How much of coaching is figuring out who needs the “kick in the butt” v. the “pat on the back”? Which one were you?If you coached, which do you prefer to coach? In my limited experience as a player (b-ball) I was DEFINITELY a “pat on the back” kind of player.
High school cross country/track coach here. Every youth athlete responds to “a pat on the back”. Constant negativity will only result in unhappy and underperforming athletes.
An occasional spur may be needed, especially with new runners who are learning how to push themselves but it still tends to be more encouragement than a boot in the rear.
We will point out flaws and mistakes but it’s with the intent the athlete learn and we work with the kid to make corrections.
I coached kid’s cricket teams for years. A pat on the back is all that works to improve technique. Anytime you offer advice you start with a positive. So you don’t say, “Mark get your bat back earlier.” Instead you say, “Mark you are moving your feet really well but try to get your bat back first.”
Maybe once a season someone would get a few harsh words because they were playing up and disrupting something we were doing. But then I would have to figure out why what we were doing was boring and change it up somehow.
I coached baseball. I never kicked anyone in the butt. If they don’t want to learn the game, you can not force them. I did have a few mothers I would have liked to kick in the butt. They were a lot worse than the fathers.
Youth generally need encouragement, not punishment.
A few Dopers in other threads have mentioned recently that there is an absolutely huge metric assload of evidence that children react better to reinforcement than they do to punishment. That absolutely was true for me, had been true of any kid I’ve worked with, and indeed in my experience is quite often true of adults.
Encourage, encourage, encourage, and actually teach. God, how many coaches have I seen say things like “Keep your elbow up, keep your eye on the ball” or “Get down on those grounders”? TEACH THE PLAYER HOW TO DO THAT. Give her/him techniques. Show them precisely how to place their feet, hold the bat, prepare for the ball.
Every now and then a kick in the ass is needed… but I believe it only works for a quick attitude adjustment, NOT skills acquisition. Yelling at a kid because he committed an error is just stupid. But if he’s loafing, taking him aside and saying “You aren’t hustling, and that’s disrespectful to me, your teammates, and the game. Hustle.” is - once in a great while - necessary.
Of course if a kid is actually BAD, e.g. punches someone or something, that’s a different situation.
The fact is the team will do the ass kicking. As a coach, when a player got thrown out stretching a single when the team was behind ,you would talk about if firmly as a teaching moment. Then when he sat on the bench, the other players would ask him what the well he was thinking about and tell him what a selfish jerk he was. They would say things you never could.
Our coaches supplied certain team members with illegal drugs.
They got busted the year after I graduated.
I coach various levels of basketball from domestic to representative in Australia. I am what is called a positive coach but there are times [after you have their trust] that you can turn to a player and say “Mate you had better get your act togethor or it’s pine for the next two games”.
One trick I have used with lots of players is to say “Love what you are doing on defensive rebounds, what I want you to work on is boxing the player out more”. So I have given a positive message and then followed up with a suggestion, this works very well. Notice I did not say but etc as it negates the positive statement at the start.
Screaming, ranting, abusive coaches are crap and have no place in junior sport. Although they are fun to wind up and beat, it is the kids that seem to suffer. A sideways look or saying you are dissapointed in someone seems to work better than abuse.
Me as a coach would pull the team aside and tell them that he is wearing the same jersey as them and that are not without sin. Having team mates berate team mates leads to fractured teams, maybe not as important in baseball but will tear apart a basketball or aussie rules footy team.
Abusing team meates is not on.
Seconding what sisu said.
Taunting, trash talk, negativity towards a teammate is not allowed and is so stated in the team rules.
Baseball coach for a couple decades here.
My goal is always to be as positive as possible, encouraging my kids, rather than berating them, and trying to make the main focus development and having fun. I firmly believe that success and winning are direct consequences of correct preparation and training, and the fact that my team has not finished lower than 3rd place in the last decade I think demonstrates at least some of that. Teach the kids how to play, give them an opportunity to develop and learn, which includes giving them a chance to fail now and then, and your end product will be better.
Now, I will also let the boys have it when I’m not happy with what I’m seeing. Typically, if I’m going to do some criticizing, I will do it to the entire team and I won’t single anyone out, and almost without exception, if I’m giving the kids shit, it’s because they’re not giving me what I consider to be an acceptable effort. Play as hard as you can and I don’t care what the result was; screw around and act like you don’t give a rat’s ass and I will have something to say, and then usually bench somebody for the remainder of that game. But I try to pick my spots.
Not what i am talking about. they don’t have to berate anybody, but they will show they were not happy with mental mistakes. Hell my mens softball players would ask a guy what the hell he was thinking about when he threw in back of a runner. They just want him to know he made a mistake and he should not repeat it.
I think generally people need positive encouragement, no matter the age. But all criticism, positive or negative, is a form of currency. You build up enough of one to spend on the other, and you can’t buy either without trust. Kind words from a harsh coach can be every bit as powerful as any other coaching. But again, they have to trust that the coach is looking out for them and is actually trying to help.
A habitually positive coach will eventually lose command of the players just as a habitually negative one will, albeit more slowly. In my experience, coaches were mostly motivators and teachers, and game planners a distant second.
I coached girl’s volleyball (my daughter’s team). I got these girls young enough where the first lesson was, “This is a volleyball.” up until the girls got into high school. In the first years it was 100% *pat on the back[/]. By the end it was 95% pat, 5% kick. Because these girls had been coached by me for so long, they would get too comfortable sometimes and needed to be reminded that I knew more about volleyball than they did and that I was the boss.
That said, kick didn’t mean demeaning the player with insults or curses. It did mean sitting the player, or giving them extra PT, or dismissing them from practice (which would cut playing time).
As a player, what I tried to use to kick myself (and rarely the team) when I was playing poorly was never ‘you suck’, but rather ‘You can do better than this! Come on!’.
I have coached a lot of youth soccer and helped out some with baseball. Mostly I coached skills and tactics. Encouragement is part of it, but only as a reinforcement. I’m not really the type to go negative, e.g., yelling or whatever, but also don’t mind telling a player when they’re being a jerk or calling out my players for their crap.
I coached a HS traveling baseball team for a few years. These were kids who were typically top performers with hopes of playing at the collegiate level, so kicking their butts was not usually necessary.
Kicking their *parents’ *butts, on the other hand, would have been quite helpful. Most parents were pretty good, but there are always a couple baseball dads who feel like they must be in the dugout acting as an asst. coach. It didn’t take long to institute the no-parents-in-the-dugout rule.
The players, though, really were just fine tuning their skills and trying to get some recognition, so I provided a little encouragement and A LOT of instruction. Kicking these kids’ butts would not have done any good. The worst thing I could do to them was sit their butt on the bench. If a kid did throw a tantrem, throw his glove, helmet, bat, whatever was in his hand when something went wrong, I’d just tell him that if a college coach was watching right now, you just got scratched off of his list. That message always sunk in.
well since my playing was limited to golf there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot that ass chewing was going to accomplish. and since they couldn’t “coach” during the actual round you didn’t have to worry about coach getting in your grill and questioning why you hit 6 iron instead of 5. and since we were typically all over the durn place depending on tee times he was lucky to see you play two or three holes.
and even then afterwards it wasn’t like “numbskull”. it was more along the lines of let’s work on your hand postioning or alignment.
about the only time i got chastised was in an in school qualifying tournament and i made the mistake of wearing jeans. he reminded me that was not the look we were trying to cultivate on the golf course and to not do it again or i would be sat down.
This is approximately the level of baseball I’m coaching as well – around a quarter to a third of the kids on my team graduate to a college program every year, so it’s pretty high level ball. A kid who graduated from our team in 2009 was his university team’s rookie of the year and won an NAIA Gold Glove in 2010, makinh imh the only freshman and the only Canadian to win that honour this year, which was very nice to see.
As you said, athletes like that don’t typically require a lot of motivation to do the work needed to succeed. However, I’ve been stunned at times by the lack of effort some kids will put in who plan to get somewhere – and without exception, those kids are disappointed. We had a solid young pitcher a few years back who was throwing in the mid- to high- 80s who landed a spot with Wayne State. I had spent 3 solid years badgering this kid to work harder on his fundamentals, make certain adjustments, and listen when the coach was trying to tell him something but he wanted none of it. He was sent home after one semester. And another kid who just graduated from our program was adamant that he HAD to go to college in Texas to play ball and that it HAD to be a NCAA Div 1 school. But he was virtually uncoachable, didn’t have anywhere near the skill set to get to that level, and also lacked the work ethic to attract any interest. Surprise, suprise, he not only couldn’t find a spot anywhere in Texas that would have him, but couldn’t find a college program anywhere that would accept him. He was stunned, but has now apparently shifted his focus to becoming the next big thing in MMA.
Your comments on parents are also interesting. As team policy, we spend almost as much time scouting parents as we do scouting kids when we’re in pre-draft evaluations every spring. If we hear of a problem parent, we scratch that kid off our list – some other team can deal with the hassles. Subsequently, we sometimes step away from some blue-chip talent, but we also don’t have all that extra grief, as a general rule. Occasionally we still wind up with a difficult parent, which can be particularly difficult if their “coaching” from the sidelines is at odds with what we’re trying to do within our system, but for the most part, we generally leave the problem children and problem parents to the rest of the league to handle. And if you don’t have a uniform on, you don’t get in my dugout – if the Lord Jesus showed up at a game and wanted to hang out in my dugout, he would have to throw on a jersey, some pants and socks, and put a cap on with the brim pointed forward. Parents who aren’t officially approved coaches don’t get in there unless their kid is lying on the bench with a snapped tibia.
D_Odds, did her teammates believe (even sub-consciously) that you went easier on your daughter?