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    22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career: For Parents of High School Athletes
    22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career: For Parents of High School Athletes
    22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career: For Parents of High School Athletes
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career: For Parents of High School Athletes

    By Janis B. Meredith

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    About this ebook

    It is possible for every high school athlete to have a successful high school career. It will not be easy. It will not always be fun. It may not look exactly as you want it to look, but it can be successful. Here are 22 ways to help your high school athlete achieve that success.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJul 15, 2014
    ISBN9781483533605
    22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career: For Parents of High School Athletes

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      Book preview

      22 Ways to Help Your Teen Have a Successful High School Sports Career - Janis B. Meredith

      success.

      #1 Accept That You and the Coach Have Different Jobs

      The opportunities for you to coach your child’s team become less and less as he or she moves up to high school. But many parents are still not ready to relinquish that job entirely to the coach. They hang on to the notion that they should still be coaching their kids, on the sidelines, at home, or in the car before and after games.

      But if you are not the official coach of the team, then it is time for you to take off your coaching hat and step aside so that the coach can do his or her job. You have a much more important job to do now. As a high school sports parent, your job description actually becomes pretty simple: support your child, the team, and the coach. That’s it.

      The coach’s job, on the other hand, is more complex:

      Teach skills

      Create team unity and focus on the team as a whole

      Help kids see that hard work can be fun

      Stretch kids to grow in character

      Push the kids to perform to the best of their ability

      Coach the team to play hard and hopefully win

      Communicate to parents (not during practices and games!)

      Unfortunately, most parents do not stick to their job description. They blur the lines and step over into the coach’s territory and try to take over some of his or her jobs. You’ve probably seen it:

      Parents who shout and coach from the sidelines.

      Parents who insist their child work on skills outside of practices and games.

      Parents who compare, complain, and disrupt team unity.

      Parents and coaches should be on the same team when it comes to youth sports. But being on the same team does not mean they have the same jobs. Yes, you should both be all about helping kids grow, learn, and have fun in competition, but that is where the similarities should end.

      For your high school athlete to have the best sports experience possible, you and the coach must partner together, doing what is best for the kids—not what is best for your egos or insecurities. When that happens, then the real winners of the game will be your kids.

      Giving Up Control

      Part of the problem is that parents do not like giving up control. But that is a must for youth sports parents if they want to help their kids develop character.

      When our kids are little, there is a lot we can control: what they eat, how they dress, where they go to school, how much allowance they get. Many parents stay in control mode when it comes to youth sports. And that is usually when the troubles start.

      And when our kids get to high school, we can barely control them, much less their sports careers, although many parents still try.

      The only problem is that, in youth sports there are a lot of things we simply cannot control. I think that’s why we make so much noise at games, get so mad at coaches, or push our kids when we really should lay off. We are frustrated that things are not going the way we want them to or think they should. It’s our inability to control things that drives us crazy.

      Maybe that’s why so many parents have trouble letting the coach do his or her job and not interfering. You are struggling to give up control.

      When you let the coach do his or her job, you are freed up to love, encourage, and support your athlete through the challenges he or she will inevitably face in a high school sports career.

      #2 Prepare for Huge Mental Battles

      You’ve probably heard coaches and athletes say that sports are much more mental than physical. Youth sports are more than skill, uniforms, team chemistry, coaching philosophy, and great snacks. In fact, experts say that it’s actually more of a mind game than anything else: 80 percent mental and 20 percent physical. Gaining the mental edge in sports will be an ongoing challenge for your child. I’m not sure that the battle ever ends. I guess you’d have to ask LeBron James, Peyton Manning or Tiger Woods about that.

      The mental game includes the ability to focus, move past mistakes, and persist through adversity. It involves dealing with anger, low self-esteem, head games, and perfectionism. There are boundless experts out there ready to help your child and you may feel the need to enlist their professional help, but as a mom of three athletes who played sports from preschool through college, I believe that even without a psychology degree, you can help your child win the mind game.

      Winning at Head Games

      I’ve seen quite a lot of head games played by coaches or teammates over my years of sports parenting. When I say head games, I’m talking about the tactics used to motivate a player. Coaches may mess with your child’s head in an attempt to motivate because they think neither encouragement nor instruction is producing the results they want.

      When my daughter played high school volleyball, her coach pulled her from her starting libero spot early in the season and replaced her with a girl who’d never played that position before. He told her as he did it that he was trying to light a fire under her butt. He was most definitely messing with her head, but at least he was honest enough to admit it!

      I’m married to a man who coached for twenty-eight years and I understand that sometimes coaches try different approaches to help a player push himself or herself. Coaches may call it motivation, but players and parents may see it as head games. If that’s the case, it is most likely causing frustration or confusion for your child.

      How can you help your child win at these head games?

      Let him vent his frustrations at the head games and then talk with him about what the coach might be trying to accomplish. It’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s important to teach your child that criticism can be constructive and maybe there’s something he should be doing that would improve his performance.

      When my libero daughter was benched for that one game, I sat down and listened to her cry and then I asked her what her choices were. She concluded that she could quit or she could work hard and get her spot back. She chose the latter and, even though she was angry with her coach for his head-game tactic, she admitted later that it actually did light a fire under her butt. And yes, she got her starting spot back.

      Encourage your child to focus on playing his best for his own satisfaction, not just for the coach.Unfortunately, some coaches are hard to please and if your child lives for his coach’s approval, he may constantly be disappointed and feel he’s never measuring up.

      My son played for a coach once who never seemed happy with what my son did. We told him that he should not play just to please his coach, but for other reasons. For him, it was for God, for his own feeling of accomplishment, and for his love of the game. Coaches will come and go, but hopefully your child’s love for the game will continue.

      Remind your child to stay the course and do what he needs to do to improve his game. Practice, practice, practice, and ignore the head games.

      Don’t keep stirring the pot. What may start out as a molehill to your child can easily become a mountain if you continue to rehash and discuss and get upset and question and analyze the head-games dilemma. This will only distract your child from focusing on improving his skills and being a team player.

      Introduce Your Child to the Imposter

      The other day I read a chapter from The 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry. It shed some light on the idea of mental toughness in athletes and why kids struggle with it so much. Think through this with me and perhaps you’ll see how you can help your child grasp some concepts that might increase his mental toughness.

      Who Is The Imposter?

      Ask your child to think of a recent peak moment, a time when everything went great and when he felt he was playing his A game. Every athlete has these mountaintop experiences. I remember some with my own kids: the match when my libero daughter had thirty-seven digs, the football game when my son threw three touchdown passes for more than 300 yards, the softball game when my daughter hit a grand slam home run.

      When kids have games like that, they may

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