressful competition, in perspective, creates a relaxed, friendly and productive training environment, and diffuses potentially explosive confrontations. After all, if you can’t have fun, why do it? Kids engage in sports for many reasons and winning isn’t in the top ten. Kids get into sports to have fun. Remember, they play sports, they don’t work sports. Keep it humorous and fun at all levels.
Morry had a terrific sense of humor that permeated his team. And he cared---boy did he care. He was like a second father to me and to other teammates. We fell in love with our sport and a majority of us persisted in the sport. Some became high school and collegiate All Americans, some were national champions, one even made an Olympic Team, and several became coaches like me.
Be The Coach Kids Deserve And Want
The more coaches know, the more competent they become. The converse is also true. Research indicates that incompetent people have difficulty judging their own incompetency. Research also informs that coaches of excellence are lifelong learners. Moreover, athletes who perceive their coaches as competent, respect their coaches more and trainer harder for them.
Competency means seeing the entire spectrum of coach education, inclusive of topics such as pedagogy, motor learning, physiology, physics, psychology, counseling, biomechanics, and sport psychology. Coaches who see the “Big Picture” create a positive, healthy, and empowering experience that kids deserve and crave—an experience that shapes their athletic careers and that irrevocably alters their lives for the better.
Conclusion
Recently, a coach sent me an email in which he said, “Having had your book, Applying Educational Psychology in Coaching Athletes, for a number of years, I often felt like telling you how much I have found this, not only a flashlight in the dark, but also a companion as I work with my taekwondo athletes.” When young children engage in sports, they are blank slates, knowing little about sports and, for that matter, knowing little about themselves. They are in the dark. The right coach can be a flashlight in the dark for them, revealing the sublime beauty of the sport experience while simultaneously illuminating to athletes their healthy, positive human strengths to not only endure but to prevail both during sports and afterwards. What coaching achievement could be more important?
Mountjoy, Junge, Magnusson, Shahpar, Lizcano, Varvodic, Wang, Cherif, Hill & Miller (2021). Beneath the surface: Mental health, and harassment and abuse of athletes participating in the FINA (Aquatics) World Championships, 2019. MedRxiv, The Preprint Server for Health Sciences (not peer reviewed).
Huber, J.J. (2013). Applying educational psychology in coaching athletes. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Huber, J.J. (2016). Springboard and platform diving. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.