How a coach can help make or break your kid's sports experience

I don't want to fall behind.

Raise your hand if you have had that thought in relation to your kids’ sports experiences.

It was a notion brought up by performance psychologist Michael Gervais on a recent Youth Inc. podcast.

"I think there's a lot of parents that don't want to take the path they're taking, but they look around and see no reasonable alternative, so there's this keeping up with the Joneses effect," host and moderator Greg Olsen responded.

Olsen, a former NFL tight end turned dad of three school-aged kids, admits to being one of those parents who sometimes feels trapped by that line of thinking. They don’t love early sports specialization, they don’t love traveling out of town every weekend for events, but they sign up for that kind of life anyway.

“Are you doing this because you feel like you have no other alternative?” Olsen says. “Or are you doing this because you really in your heart think this is the best path? I think their answer if they're being honest was, ‘We don't want to do this, but we don't know what else to do.’ ”

Olsen has a word of advice: Pause. I had an opportunity to do so while filling out the Aspen Institute’s National Youth Sport Parent Survey this past week.

Aspen, through its Project Play initiative, assists leaders in building healthy communities through sports. It developed the survey to assess the crucial role parents play on children’s developmental outcomes.

One survey question in particular helped me reflect on decisions my wife and I have made that have influenced the journeys of our two sons (ages 17 and 14):

How do you find the “right” coach?

Coaches can profoundly affect how young athletes develop and determine whether they continue to play sports. When we closely watch their interactions with players, our kids’ needs become clearer.

Aspen provides 10 coaching philosophies and asks parents to rank them by importance. Here's how you can use each philosophy to find the best situation for your child.

10. Helping athletes learn life skills

Building life skills was not something I thought about much when I played organized sports, or even when I started signing my kids up for them.

But in time, we come to realize valuable intangibles we get from them – teamwork, perseverance, moving on from failure and forging independence.

As you get more experienced as a coach, you learn how to bring out these qualities in your players.

Kids learn life skills when a coach encourages them to talk to him or her independently about playing time or a desire to try another position. If we resist the urge to stay out of the discussion, even just standing nearby but not as part of it, we encourage autonomy.

As kids get older, a coach with an eye to long-term development might allow them to resolve conflicts in the dugout or on the sidelines on their own. What looks like an unfolding dispute might also be a coach first giving a teammate an opportunity to step in to try and resolve it.

9. Supporting athletes in being healthy and fit

When we enjoy playing sports, we don’t really think about the physical benefits we are getting from them. But when does physical activity become much less fun?

We can feel the motivational effects when a coach promotes it as a way to get better: Through offseason or off-day weightlifting or through sprints after practice. The extra work, and a player’s willingness to do it on his or her own, becomes critical for development and advancement in high school and college.

Watch for the distinction, though, between the coach who has the team run or do push-ups or planks after practice as a means of punishment.

This practice, often an attempt to assert authority, can also create a negative connection with sports.

Coach Steve: How much is too much with extra workouts for youth and adolescent athletes?

8. Helping athletes learn sports-specific skills

Watch how a coach runs practice. Is everyone active and engaged?

Some kids can stay focused and motivated through coaches’ drills, but there are other ways to get reps.

More than 15 years ago, when families were streaming out of their sport, USA Hockey officials added a healthy mix of small-area games to practices.

“We take our fun pretty seriously,” says Ken Martel, senior director for player and coach development for USA Hockey. “We've really looked at what keeps kids coming back. If they're not having fun, they’re not enjoying the experience, they vote with their feet. They just walk away.”

USA Hockey has found the in-practice competition has kept kids playing hockey and made them better at it in the long term.

“Look, if your passion’s not ice hockey, you're never going to really turn out to be a great player if you don't truly love it,” Martel says.

The competitive environment, Gervais offered to Olsen on the podcast, also encourages independent thinking and problem solving that is more conducive to learning than rote instruction.

7. Creating a safe environment to prevent injuries

Parents of youth athletes are often dogged by the question of whether to have their child specialize in a sport. Club coaches are asking them to play one sport exclusively, or for at least 10 months out of the year.

Medical professionals are still learning about the health consequences of early sports specialization. We know, though, that focusing on one sport can make your kid a lot better at it, but it also can drive him or her out of sports. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends kids take 2 to 3 months off a year from any specific sport to help keep it fresh.

“We’re not telling people that they have to take three consecutive months off,” says sports medicine physician Joel Brenner, co-author of a recent AAP paper entitled "Overuse Injuries, Overtraining, and Burnout in Young Athletes.”

“It could be broken up (as a) month here, month there. They should also look at what the professional athletes do. They all have an offseason, so they’re letting their bodies recover, they’re letting their minds recover, and professional athletes don’t have growing bodies, growing bones and muscles.”

6. Making sure athletes have fun

There’s that word again. Exercise scientist Amanda Visek found in an innovative study of kid athletes from ages 8 to 19 that “fun” is more than a smile during a game or a shared laugh with teammates. It’s a state kids feel that helps them get the most out of their ability.

The process of having fun, the study found, is something a coach facilitates through encouragement, effort and sportsmanship.

"Positive coaching” was one of the three highest rated dimensions of fun among the 142 kids who participated in the “Fun Maps” study.

What is a positive coach?

The most common quality kids attributed to one is someone who treats them with respect.

You’ve probably seen a youth coach pull a kid from a game immediately after he or she makes a mistake. I look for ones who allow my kids to try their best and realize the coach is behind them when they make one.

5. Winning games or competitions

“Do you play to not lose? Or do you play to win? Let’s have that mentality here.”

It’s a line you might hear, in some form or fashion, at thousands of fields across the United States.

I heard it from a soccer coach as I walked my dog past a field last summer. He was talking to a team of girls who couldn’t have been more than 10.

There is nothing wrong with playing to win in youth sports, but we can look for coaches who strive for winning in a productive fashion.I prefer the John Wooden model, where a coach equates his or her team’s success with putting forth one’s best effort to achieve his or her full potential.

“Trying hard” was another top fun factor Visek found in her study. Actual winning was much farther down the list.

Coach Steve: How do I deal with a bad coach? Here are three steps

4. Promoting good sportsmanship

We root hard for our kids to win, but in our hearts we know we want them to have the opportunity to learn how to lose gracefully, too. Right?

We know sportsmanship isn’t practiced enough in youth sports. Parent spectators often can’t help but scream at officials.

What we don’t realize, perhaps, is how much a coach controls the environment at a game.

“That coach who is ranting and raving up and down the sideline, gesturing and emotionally reacting to calls and non-calls,” Mark Uyl, the executive director of the Michigan High School Athletic Association, told USA TODAY Sports last fall, “I can tell you 100 percent of the time, that tends to inflame that school’s fan base.

“The way that coaches act,” he says, “has a direct correlation for how their spectators act.”

Remember, our kids are always watching the coach, and kids are much more impressionable than parents.

3. Distributing practice and competition time fairly

Project Play’s parent survey has a section where you are asked to calculate the average number of minutes you commit to a typical day of sports competition for a child.

Factoring in playing and drive time, laundering clothes, coordinating with other parents and eating before, after or in between games, I came up with 455 minutes per son for their travel baseball.

There are coaches who are satisfied to have you spend those minutes knowing your son or daughter will sit on the bench.

In high school, where winning is the name of the game, some kids are going to play a lot more than others. But in a club team setting, where development and showcasing talent for college coaches is more vital, I want my kid to play.

2. Fostering a love of sport

Kids in Norway only play sports recreationally before age 13, giving them time to develop a love of them.

Youth sports participation in the country is around 90%. In the USA, where club sports dominate from an early age and push some kids away, team sports participation is less than half of that.

Norway won an Olympic-high 37 medals (including 16 golds) at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

The takeaway for us: Our early sports experiences are about enjoyment. Coaches who understand that idea help kids improve over the long term without worrying too much about each day’s result.

“I think the key to all sport achievement,” Olsen, a three-time NFL Pro Bowl tight end, said on his recent podcast, “(are) the kids who improve the longest - not the fastest, not the most severe – the kids who just continue to creep up in perpetuity, just forever, they win.”

1. Creating a sense of belonging through sport

Why does your son or daughter play sports? If you ask them, they might shrug and tell you because they like it.

But if a coach is creating a valuable experience for them, you’ll notice it in the actions of their team.

Think of the immediate aftermath of the 1983 NCAA men’s basketball championship, when NC State player Lorenzo Charles secures a stunning win over Houston with a buzzer-beating dunk.

NC State coach Jim Valvano starts racing around the court. He initially finds no one to hug because all of his players are hugging each other.

It's a feeling we should give all of our kids a chance to have through sports.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sports coaching philosophies to help find best fit for your child