Random Thoughts on Youth Sports

This past Sunday, after my NCAA bracket was busted by St. Peter’s wins over Kentucky and Murray State and Richmond University beating Iowa and with four of my six fantasy golfers not making the cut, I was flipping channels deciding what I wanted to watch and ended up watching two movies, The Gridiron Gang and Coach Carter. I’ve watched these movies maybe a dozen times; however, for some reason this time I watched them through a different lens. Both movies deal with young adults who are more or less forgotten by society and yet by just having a caring adult come into their lives it gives them the confidence needed to become successful members of society.

The Gridiron Gang is about a group of boys who are in a California youth detention camp where a probation officer named Sean Porter, played by The Rock, puts together a football team made up of tough juvenile offenders in order to teach the boys self-confidence and teamwork and by playing on this football team, the participants learn self-respect and responsibility. Coach Porter does this despite pushback from the administrators who run the facility. Coach Carter is about a California high school basketball coach who goes back to coach his high school alma mater’s basketball team and during the season suspends the teams undefeated season due to the player’s poor academic progress. Why was I suddenly intrigued by these movies after multiple viewings? As I thought about this, I think that it was a simple premise that if someone pays attention to a child and shows some belief in them, then they can accomplish anything that they want to accomplish.

This past summer I attended the “Way of Champions” conference run by The Changing the Game Organization. The premise of the conference was the importance of coaches in youth sports and the difference that a youth sports coach can make in a child’s life. Coaches don’t know how powerful and influential they can be just by doing the simple things and a coach’s influence is never neutral, it’s always either positive or negative. Watching these movies, I was thinking back on my coaching days and some of the youngsters that I coached, some who came from broken homes and tough situations and how I tried to take a little extra time with them by asking them about their day or how they were feeling on that particular day. I wasn’t doing this to pry, but to let them know, without saying as much, that I cared about them beyond the field of play. Granted, at the younger ages, they may not have understood what I was trying to do, but as they got older and would see me at the field, while walking on the street, or while eating at a restaurant with my family, most of the children would stop by to tell me how they were doing, not only on the of field to play, but in school and life. Over the past few years, I've actually run into a few former players, who are now adults with children of their own, and the first question they ask me is 1) am I still coaching and 2) can I coach their child. Imagine the feeling that I get when they ask me those two simple questions.

Now, I didn’t tell that story to make me sound like some great humanitarian, but rather to show that by displaying a little compassion I was able to make a difference in their lives, just like Sean Porter and Ken Carter did for their players. Sean Porter went above and beyond to make his ragtag group of players a cohesive team that believed in themselves and along the way helped a number of players beat the cycle of recidivism and become productive members of society. In Ken Carter’s case, he had his players sign contracts that they would maintain a 2.5 GPA in order to stay on the team and when he finds out the players are cutting classes and not holding up their end of the contract, he shuts the season down and locks the team out of the gym. Much like Sean Porter, he takes this stand in the face of pushback from school administration, teachers, the players parents and the public. At one point school’s principal basically tells Coach Carter that his players have no chances of going to college. Coach Carter never agrees with that assessment and at the end of the movie we learn that six of his players go on to college with five of them earning scholarships. All Sean Porter and Ken Carter did was show these youth that they could do whatever they dreamed of as long as they worked hard for what they wanted.

One of the reasons that I am doing these blogs is that I hope to have people see that we need to change the model from the one that is currently dominating youth sports which is a “win at all costs”, travel/elite team centric, eliminate all the children who aren’t “good” model to one where the skills that the children learn while participating in youth sports can be transferred for use in later life, skills such as teamwork, understanding and compassion. Youth sports seem to have become more about the coach’s ego and winning then teaching and helping our children to become better people and I feel that we are missing the boat. Youth sports is a laboratory where we should concentrate on building better people and not necessarily better athletes. I feel that coaches need to work to build relationships with the children that they are coaching, and while I realize that might be hard considering that we might only coach a child for a year or two, maybe three at the most, that short period of time could make a difference in a child’s life and that is what we, as coaches should be striving for.