Training of Youth Sports Coaches

About 25 years ago my daughter came of age to start participating in youth sports so my wife and I signed her up to play youth soccer and as part of the sign-up process I volunteered to coach. Now as a former youth soccer player myself (2nd grade through high school and college intermural), I couldn’t wait to impart my knowledge on another generation and have some fun. A few months after being approved as a coach I was given a roster, a few soccer balls, my teams uniforms and was told to “have fun”. From that time on I had very little contact with anyone from the league. There was a general coaches meeting about a week before the season started which included each division having a separate meeting to explain the rules of the particular division that you would be coaching in and that was it.

As a new coach in the organization, I wasn’t given any information regarding what the expectations were for the children. What were the children expected to know before moving onto the next level (keep in mind that these were 4- and 5-year old’s so there weren’t that many expectations)? Should I have practices during the week apart from our Saturday morning sessions (with the 4- and 5-year old’s, we would have an hour at the field on Saturday mornings with the first half hour dedicated to “practice” and the second half hour dedicated to the “game”)? In fact, I’m not even sure that anyone actually told me where the fields that we would be playing on were located. Because I had played youth soccer, I had some knowledge on how to run practices and teach the necessary skills; however, since the last time that I had actually participated in a youth soccer practice was years earlier a training in coaching youth, which I had never done, would have been very helpful.

A few years later I joined the Board of Directors and one of my first questions was why we didn’t have some sort of training program for both new and returning coaches? One of the board members stated that “it wasn’t our responsibility to teach the other coaches” and “they should just go to the library and check out a book on coaching youth soccer like I did”. It was at this time that I was determined to get the others to see the wisdom of developing a simple training program for the coaches in the league, both new and returning, so that we weren’t just throwing them to the wolves. Most of the arguments against developing any training programs for coaches was they were “volunteers” and we couldn’t require them to attend any mandatory trainings, while my argument was that this training would be a few hours out of the coach’s time and would definitely strengthen our league and assist the coaches to become more knowledgeable in the sport. Over the course of my years on the board we made some strides in developing a coaches training program and actually ran a few sessions that were strictly voluntary (as you can imagine these sessions were not very well attended) and the coaches that did attend were given the benefit of the trainer’s knowledge and were more prepared for what was needed to coach our youth.

According to the National Alliance for Youth Sports (NAYS), an organization that educates, equips and empowers youth sports leaders, volunteers and parents so all children can enjoy the lifelong benefits of sports, only 5% to 10% of youth sports coaches have received any relevant training and that most coaches sign up to coach because their own child is on the team and no one else volunteered to coach (something we did quite often with our league). So, what is the problem with a parent volunteering to coach and not having any training? Again, according to NAYS, quality trained coaches benefit children, youth sports and communities in countless ways. If volunteer coaches are comfortable and confident in their abilities to work with children and coach the sport, they will feel like - and be - an extremely valuable part of any youth sports program.

I can’t tell you how many times a parent approached me and told me that their child quit soccer (or any sport) because they didn’t feel that the coach was knowledgeable in the sport (generally that was the parents view), their child wasn’t learning anything and more importantly they weren’t having fun playing the sport (usually the #1 reason that children give for playing youth sports) and unfortunately, when it came to our soccer league, I knew this to be true because we would ask/beg a parent to coach a team, tell them that we would help them with resources, and then did very little to support said coach after the season started.

Jon Solomon of the Aspin Institute of Youth Sports writes what if there was a way to systematically measure youth coaches by personal development of their athletes and not wins and losses? He goes on to further state that sports provide such a unique opportunity to help youth develop physical, social, emotional and cognitive skills, yet to often this golden chance to build kids up gets squandered in our hypercompetitive youth sports culture. University of Maryland men’s soccer coach, Sascho Cirovski, says that “we have to redefine what the purpose of coaching is” and “we have to go back to the teaching and caring and serving portion of coaching”. Most children will play youth sports and some will maybe move onto play in high school while a few more will move onto play in college and even fewer still will go on to play at the professional level so it may be time to look at what our leagues are doing to help our youth sports coaches coach our children. In 2019 the Aspin Institute Sports & Society Program along with the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development released the “Calls for Coaches”, a resource to help youth sports coaches develop personal growth in their players. They wrote a white paper and came up with the “Calls for Coaches” which discusses, among other things the following:

1. Know every athlete’s story – Build positive adult-youth relationships;

2. Establish a supportive team culture – Create a safe space that supports social and emotional skill development;

3. Celebrate effort – Embody effective leadership strategies that emphasize effort, autonomy and learning;

4. Focus on the skills that matter – Prioritize and provide opportunities for direct skill building and practice;

5. Be a role model – Model good character and decision making;

6. Be coachable – Seek opportunities for support, training and professional development; and,

7. Join forces – Engage with families, schools and other community organizations.

This may seem like a lot of work for small youth sports organizations, most of which are run by volunteers; however, with 70% of our children dropping out of youth sports by the age of 13 what can we, as adults do to assist our youth sports coaches become a more valuable assets to our youth sports organizations? The Solomon article admits that this is a challenge. He states that it’s difficult to find volunteer coaches and administrators and that some coaches are forced into coaching and that each coach has different levels of passion, time and experience so asking these coaches to evaluate children’s personal development will be challenging. Second, youth sports culture is so rooted in the won/loss record, the all-star/travel teams, high school teams and scholarship offers that trying to measure success in dramatically different ways will face backlash. Finally, Solomon states that there is nothing wrong with being competitive in youth sports, as long as it doesn’t sacrifice the larger mission of using sports as a tool to aid the social and emotional growth of children. I agree with Mr. Solomon regarding children’s participation in competitive youth sports for many reasons (some of which will be discussed in future posts); however, I am also a huge proponent for the need in training youth sports coaches.

NAYS states that there are many reasons that volunteer coaches should be trained and a few of these reasons are listed below:

· Increase the amount of people interested in coaching – Knowing that training is available will make parents more likely to step forward to assist;

· Empower volunteers – Training volunteer coaches will familiarize them on your program’s philosophy and mission, which gives them the confidence to conduct fun and productive practice sessions and be effective on game day, while enabling youth athletes to grow and develop in the sport;

· Build a quality volunteer base – Rather that practice a “warm body” approach and accept all interested volunteers, training will help weed out those people that may not really want to be there for the right reasons from the ones that will be dedicated and true assets to your program;

· Set standards for coaches and the community – Being known as a program that requires its volunteer coaches to be trained will let others know that your program focuses on the safety and well-being of the young athletes, not the egos of the coaches;

· Children stay in sports longer – Studies tell us that athletes who played for untrained coaches drop out at a rate of 26%; whereas those athletes playing for a trained coach resulted in a significantly lower dropout rate of only 5%. Other studies show an increase in self-esteem for young athletes (under 12 years old) who play for a trained coach;

· Reducing legal liabilities associated with sport – Youth sports organizations that train coaches are taking an important step toward reducing risk in their programs while also reducing the chances that youngsters will suffer serious injuries; and finally,

· Positive experiences for youth athletes – The coach is the key to making a child’s experience fun, safe, educational and memorable for all the right reasons.

While I realize that this may be a lot for small local youth sports organizations to handle due to the fact that most coaches only coach a child for 2 or 3 years at most because either the coach or the child moves on and, as I stated earlier most youth sports organizations are run by volunteer administrators and coaches, I do feel that some of above can be incorporated into what our youth leagues are doing when bringing coaches on board. I feel that we need to do more to move away from the “win at all costs” way of coaching our youth and spend more time developing healthy children who will excel later in life with the lessons learned at a young age from trained youth sports coaches.