Teaching Skills in Youth Sports: Why it Matters More Than You Think (Parents)
If you look into the young lives of some great athletes you will see an extremely disciplined and strategic approach to achieving excellence that some call "champion-building." This style leads to success in rare cases, but not on a regular basis. In reality, these outliers have negatively affected the way we teach young people how to play the sports of their choosing (if they even get to truly choose at all). This is definitely a "hands-on" style of sports parenting. Another is to push sport participation and at the same time tell the young athlete (directly or indirectly) how great they are and reward them for winning at a young age. Both can be detrimental, and I'll attempt to explain why. As a precursor, this post is mainly focused toward parents of young athletes. There will be a post soon aimed at youth sport coaches and those roles can sometimes blend into each other, but this meant to generally influence the "big picture" of sport partici...