Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Do you want your child playing for that coach

It has come to my attention, as more and younger children are being “offered” athletic scholarships that the coaches and the parents need to look a lot closer into what is actually going on. Are you being told something just so you have something to justify your dream not your kid’s future?

The phrase that college coaches tell parents is that they have to recruit younger and younger. If they don’t, then there are 5 other coaches who will do it. “I don’t know if the kid will develop, but we have to do it. By the time they get to their senior year they might not have the grades to get into our school. I’m offering scholarships to kids that haven’t even played a minute of high school varsity sports. I filled up my 2015 class 3 years ago.”

Let’s look at this more closely. Although the data is not in great enough numbers to give us precise and truly accurate results, there are a growing number of coaches who are saying this type of recruiting is not working. What is working is that coaches have to go to fewer events because youth sports has funneled the early developed kids to showcases. The  college coaches now have an easier time, less time spent, cheaper way to recruit, and  a set statement to tell parents as to why their child will not play for their college.

Do you really want your child to play for a coach who says this? Is this the model of behavior that you choose for your child for the next four years of their lives? Do you want them around a coach who is being pressured to do something you would n to want your child to a part of? Wait, unless you are climbing on the status wagon with the coach.

A college coach cannot fill up this year’s recruiting class three years before. It’s against the rules. A verbal commitment means nothing except to the parent and their friends. The NCAA says a child can’t get an athletic scholarship offer until after their junior year in high school and the get a # from the NCAA clearing house and eligibility center.

You want to know why youth and high school sports are out of control. Look in the mirror?

It's not about you

It is not about you

I have recently been sent numerous messages about coaches not wanting their season to end. These coaches want to continue to coach, and I like that. BUT, holy cow, give it a rest with your team. Get some balance in your life and maybe the kids will too. I am hearing messages about a coach saying that coaching kids is all he lives for. Another coach says that even though the season is over he wants to keep coaching this same team. One more coach says he is going to retire and then admits that he has nothing else to do. One coach says it’s all he lives for. You don’t want to leave because you miss the limelight.

Come on guys and gals. Coach something else. Coach real young kids. Help reestablish the base the right way. Introduce fun and equal play to the little kids and show everyone how that helps ALL kids get better, instead of hurting development. Show how coaching is about relationships and giving back to the game.

It really troubles me when I hear coaches describe who they are through their coaching position, just as it bothers me when a 10 year old is described as a hockey player.

Where has the balance gone? Why are these coaches so caught up in the status of their job as a coach? Are there other problems in their life that they choose to make their identity as a youth a high school coach paramount to their identity? When they do that, don’t the kids and parents follow suit?

A coach first and foremost should be a teacher. Very plain, very very simple. They are there to send the children they coach on their way to adulthood with life skills, such as coping, stress management, community, and humility.

 I hear coaches rattling off their win loss records and championships all the while knowing they were in a league that guaranteed them a certain amount of victories before the season even began because of the league they coached in.

I am watching coaches wear their team’s gear year round and wanting people to ask them about the team they coach so they can have status, ego, and attention all rolled into “It’s all about me.”

I do not hear stories anymore from coaches about the late bloomer or the kid who came out of nowhere to have a great game in a championship. No stories about how no one would give this kid a chance and we said,” hell yeah, let her play.” Where is the: “The win was nice but did you see Molly? She played great. She hasn’t played much this year, but boy is that going to change.”

A very wise college coach once told me this: ALL great coaches have great players. The rest of us, eventually, are unemployed.

Let the kids be the center of attention. Model humble and inclusive behavior for them. The less serious you are about it the better you will be able to coach it.

This Sucks and I am Bitter

I write this week’s blog with a heavy heart. There is so much of what I see out there in the world of youth sports, and society in general, that I wish was not happening. Today, I want to talk about what children learned when they realized the end of their career was coming. What would they change about how they did things after their playing days were over?

 It was brought up to me recently, after one of my talks, if I thought the kids that got screwed over playing youth and high school sports, would behave and coach differently than the coaches they had. Would they play lots of kids? Would they have learned from their journey that it shouldn’t have been the way they were coached? These kids would have a chance to stop the Tsunami. My answer was not what he wanted to hear.

I have watched over 1000 high school and youth sports games. The new breed of coaches, and I am only talking about the ones who actually played high school and or possibly made it to college to play intercollegiate sports. The results have not been what I had hoped I would see.

Three people I was very close to all succumbed to different forms of cancer.  I talked to all three multiple times before they died. It’s an awful disease, and I hope researchers find a cure for it soon. In their last months on earth I was intrigued  as to how they would handle their remaining time. All three either remained themselves in some way shape or form. What struck me most though, was that all three showed no remorse or any inclination to make up for what they may have done in their lives. They did not show any appreciation or even wisdom from what they learned while going through this tremendously painful journey to the end of their lives. Repeatedly I see bitterness, angst and short tempers.

I am now watching  really good kids turn angry on a moment’s notice from seemingly small slights or misdeeds. Harsh negative comments abound about the world that they live in now. They fail to see the connection, or refuse to acknowledge, the tremendous negative impact that their youth and high school sports experience laid upon them.

It is time to hand the games and play back to the children. They need to be able to play freely with little input and structure from adults at a young age. Let them develop a base of desired activity that is fun and free. We are raising a generation of children in and out of sports, who have been told what to do, and how to do it.

This current paradigm my friends is not how children learn to be independent thinkers, creative, balanced, and coping adults.

We want children, and people in general, to look back over their past and appreciate the journey as well as trying to leave the world a little bit better place than when they were here. Peace of mind is victory.

Let’s have some more fun. It’s an awfully long dirt nap.

The End Game Truth

I have worked with, coached, mentored, and interacted with over 5000 kids on this journey to change the culture of the youth and high school sports environment. To say it has been a difficult journey so far would be quite an understatement. These kids and most well intentioned parents and coaches have been caught up in a Tsunami of epic proportions, that leaves a path of long term destruction the likes we have not seen in youth and high school sports ever, to this degree.  We have not been able to stem the tide as the problem of specialization, angst, and anger, over spending, injuries, status, and egos is running rampant. However, even as this problem grows, we here at Frozen shorts, along with a few others, work to chip away at the false foundation of youth and high school sports.

Over the next three blogs I am going to write about a few kids we have worked with, some we have observed, and others we have observed and how the journey worked out for them. Their journey’s are eerily similar as they were promised a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but have since learned that it is not so.

Hearing family members related to these kids brag about them and their athletic endeavors and make believe full athletic scholarships is okay as it shows a certain loyalty, however misguided. The real problem in our first case is that the scholarship offer never happened. When confronted with this fact the defensive actions of certain family members just reinforces why this problem is becoming more prevalent.

You see, people are told this child got full athletic scholarships that know this kid. They or people close to them have a child playing that sport. They immediately think,  great for that kid, BUT well IF my kid specializes, goes to showcases, gets a personal trainer, he/she can get the mythical DI athletic scholarship/. They don’t, he didn’t and I am the one coming out of this as the bad guy.

 Living off a lie is no way for a child to enter adulthood. There is lots of noise lately about respect, and some of it is justified. HOWEVER, way more important is trust. At some level, mostly when the kids get to the next level, they find out that what people were telling them about their athletic “greatness” was not true. Much of their youth was spent in a race that doesn’t exist. Then what? These kids don’t know who to trust and how to cope. Because they lack balance, a key component to success in relationships and life skills.

We see they hangover every day. Play for fun. Stop The Tsunami!

Ice Cream

I love ice cream. Let me explain. There is a certain ice cream franchise that I took my wonderful wife to the very first day she moved in to my house. I remember that day it as our real true anniversary. It was January 21, 1988. Yes, that’s right, in the dead of winter. The temperature that day was 10 degrees.

The girl working at the counter said I was the only person she had seen all day, and that included her boss. My girlfriend at the time, the Saint that she was, humored me by going out in the bitter cold for ice cream right after she had moved in. I’m sure it was not her idea of a celebration.

I have all the franchises phone numbers listed in my little white book along with rankings for each store. Friends will email me to check on which one I recommend when they have friends coming into town, IN THE SUMMER!

I recently was told this by a parent: “As long as my son keeps his grades up, and he loves playing this sport, we are going to keep doing it.” He described trips to Baltimore, which games got rained out or at least shortened, without any angst.  They have trips to Washington and Boston coming up. The tone and inflection in his voice showed ne that he was partnering with his child in this sport. He loved the status and travel name dropping or adult Olympics as I call it.

There were other people around when he told me about this, so I did not want to get into a discussion with him, We are not a gotcha company. I simply gave him my card and explained that his son could get better at his sport by not playing it.

 I have seen hundreds of children keep playing a sport just to get their parents approval!

For you reading here, let me explain.  It is unhealthy to play one sport year round, travel, elite whatever. Your chid’s chance of injury increases dramatically. Have you ever flown and it took all day? Remember how tired you were from just sitting around at the airports and on the plane? Now think of driving 7 hours in a car ONE WAY, and the effects of that on a young body.  Then they play multiple games over the weekend, then drive another 7 hours home.Lastly, life for children is about new experiences, meeting new people; fun, failing coping, and experimentation.

I love ice cream. I can’t eat it every day, it’s unhealthy.  I would get sick of it.

Sports are a microcosm of life.