How (not) to root for your child-athlete

Youth sports has been hot in the Baton Rouge area for a long time, and the long-term effect has shown as players have grown up and starred at higher levels.

Gary Buete and Bo Cassidy of the Baton Rouge Soccer Association hoped to build a solid foundation for the coaches and athletes in their corner of that world.

So Cassidy, who has coached in the BRSA for years and is now the group’s director of marketing and development, invited his friend Jeremy Boone of Athlete By Design to Baton Rouge recently to give parents and coaches a blueprint to follow.

Boone is a long-time performance coach who wrote Parent Your Best, a book he says was meant to “establish guard rails for effective decision-making and better behavior for parenting excellence.”

“My whole vision is to reshape this crazy culture of youth sports,” Boone says. “In order to do that, you have to reach out to the coaches, the clubs [and] the organizations as well as the parents.”

This message was exactly what Cassidy wanted the BRSA community to hear.

“We’re sort of seeing the trend in youth sports with kids not always having a great experience,” Cassidy says. “Not being able to retain players and have a positive experience usually deals with the players’ relationship with the coach and the coaches’ relationships with the parents.

“At Baton Rouge soccer, we always try to do a good job of building those relationships, educating our parents and educating our coaching staffs to not let the environment become like what you see on YouTube or get to the extreme,” Cassidy says. “We also wanted to provide education for parents how they can build relationships with their children through sports and help their children succeed.”

After his visit to Baton Rouge, Boone said he was impressed by the proactive attitude he saw about reshaping the culture of youth sports.

“Parents were very engaged and asked questions,” he said. “It was obvious they want the best for the kids and were open and receptive to learning different ways to help them succeed in soccer and whatever else they choose to do. I was very encouraged by what I heard from the core group.”

The catch phrase for Boone’s model is, “Together I’ll play better,” with a focus on open lines of communication about basic tenets that are controllable: Hard work, effort, focus and commitment.

Common parenting pitfalls

Comparing: Talking to kids after a game and comparing their performance to an older sibling or another kid on the team.

Enabling: Teach kids to make good choices. Allow them to fail in order to become better decision-makers.

Correcting: Some parents try to be the coach, creating a conflict among adults that confuses the child.

Blaming: Making excuses or blaming a coach for playing favorites or a referee for a way a game was called.

Controlling: Living vicariously by preparing the path for a child and not preparing the child for the path.

Entitlement: When parents feel like they should have a voice in playing time because they’ve paid good money to give their kids the chance to participate.

The best approach, Boone says, is to go back to the baseline, establish what needs to be emphasized and stick to a plan made with your child.

“There’s a tendency to not define what competition is,” Boone says. “We live it, but we never sit down and talk with our children about it and explain what it means to them. Our biggest goal is how we can help parents be a partner in their child’s potential.”

athletebydesign.com

parentyourbest.com