LAX

Lax

I recently got a call from a Lax coach. He had just finished coaching a game. The indoor game was played on a beardless field and was composed mainly of high school kids. It was a normal off season game in many respects. Except for a stretch were one team allowed a bunch of goals it was a pretty even contest. Final score 9-3 Lots of kids got to play and for the most part good sportsmanship was on display, until the end of the game.

The coach of the winning team decided, with two minutes to go in the game that he would play stall ball. That’s right with two minutes to go and a running clock he decided to do everything he could not to lose. I purposely said not to lose instead of playing to win, because that is what happened. So, for two minutes, to satisfy the coaches’ ego, every kid “playing” in that game at that time stood around and basically did nothing. Let me tell you why, on so many levels I disagree with the strategy.

First and foremost, no one was improving during the last two minutes of the game. Let’s say the losing team popped in a couple of goals and started to make a game of it. What would be the result? Increased competition and positive stress. Exactly the things you should want your kids to experience when they are playing youth and high school sports.

Next what message was being sent to everyone there? In a meaningless game the coach was modeling a behavior that everyone there had to accept. The final score of the game, with him winning was more important, not the most important thing to him on that night.

Each and every kid on both teams saw what was happening and logged it into their brains that this was acceptable behavior and when they got older they could repeat this style of coaching. They would log into their psyche that winning is more important than development.

Where had the winning coach seen this style of coaching? Did he see a pro game? Did he coach a youth sports game where the other coach did this to him? Was he watching a game when this course of action took place? A

And when he saw it, why did he think it was an acceptable instead of saying to himself”that’s not any fun for the kids. I’m never going to do that.” Why didn’t he look at the kids faces through their masks and see what the kids were feeling.

Wouldn’t it have been great if he went back to his team and said “Guys, I just watched a coach stall for the last two minutes of a game and no one was having any fun or getting better so I am going to make sure we never do that as long as I am coaching?”

Myth #5 personal trainers

Myth #5

 Personal trainers are a necessity to be excellent in youth sports.

 Play pickup games. Play tag with your friends. Do hop-skip- and jump, hop scotch, or red rover. They are just kids.

Think of your top five athletes. Are any of them  12 years old? By putting that label on children at such a young age we certainly have a tendency to believe they are special.

 I’m being told there is such a thing as a 10 year old athlete. My definition of an athlete is a person that starts for a varsity high school team in their chosen sport(s). No 10-12 year old does that.

 I was once told that my son, at the age of 10, was a good athlete, by multiple people. I didn’t know they were serious. I thought they just wanted me to tell them how great their kid was.

Are we now saying you have to have financial resources to play youth sports? Is that not entitlement? How do poor children get to play at the higher levels?

 Have we gotten to the point that specialization has robbed the children of the basic fundamentals of running stopping, throwing, kicking, and catching? They now have to be taught by specialists?

 I am all for C.A.T. in rehabbing injuries. But let’s be clear. Until you show me a study where an overweight 10 year old was given a personal trainer for 8 years and made into a DI athlete with no baggage, I have a hard time believing.

 We have gotten messages from a couple of national trainers and they say it gives an athlete a mental edge and a physical edge, but that applies only for the very top 1% of the athletes in the country.

 Go outside or play for fun pickup games. Coping, sharing, playing, socializing, and fun will give you the tools you need to be successful on and off the playing fields.

In the last 30 years there is no question that athletes are bigger stronger and faster than ever before. But in the history of mankind this time continuum is about a mili second of a nano second of a micro second. So the increase is from technology not genetics. If this is true, then there must be a cost.

I am all for off season conditioning and having children get down time and active ret from youth sports. But I am seeing a disturbing trend where children go from playing one sport in the afternoon a to cross fit training and sometimes doing two sports in one day, multiple times during a weekend.

At Frozen Shorts we specialize in balance. It is very important that adults realize that children have a natural pace of development. Trying to speed it up  through a personal trainer or by playing one sport year round to get to the mythical 10,000 hour level of excellence comes at a cost.

 We are seeing on children some of the same injuries we see in adults. We are also seeing some of the emotional stress with playing DI and professional sports in young children.

If only 1% of all the kids playing sports make it to the D1 level why on earth are we coaching and training these little children like D1 and professional athletes?

Let’s embrace the fact that they are children, not take advantage of it.

Myth #4 Shocases lead to D1 Scolarships

Myth#4

Showcases are there as a big step towards your scholarship goal;

 Here is my definition of a showcase. An elite, truly elite, program sends out specific individual invitations for you to attend. The event is only for children above the age of 15. The coaches just let the kids play, minimal instruction. The parents of these children playing pay a nominal fee. The showcase is not there for the main purpose of funding a team, program, or organization.

I understand that college coaches sometimes get paid a fee to attend these showcases. They also get an advantage watching a lot of kids in a short time. They can only attend these showcases at certain times of the year according to the NCAA. Because of the plethora of these money making showcases, there is a  watered down aspect starts to arise at these showcases. Many may not have the talent you think there is.

 Lastly, in some cases, kids go to these showcases, tired, not at their peak and try to impress the college scouts with their “stuff” and they can get injured. 80% of a college coach’s job is recruiting. If you have talent we will find you. Its our job and we like our job, a lot. We want to find you when another coach cant.

Let me relate to you the last showcase I went to for my 15 year old son. We traveled six hours by car to Virginia. He played four games against the same level of competition that he normally played against in his ‘elite” travel league.

 After the first game when everyone was headed back to the hotel I told my wife I was going to hang around for awhile. I watched every team I could get to, a total of about 600 kids. I saw two children that I considered to be D1 material. So, in essence, the other 598 families were paying for these two kids to be seen.

I then went and found the person running the tournament. I told him I was a college hockey coach and would like to meet some of the other college coaches there scouting. He immediately asked me to sign in. There were six other coaches on the list and I did not recognize any D1 schools.

He played in four games against four teams with about the same scores as there was in his normal league. We paid $600.00 to go to Virginia and sit and watch soccer for the weekend. I understand that some people refer to this as their social lives and have and maintain friendships after the children stop playing. But the point of this article is this was supposed to be a showcase for college coaches and perspective student athletes for college bound children.

 It was not. It was the last showcase we went to. As a side to this story it was also the last season my son played travel soccer, and he still played and started for his high school team his senior year.

He chose not to play soccer in college when he was handed a 7 page work out list for the summer before college started. I agreed with his decision

He no longer plays soccer of any kind.

Youth Sports Myth#3

Your team and the kids who play on that team have a much better chance of getting a Division 1 scholarship by playing “elite” travel sports.

You play other “elite” teams and you play more games than playing recreation level, which is for sure. But I have seen little talent differences in a vast majority of these “elite” teams and the town teams, or even the level of top talent on a so called recreational team. Some kids with talent prefer to play with less travel and less pressure. That does not in itself mean they are not as good as some kids playing on an elite team. It also doesn’t mean that for most kids playing on any “elite” the mythical D1 full ride scholarship offer is waiting for them. If you are good enough, college coaches will find you

 Now there are some truly elite teams. Simple math tells you that there are way more ‘elite” teams, with way more kids playing on them, than there are scholarships.

I was told, on one “elite” academy that 17 players went on to play Division 1 athletics. So I asked a friend who does this sort of thing for me, to verify this. Out of the 17, only TWO were playing on a D1 team, and only one was playing regularly.

The National team in your sport,  invite only travel teams, and a few, very few, of the very top programs who recruit children from all over the country to play on their team, are the truly elite teams, and they do send many more players to D1 schools with athletic scholarships, that is true. But there are very few of those teams, and even they don’t have the market corned on scholarships. Academic excellent plays a key component to those offers and missing school days to go travel and come home tired from a long weekend do not help you get good grades for the most part.

 I believe to be called a truly elite team; they should be sending most if not all of their players to a Division 1 program. I have watched over 200 of the so called “elite” teams play and to say that it is much better than a recreational team is true in most cases, but hardly fits my definition of elite.

 Let’s be clear here. Most teams are only elite because someone put a title on it. In fact, most elite teams consist of a group of kids whose parents agreed to pay an outrageous fee for participation on this team. The members of this team were picked from a pool of participants that excluded anyone who could not afford to pay the fee and or did not want to give up everything else they were doing in that time frame to play on this team. How is that elite?

The league in which you play has the same criteria as you do. In this criteria there is no way you can expect true elite completion. If it were all the scores in most games would be extremely close!

 Most recreation level youth sports are not as good as “elite” level because of desire. I have watched many of them, well over a 100 of the ‘recreational” teams play, and I can say that just like elite, there are a couple of kids who stand out, a couple that aren’t very good and the rest are about the same talent level. You could certainly make a case that you could switch some kids from either team and not see much of a difference in either teams play.

 Being around children we all know that they change their minds all the time, daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute in what they want to do. In the elite travel case, pushing a child to play on a team they don’t want to inhibits their fun and thus the quality of their participation. I have seen on many teams, before, during, and after games, a disgust, lack of enthusiasm, and disinterest from many children being pushed to play at this so called “elite” level.

 Also, since children don’t fully develop physically until they are in their early to mid twenties, and mentally even a bit later. However, and research is starting to come out , that being a great teammate far outweighs the advantage or perceived advantage of playing with a group of kids whose parents “paid to play.”

I have talked to many kids who passed up playing for their high school and I will tell you that most, publicly, say they wouldn’t change what they did. But behind the scenes, and in  growing numbers, kids are either being asked to play, and say no, are going back to their high school teams, and quietly to, some family and close friends, are saying they regret their decision to play elite sports.

You see, there are only so many spots on college teams and they are getting filled by a global pool of talent. This talent comes from all sorts of places and teams. While it is true that some college coaches only recruit form the pedigree tree, many are looking for multi sport athletes, that are really great teammates and high quality character people first and foremost, and “elite” does not have a strangle hold on either of those two characteristics. 

In most cases, you are paying a lot of money for your child to play on that so called elite team for YOUR child to get better, not the child next to yours. That is an environment ripe for dissent.

Our city has what is called the ALL-Greater Rochester team for each high school athletic season, boys and girls. It is true that most of the kids play on a club team. I try and figure out how many are actually getting “full rides” to college to play a sport each season this list comes out. You can too!

Oh, and as a plug for multi sport athletes, see how many of these children play more than one sport!

Here is an experiment you can try. Ask an AP teacher how many kids in his or her class got an academic scholarship to college and compare the total amount they got to an “elite” travel teams athletic scholarship total.