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Growing Athletes: A Father's 15-Year Journey from T-Ball to Hard Ball
Growing Athletes: A Father's 15-Year Journey from T-Ball to Hard Ball
Growing Athletes: A Father's 15-Year Journey from T-Ball to Hard Ball
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Growing Athletes: A Father's 15-Year Journey from T-Ball to Hard Ball

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This book offers a father's personal account of his experiences in shepherding his two sons through the baffling, wacky, frustrating, disappointing yet often wonderful world of youth sports. The book takes a chronological accounting of what they went through as a family, from the earliest days of T-ball all the way through varsity participation in high school. Over the course of the book, the author introduces the reader to some two-dozen powerful principles of behavior that help explain: what makes a good (or bad) coach, why practice (and what kind of practice) is so important, how parents can help support their youth athlete without smothering them, how to acquire and use information to help foster one's child's success, and most importantly, how to keep it fun. While the primary focus is on baseball, the author's family experiences with other sports (basketball, football, soccer) are also covered. Recent research on such topics as why kids quit sports, sports injuries, types of playing opportunities (e.g., club teams, All-Stars) is also discussed. The prime focus of the book is to give parents some useful tips on keeping their kids interested in continued sports participation, having fun and achieving success, all the way through high school. A child doesn't have to be a superior athlete to have success in sports, if his or her parents adhere to the basic principles of behavior management outlined in this book. Along the way, the author recounts his own experiences as coach, cheerleader, advocate, therapist, and always - parent. Though grown now, the author's sons have continued to reap the rewards from having played organized sports on a year-round basis from the age of 5 until high school graduation, and beyond. The book describes what things worked, and what didn't work and why, as our family went through this unforgettable journey.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateSep 21, 2015
ISBN9781483558639
Growing Athletes: A Father's 15-Year Journey from T-Ball to Hard Ball

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    Growing Athletes - V. Alan Spiker

    Luck

    PREFACE

    This was not the book I intended to write. When I first thought about writing about my sports experiences with our two boys, more than eight years ago now, I imagined that I would craft a chronicle that was something along the lines of Michael Lewis meets Dave Barry. That is, I was hoping to write an account that would be clever and informative, like the stuff Lewis (of Moneyball fame) writes, yet amusingly anecdotal like some of Dave Barry’s better work.

    Unfortunately, I’m not as smart as Lewis or as funny as Barry. What I am, though, is a father who really was fully engaged in our two kids’ sporting lives for 15 straight years. I’m also an applied psychologist who spent more than 30 years analyzing how people can work smarter and better. Putting these two facets together, you end up with the book that you have before you. It’s essentially a chronologically-arranged, narrative account of how we prepared our two boys from the earliest stages of sports, before T-ball even, to be able to play varsity ball in high school. My story also includes descriptions of what happened between those two endpoints. Along the way, I’ve tried to infuse my chronicle with relevant psychological research findings – such as what we presently know about how people learn, practice, and develop skills – as well as the latest survey data concerning sports participation rates and related topics (e.g., injuries).

    The result is an account that is somewhat less personal than I originally intended – probably a good thing – and buttressed with more analysis and science than I expected. But like the scorpion and frog parable, you are what you are and it’s hard to get too far from that. Hopefully this book will make it across the stream without stinging itself to death. That assessment, however, is up to the reader. I can only say that I did my best, and tried to give an accurate accounting of my experience at the time, supplemented by whatever insights I’ve gained in the ensuing eight years.

    The book is a little preachy at times, and I’m sorry about that. In describing what I believed to be the best elements of youth sports, I found myself on my high horse from time to time. I tried to dismount quickly when that happened, but sometimes you just want to make sure the choir hears you.

    The book is also a fairly positive accounting of youth sports, which I’m not sorry about. For the people who know me best, this will no doubt come as a surprise. As someone who’s known to be a fairly negative person and a bit of a complainer, I wanted to do something out of character yet be heartfelt about it. So, this story is not an expose of the dark side of youth sports. You can find that perspective in lots of places, but it won’t be here. Now it may be that I’ve perhaps given a more positive account of things than they actually were. Possibly, but I’ve tried to take the long view here as much as possible.

    Finally, I want to make it clear that I’ve written this book primarily for my family. It’s really the only way I know to tell my wife and two boys, and their families, what this intensive and long-lasting sports experience meant to me. So in that sense, you can consider this book to be a legacy piece of sorts. Throughout these 300-odd pages, I’ve revealed some aspects of myself I thought were relevant to the journey that I went on. I’ve tried to do it in a way that doesn’t embarrass anybody, except perhaps me. I hope I’ve achieved that.

    PROLOGUE

    My car was traveling down the freeway, ambling along with a mind of its own. Mine was elsewhere. It was the day of my son’s baseball game. Like all game days, I had this funny feeling in my stomach that had been there since I woke up. A mix of nerves and excitement, controlled by a biochemical blanket that seemed to undulate, getting more intense as the start of the game drew near. It was similar to how I felt before having to talk in front of a large group of people, something I never really enjoyed but occasionally had to do for my work. The difference, though, was that my game day feeling contained a salient element of excitement that something wonderful might occur. You just never knew. It was the uncertainty that the game could be really good, really bad, or something in-between. It was pretty much the unknown on steroids. Powerful stuff and a far cry from any feelings I had on other, non-game days, when most things are more certain or at least biochemically neutral. But game day was always different, at least for me.

    But this game day was something very different. It was my youngest boy’s last baseball game, and last game period. A senior in high school, he would not be playing anymore, so this was it. No more game days for me. So my typical game day feeling was colored with a strange ingredient of sadness and relief. This was going to be the last game, after 15 years of watching my two boys play baseball, basketball, soccer, and football, beginning when my oldest was six. My drive today was the culmination of 15 years of watching, transporting, cheering, worrying, laughing, crying, hovering, cajoling, and otherwise doing all those strange things which parents of child athletes do.

    In the midst of my daydreaming and stomach churning, out of the corner of my eye I noticed the temperature gauge in the car drop precipitously, some 10 degrees, in only a few minutes. Although it was a party cloudy, warmish May day, fairly typical of Central Coast California, the temperature was now in the 60’s. This was a sign that I was approaching the high school where the last game would be played. Located off a stretch of the Foothills known for its gusty winds and cooling breezes, this high school was always cooler than the other schools in the area where I lived. I fully expected this, however, and had a jacket and a sweater with me in the car. I had been at that school many times over the last 15 years, and besides, if the game went into extra innings, it could stretch into the evening and get even cooler.

    With my car continuing to approach its destination on its own, my mind was free to wander over some very familiar topography. Leaving work in mid-afternoon, standard procedure for baseball games that started at 3:15, I was mulling over how to tell my customer I was going to be late – again – with the report they were expecting. I wasn’t worried, though, since over the last 15 years, I had been late with many customer-expected products and had gotten very good, approaching genius even, at coming up with excuses and convincing them that they would actually be better off with a late product.

    I also started thinking about who would be at the ball field when I got there; no doubt it would be the usual suspects. Three or four dads who doted on their sons, had lots of free time to hover around the field before the game, and were pretty much the type of guys who were always there, in full view of the coaches, to make sure their sons were receiving whatever benefits or special treatment they thought was their due.

    I purposely made sure my arrival was not too early – I didn’t want to be part of that parental landscape. I knew these guys. After all, my boy had played with or against their sons for years. These guys weren’t my friends; my friends among the parents on the team wouldn’t arrive until the game started or shortly thereafter, as would my wife, since they had separate lives after all. But I was friendly enough with these hovering fathers. I also knew there would be a few dads (and moms) just like these guys on the other team, also waiting and watching and hovering. My sons had played with their kids too. They would be sitting in their usual spots in full view of their coaches. As I knew all too well, every team has pretty much the same parent tapestry, replete with drama, melodrama, bickering, and pettiness. But despite this emotional backdrop, they were good parents and cared about their kids every bit as much as I cared about mine. I didn’t always know this, but it was one of the things I had learned over the past 15 years.

    My arrival time would be carefully choreographed as it was for all the games. A true Goldilocks timing: not too early so I wouldn’t be grouped with the hovering dads and not too late so I wouldn’t miss any of the action. For an away game, like this one, our team would be batting first. Because my son batted third in the order, it meant he would be batting in the first inning. Since the first at bat usually tells you how a kid is going to play that day – something else I had learned over the years – you want to be there for that at-bat. It informs the rest of the game.

    Pulling into the school parking lot, I could see the stands at a distance. The hovering dads that I thought would be there of course were there. I couldn’t hear them talking but I knew what they were discussing: How the team was doing - lots of one-run losses in league play – and things the coaches could have done, or should have done, to have a better season. There would be no mention about how much fun the boys had had or how much they liked their teammates. The fun and camaraderie, those elements that social scientists and other youth sports experts say should be part of the equation, had long since faded from the scene. This was varsity baseball after all, and the primary goal, at least for the coaches and many of the players, was about winning. But I was comforted with the feeling that my son, nevertheless, was having fun and had comrades on the team. I couldn’t care less about how many games our team had won or how many one-run losses we had suffered or how many games we gave away due to coaching mistakes, bad plays, or just plain bad luck. I only cared that my son was still having fun playing a game he started when was five. That he still felt that way was a sign that we had engineered his sports experience pretty successfully, much as we had done with his older brother whose last game was three years earlier.

    Walking across the parking lot, I was still consciously choreographing my just-in-time arrival. Stretching out the time, I bent over to tighten my very-much-tied shoe laces. Looking up, I saw one of the game’s umpires walking toward where I was standing. Now normally, the two game umpires will park their cars at the back of the parking lot, put on their equipment, and walk in silence to the field. They don’t want to talk to any parents of either team, many of whom they know since it’s a small town; they go to great lengths to avoid contact with any parent.

    We parents all knew this, of course, and most of us did our best to honor their need for solitude. But for some reason, this umpire didn’t avoid me today. I knew him, which is hardly surprising since after a while, you knew most of the umpires, at least for games played in the vicinity where you live. In this case, I knew the umpire pretty well since our kids had played with and against each other many times in the past. He had even coached my son in All-Stars some years back. We had always gotten along and he knew that I wasn’t one of those parents, the kind you avoid like the plague, who make an umpire’s or referee’s life miserable through badgering, hectoring, or just plain shouting. Since he was wearing the large chest protector, I knew he would be the home plate umpire, which for a high school game, is far more important than the field umpire. Knowing this, I kept my conversation very brief – weather’s cold here so what else is new, and so on. But because I was feeling emotional, I did tell him that it was my son’s last game, which made it my wife’s and my last game since he was the youngest. I told him we had spent 15 years following our two boys year-round and how it had gone by ever so quickly.

    I stopped at that point since you never want to get into a TMI (too much information) situation with an umpire, especially a plate umpire. But he was a good guy and I could tell he knew what I was going through. We wished each other good luck and off he went, toward the field while cutting a wide arc away from the hovering parents of both teams. Since his son played on a high school that never played our two teams, he was allowed to umpire this game; his objectivity wouldn’t be questioned. In truth, umpiring a high school game is such a miserable, stressful job that I never questioned the objectivity of any umpire, even in the rare instances where an ump might have had a son with some connection to one of the teams.

    As I walked to the field and took my usual position in the stands, one on the lower corner that allowed me to sit but where I could quickly stand up when my son came to bat, I wondered what kind of game, this last one, would be. Listening to the National Anthem, I didn’t know it at the time but this game would be one for the ages, a fitting last game, a capstone of 15 years of driving, clapping, cheering, cringing, laughing, crying, and even singing.

    I’ll get to that.

    But first, I want to recount what I learned from my experience of 15 incredible years of year-round youth sports with two wonderful boys. Fifteen years is a long time, consuming all of my 40’s and the first half of my 50’s. I wouldn’t trade them for anything and I mean that. It was a long journey, during which I saw my boys literally grow up before my eyes. And I grew up with them.

    CHAPTER 1. FIRST THINGS FIRST

    Why this Book?

    I wrote this book because I had to. Having recently retired, I knew that I needed to write about my experiences in youth sports in order to get it out of my system. As someone who spent a 35-year career writing lots of technical documents, most of which were truly drier than a bone, the last thing I thought I would be doing after hanging up my spurs was to do more writing. But hopefully what follows is not as dry as my previous stuff. No promises here, but I have tried hard to make the concepts and information contained in this book as accessible as possible. However, the reader will be the ultimate judge.

    A tenet of good writing is that you should write about things you know. After fifteen years of growing athletes, I humbly submit that this is a topic I know a little bit about. While I didn’t spend eight hours of day coaching and cajoling my kids into sports – and believe me there were and are parents who do this – my involvement in our boys’ sporting life was akin to a substantial second part-time job or at the very least a time-intensive hobby. So in other words, this is a topic that I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about, talking about, and actually doing.

    This is the point in the story where I need to give you the big pitch about why this book might be useful for you. Specifically, this book attempts to:

    Give you sufficiently compelling information to convince you why helping your children become athletes is a good idea

    Present the other side of the story by honestly telling you what athletics won’t do for you and your children

    Explain the need to continually focus on the big picture as your children mature and move through the different levels of sports

    Help you, the reader, establish some goals to set as you embark on this journey

    Tell you why almost anyone can be modestly successful in sports and achieve reasonable goals

    Inject at judicious places throughout the book some scientifically-established principles of psychology that can be useful in getting you and your kids through the sports years

    With respect to the target audience part of the pitch, this book has been written for anyone:

    with a young child who is contemplating having them participate in athletics but isn’t sure that it’s a good idea,

    who has had a child, tried sports, and wondered why it didn’t work out,

    who has a grandchild and would like a second chance at the whole endeavor,

    who didn’t have a child but wonders what it would have been like,

    who’s seen a youth sporting event from afar and wondered what happened behind the scenes, or

    that’s curious about youth athletics and what its role in society is or should be.

    Yeah, I know, this list includes just about anybody who can fog up a mirror. But I think the topic of youth sports is sufficiently important that it should be on everyone’s radar at least some of the time. If this book is even modestly successful, then the reader will walk away with that perspective.

    What this Book is not

    In the spirit of truth in advertising, I must warn you in advance what this book is not. First and foremost, it is not a how-to-book to create a super athlete. I certainly do not have the skills for that, and besides, you’re not going to find that out from a book anyway. Later on, I will discuss some recent psychological research that bears on this topic, at least indirectly, concerning an approach designed to create a highly skilled individual in a given sport. However, the time required to do this is beyond the limits of any normal parent, where the long-term gains for the child are questionable.

    This is also not a book to tell you how to get your child a Division I athletic scholarship. As you’ll see throughout the book, my whole focus is on reaching some level of proficiency for high school sports, at which point I would recommend stopping. Collegiate athletics is a life unto itself, and very few girls and boys are able to achieve that. The information presented in this book is not designed to get your child to that level. To do that, you’ll need a different book and, quite likely, a different child.

    This book will also not tell you how to be a super-parent. I was at best a mediocre father, but fortunately, I was married to a terrific woman, a super-mother who compensated for a lot of my failings. So I can no more tell you how to be a super-parent than I can a super-athlete other than to do what I did, which is to marry well. Despite my mediocrity, I did know what I wanted my children to get out of their athletic experience. Hopefully, I can impart that knowledge to the reader.

    In addition, this book is not a tell-all, gossipy, gripe-fest about youth sports or our experiences with it. I don’t have any hidden agenda against anyone and I will not be using real names; in fact, I won’t be using any names at all since my focus is on what I experienced as a parent and how what I learned can help you in your youth sports experience. Consequently, you should know at the outset that this book is not some Bad News Bears account where I’ll be regaling with you stories of coaches drinking beer or doing other inappropriate things that most of us don’t really see much of in real life except when watching CNN. Towards the end of the book, though, I will be mentioning some highlights from the cheap seats where alcohol does get mentioned several times. But it’s truly a minor part of the entire story.

    This is not to say that I don’t have criticisms of how youth athletics is conducted. Regardless of the level, there are always political forces at work and parents of young athletes should be aware of these factors just like they should know about the political infighting going on in their city council. Why? Because these events affect you, and more importantly, they affect your child. They can influence opportunities, limit choices, and drive decisions you will have to make. However, I don’t view these criticisms as gripes since any group endeavor will likely have these kinds of problems; youth athletics is certainly no different. I think it’s safe to say that there probably isn’t a youth sports league anywhere that doesn’t have its political intrigue and backstory drama, just as there isn’t likely to be any Elk’s Lodge or Rotary Club or Boy Scout troop that doesn’t have similar issues.

    But when all is said and done, I believe the good far outweighs the bad in terms of having your child participate fully in youth athletics, at least up through high school. One of the aims of the book is to explain what we did to make that happen. In our experience, and despite the inevitable politicking that we saw, most youth league officials spend an enormous amount of their own valuable time doing things that benefit the rest of us. That’s certainly one of the takeaways I have from our sports experience. It’s another thing I didn’t always understand or appreciate initially, but by the end of our time, it was another lesson I had learned.

    Neither is this book a scientific study of youth athletics. I’ve written this book based on my experiences as a father rather than from a scientific perspective. As you’ll see below, I could have done that given my training, but that wasn’t my intent here. I will, nevertheless, be presenting research evidence to support some of my basic points, but for the most part, I’m relying on my own experience, what I observed and learned, over the 15 years. However, while the book isn’t steeped in science, it does put a premium on analysis, or trying to decompose a complex problem into its constituent components. This type of approach, which I’ll be espousing throughout, will hopefully help you wind your way through the athletic maze.

    Finally, this book is not a comprehensive, step-by-step rendering of how to get a child from the beginning levels of youth sports through varsity participation in high school. That would fill volumes and would quickly, I believe, become unreadable. I have mostly tried to hit the high points in helping youth athletes develop and I therefore leave out a lot of the intermediate steps. So you should think of the book less as a recipe and more as a small-scale map that contains a few landmarks to help guide you on your way and keep you on course.

    The Book’s Central Thesis

    Now is the point where I lay out of the main premise of the book, where all the rest is supporting detail. It’s contained in one sentence: a parent should encourage his or her child to engage in youth sports with the end goal of participating in at least one high school sport at the junior varsity or, ideally, varsity level. While this seems like a fairly simple goal, engaging in all the preparatory effort to make this a reality is not so simple. However, establishing a concrete goal like this at the outset provides an effective lodestone for most of the decisions and choices that have to be made to achieve it.

    With the main thesis spelled out, let me provide some qualifications so there isn’t any confusion about what I’m recommending. By participating at the varsity level, I mean making the varsity team, usually as a High School junior, but sometimes as a sophomore or perhaps not even until the senior year. By no means does the child have to be a star on the team or even a starter. Rather, the goal should be to be a significant participant on a varsity (or at least junior varsity, JV) squad where being on the team is viewed as a positive by both child and parent.

    Practically every book ever written about successful people describes the setting of goals as one of their distinguishing features. It stands to reason, actually, that if you have a goal then you know what you are working toward. As I describe in the rest of the book, setting Varsity/JV participation as a goal for your child will help you make decisions throughout and lead you into such activities as determining ways to convince them not to quit in the early years, which is inevitable, when they get frustrated, bored, embarrassed, or burned out. Setting a Varsity/JV athlete as your child’s goal will motivate you as a parent to work through these problems constructively as you keep this overarching objective in your big picture.

    Why this Author?

    Okay, so who the heck am I and what qualifies me to write this book? Let me answer the first question first; the second question is harder and I’ll have to finesse that one a bit.

    To start, I have a PhD in Experimental Psychology. Note that this is not Clinical Psychology, which is the type of psychology most people are familiar with. That’s the kind represented by Dr. Drew in the popular media, where you diagnose the root of someone’s abnormal behavior in terms of an underlying psychosis or neurosis¹. This is a perfectly fine profession, and in fact, my wife is a licensed clinical psychologist. But that’s not my professional background.

    An experimental psychologist is someone who conducts studies of normal or normative behavior to derive principles of behavior that apply to most organisms. While the focus of the field is mostly on human behavior, you can learn a lot about behavior by studying animals. In fact, that’s what I did early in my graduate studies. I performed experiments using rats, pigeons, rabbits, and monkeys as subjects. Although you can’t learn anything about language with non-human subjects (leaving aside sign language in chimps, which is another story), you can uncover useful principles of how organisms make biologically-significant responses (like seeking food, avoiding shock) to stimuli in the environment. Moving up the evolutionary chain to humans, you can study a much wider range of more complex and interesting behavioral phenomena, such as learning language, having memory for complex events, and importantly, social interactions among groups of people. Later in my graduate career I switched over to studying humans and never regretted that decision.

    With this type of training you can get a job as a university professor doing experiments to uncover more basic principles and construct elaborate theories that tie the principles together. But there’s another use for this training, which is what I ended up doing. That involves being what is called an Applied Psychologist, which is someone who works outside the laboratory, in field (or applied) settings where known principles of behavior are applied to help structure work environments so that people are more effective at their jobs. It’s not dissimilar to an Engineer, who is trained in physics and the basic sciences so he or she may apply those principles to build the things that make the world around us technologically sophisticated and comfortable.

    In my case, I worked for over 30 years at a small consulting company that specializes in Human Factors. Now you see the term ‘Human Factor’ a lot in the popular press; CNN loves to use that phrase when covering a story where human nature plays a major role. In short, the term Human Factor is invoked to signal some type of human interest piece as opposed to a hard news story. Not surprisingly, that’s a gross oversimplification and a bit of a mischaracterization as to what Human Factors really is. Essentially, a Human Factors professional is someone who observes how people behave in a complex setting, usually industrial or military, and determines ways to make human performance better.

    There are a number of ways to improve human performance, where a Human Factors professional will make this determination based on having conducted systematic observations and analyses. Depending on what seems to be causing problems with performance, there are a variety of different solutions to make things better. These could include redesigning the work environment (e.g., improved lighting, increased space, improving the fit of personal equipment), introducing new technology (e.g., new software, improved workstations, automation), providing additional training to increase skills, modifying the procedures which govern the rules by which people work with one another, or some combination of these solution categories.

    I performed applied studies in a number of settings throughout my career, but one of my specialties was observing how a group or team of military personnel worked together to accomplish their mission, where I identified ways that overall performance might be improved. Over the years, I completed projects for all branches of the military in which I observed a crew or team operate in the tactical setting and then made recommendations for how performance could be improved. This was actually a lot of fun as it allowed me to ride in tanks, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft like C-130’s, accompany Marines and Army infantry on training maneuvers, observe Navy shipboard personnel operate the combat information center – the nerve center of the ship – and even watch submarine crews conduct antisubmarine warfare operations in training simulators. I also watched teams perform outside their weapon system, such as Army staff members working in a Tactical Operations Center or Air Force personnel in a mission planning cell. Sometimes this meant observing personnel in a classified setting, requiring a SECRET security clearance which I’ve maintained for over 30 years. I even got to observe the real-world planning activities of Air Force and Army personnel during Operation Haiti in 1994.

    Before making my observations, I would read all I could to learn about their jobs and then interview experts in the various crew positions so I would have some idea of what types of problems may be occurring. I would also talk to supervisors, leaders, and others with extensive experience in multiple team positions. Sometimes these would be formal interviews, sometimes casual observations, and sometimes I would solicit their opinions via surveys. However, I would always try to keep an open mind since it is often the case that what people believe to be the source of the problem is actually merely a symptom of some deeper underlying issue.

    Many of the problems that I identified during my observations of military crews and teams are typical of group interactions in any setting. Common issues include communications breakdowns, lack of leadership, confusions about what to do next, misunderstandings about the overall objective, ambiguity about which team member is supposed to do what, incorrectly assuming that some team members know something they don’t, failing to provide information to team members in a timely fashion, and not speaking up when others would benefit from being spoken to. There are many other types of problems that you see occur when watching teams perform their tasks and duties over an extended period of time; it’s a long list. I saw such problems often when observing Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force teams perform over the years. I also saw these same problems materialize, though under different circumstances, while observing nuclear power maintenance crews, automotive engineers, and software technicians work together.

    Not surprisingly, you encounter a very similar list of performance-limiting problems when you watch sports teams perform, be it baseball, basketball, football, soccer, hockey, water polo, or lacrosse, among others. While the consequences are different – for military teams the consequences of poor teamwork can be fatal or at the very least result in mission failure versus simply a loss for sports teams – the symptoms you can observe, the root cause of the problems, and the interventions you can introduce to ameliorate the problems have a common flavor between the two domains.

    It was with this professional experience, having developed a trained eye for observing and analyzing military teams, that I approached my foray into youth sports as a father. Thus, my background in behavioral and cognitive science armed me with a wealth of typical problems to look for when teams perform as well as some tried and true solutions. Some of the people who coached my kids had an intuitive understanding of likely problems with teamwork, particularly as they afflict young team members. But most coaches frankly, did not, and they engineered their teams’ training programs with the same randomness and lack of systemization that can be found in most organizations. In the following chapters, I will talk about both kinds of coaches and some of the things you can look for to help you steer your kids towards the first type of coach to the extent that you have a choice in the matter.

    What I’ve just described tells you who I am as a professional and the kinds of work that I’ve done. But my real qualifications for writing this book – such as they are – come from raising two boys in a small Central Coast California town where the benign weather allows for year-round outdoor sports. As my boys and anyone who knows us will tell you, my wife did the heavy lifting in child rearing, and what a job she did. My main responsibility was for the sports part of their lives. Getting them involved in organized sports at an early age, around 5 and 6, and keeping it up throughout high school was my contribution to the family and it is what prompted me to write this book. Their sports were principally baseball and basketball, although our oldest also played football for a time and our youngest did soccer. I believe that most of what I’ll be discussing applies to any team sports, although my examples will be drawn from the particular sports in which we participated.

    Since I had sons, my base of experience obviously concerns boys’ sports. However, I believe that the importance of youth participation in organized sports is equally important, if not more so, for girls. In the next chapter, I’ll present some evidence to support that position. In fact, if I had daughters, I would be even more adamant about sports participation as a way to counteract our society’s toxic environment for young girls and their appearance. As I describe in the next chapter, Title IX has been a real boon for girls’ participation in sports up through high school and beyond. However, as with boys, it requires a great deal of parental involvement to ensure that their participation in sports continues through the vulnerable pubescence and adolescence years.

    Finally, my focus in this book is on team sports and how a parent can help their child navigate these tricky waters. Although individual sports, like golf, tennis, swimming, and wrestling, have strong merits and do much for a child, my bias is towards team sports. And that’s what I’ll be talking about. Not only do team sports put a premium on developing a camaraderie that can help a child later in life, they help instill skills involving teamwork, communication, and collaboration that reap dividends throughout one’s work life.

    In this regard, I should note that it doesn’t necessarily have to be sports. There are other group-oriented activities for youths that have all or most of the merits of team sports. These would include dance, theater, and music most notably, and probably some others. The main features that these non-sport alternatives should have are: (1) substantial year-round time commitment, (2) a path to getting better with practice, (3) healthy interactions with capable adults, (4) opportunities and requirements for collaborating with other youths, (5) a need for parental involvement through transportation and cheerleading, and (6) some degree of competition that provides public feedback on performance. I don’t have much firsthand experience with these alternatives, but I suspect they will be just as beneficial. However, my experience is with sports, so that’s what I’ll be talking about in this book.

    What do I Mean by Growing Athletes?

    The double entendre of my title, Growing Athletes, is obviously an intentional attempt at being cute but it belies a subtle point that I would like to unpack now. For the grammarians among you, the first word in the title, growing, can be used as either a verb or an adjective, depending on the intended meaning. As a verb, growing means something you do to make things come to fruition, like growing a flower or a crop. In the present context, it implies the active role of the parent since you have to do something to grow your child into an athlete.

    But as an adjective, growing implies that the child is changing, pretty much on his or her own, consistent with what we know from Development Psychology. This developmental point of view demands that we recognize the inevitable growing process in the child, requiring that our active growing actions (the verb use of growing) change in response to the intrinsic growing process. In line with this inevitable two-fold growing process, I’ll talk about the different things that parents have to do as their child grows in order to continue growing them into an athlete.

    Let’s next look at the second word, athletes. If you look up the definition of athlete in Dictionary.com, you find two parts to the definition. The first part defines athlete, a noun, as a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength. The second definition refers to an athlete as a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill. Completing our dictionary review of the term, we see the word first appears in the 1520’s, where its roots are from the Latin and Greek. The Latin root, athleta, refers to contend for a prize which, in turn, is a derivative of the Greek word, athlos, a contest.

    At the risk of complicating the terminology too much, let’s also consider the definition of a related word, athletic. This adjective is given a five-part listing in Dictionary.com. Ignoring the of’s, likes, befittings, and other dictionary discourse that I’ve always found off putting, let’s just focus on the parts of the definition that bear on the real world. When you do this, you find that athletic is someone who (a) is physically active and strong; (b) is good at sports; (c) has physical skills or capabilities; (d) has strength, agility, or stamina; and (e) has a sturdy build or well-proportioned body.

    So what’s the point of this grammatical parsing? My point is that I want to disconnect and distinguish athletic from athlete. While the words have similar roots and their distinctions in the Latin and Greek are minor, for my purposes the two words are very different. As I see it, someone is athletic who has a natural tendency to be fast, strong, and agile; excels at sports; and comes into the world with a full palette of physical skills. For example, both of my parents were athletic. My father was strong and fast, with extremely quick hands. This allowed him to pick up boxing very quickly and run track, especially the short races, without much effort. His father was extremely athletic as well. At the age of 65, it was reported that my grandfather could out run anyone in the Eastern Kansas area around Topeka where he had a ranch. My mother was also very athletic. Tall, graceful, and gifted with an incredible throwing arm, she could shoot baskets accurately and throw a baseball farther than most men.

    As you might expect, I was also athletic. I had above average foot speed, very good hand-eye coordination, quick reactions, well above average leg strength, and outstanding balance. I could pick up a new sport fairly quickly. In sixth grade, I competed in a city-wide track and field meet where in one of the events I had to dribble a soccer ball through cones as quickly as possible. I finished second in the city despite never having touched a soccer ball before that day.

    So you get the point. Being athletic, my parents – and hence me – had physical attributes to learn new sports-related skills quickly and be successful in individual events, like running, punching, and throwing without much work. It’s largely an inherited capability. But despite these natural gifts, none of us were athletes. That is, we did not participate over the long term in team sports which involved a continued commitment to improve, dedication of time and self-sacrifice, and most importantly, the willingness to practice one’s skills at the expense of other activities. In my case, for example, I stopped participating in team sports by junior high since I didn’t have the dedication to attend practice, the temperament to listen to coaches, or the internal desire to engage in the self-sacrifice one needs to compete at the higher levels of varsity-level sports. I also didn’t have any parental encouragement to do so since my parents, with similar athletic gifts, had opted out themselves at about the same age. However, I always had A’s in physical education and was actively encouraged to be on teams (baseball and football) for most of my youth because of my easily recognized athletic skills. The same was true for my parents. We were athletic but we weren’t athletes, so we didn’t continue our participation in youth sports.

    From what I have just described, we can make two statements with some degree of confidence. First, we know that someone who is athletic, typically acquired through inheritance, can become an athlete if they practice, dedicate their time, are amenable to coaching, and engage in the other activities needed to stay on the path for continued participation through high school. Depending on their athletic gifts, this route may be relatively easy, particularly since they will be rewarded with exceptional performance when they are young. Professional athletes are all athletic and were generally the most athletic kids in their hometown.

    However, the second thing we know is that being athletic does not necessarily make someone an athlete. Being athletically inclined gives one early rewards and no doubt makes the involvement in team sports fun, but it doesn’t guarantee continued success unless one practices, self-sacrifices, and accepts the fact that a substantial amount of time will be required to continue. My parents and I did not make that sacrifice, so we chose not to become athletes. There are, of course, countless other examples of this failure to transition through the adolescent years, which will be a major topic of the book in a later chapter.

    The key question, though, is can we make a third statement? That is, can someone who is not particularly athletic become an athlete? While it will certainly take more work, more dedication, and more practice for the less-than-athletic individual than it does for someone who is athletic, the answer, I believe, is a most definite Yes. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t have written this book. Although the athleticism of one’s child may dictate some of the things you have to do as a parent, and possibly the sport you elect to pursue to the high school level, there are ways to grow an athlete even if the child is not very athletic. In the chapters that follow, my message is meant to apply equally to the athletic and non-athletic child and their parents.

    What about the Science?

    Because I was a professional social scientist, it is difficult for me to write about my experiences as a youth sports father without interjecting some of what I know about the psychology of behavior. Indeed, it’s tempting to write entirely within that frame of reference, but that is not the purpose of the book. So my compromise is to periodically introduce relevant psychological principles throughout the book, briefly define them, and provide some research evidence using a minimum of jargon. To keep from disrupting the flow of the book, I’ll put this information in a lightly gray-shaded box like that shown below. When you encounter these boxes throughout the book, the reader can either glance at the title and know there’s a relevant underlying principle for what’s just been described and move on, or alternatively, read through the text in the book for a better understanding. It’s your choice.

    Behavioral Science Insert #X: Name of Principle

    Definition of Phenomenon

    Examples and Research Evidence

    References

    My goal is to buttress some of my most salient observations with applied behavioral science principles without making the book unfathomable to the lay reader. Throughout the next nine chapters, I’ll be introducing some two-dozen relevant psychological principles. All are well-established principles of behavior and known to most psychologists in the area; almost none are still controversial or under dispute. In other words, all are principles you can take to the bank as scientifically-respectable accounts of the behavior of the child, coaches, and/or parents being described. I think it represents a reasonable compromise instead of writing a more scientific, but highly niched, book.

    How Much Do You Already Know?

    Before you get to the rest of the book, you might find it informative to take the following 8-item quiz. Now be forewarned, it’s not a scientifically-rigorous test like you’d see on the SAT exam or even on a Driver’s License exam. And some of the items and response foils are a bit tongue in cheek. However, the quiz provides, I believe, a quick assessment of the reader’s natural instincts toward growing a youth athlete. The answer key and scoring protocol are given at the end of the book.

    Growing Athlete Pretest

    1. What’s more important, to be at game (a) when your kid hits a HR, (b) strikes out 3 times, or (c) whenever you can make it?

    2. Your kid isn’t being put into the game by the coach. Do you (a) scream at the coach and try to get him to put your child in, (b) handle it after the game by talking to him in front of other parents, (c) handle it after the game when the two of you are alone, or (d) discuss it during/after practice with just the two of you?

    3. How much should you be willing to spend on a piece of sports equipment that your kid’s coach told you that he/she should have in order to improve his/her performance? Up to (a) $20, (b) $50, (c) $100, or (d) hand over the plastic and don’t think about it.

    4. How far will you drive to get your kid to a game while on a traveling team? Up to (a) 5 mi, (b) 10 mi, (c) 20 mi, or (d) until you’re very tired.

    5. You see a kid throwing a ball awkwardly. What is the best expression for what you see? The kid (a) throws like a girl, (b) throws the best he can, (c) has no talent, or (d) throws like someone who didn’t get instruction in throwing until puberty?

    6. Would you alter your vacation plans – delay or even cancel them – so your child could keep playing on an all-star team that was consistently winning and advancing to the next round? (a) Definitely no, (b) Maybe yes if the child was playing a lot, or (c) Yes regardless of playing time.

    7. What gives you the most excitement? (a) You hitting a home run, (b) Your kid hitting one, or (c) The feelings are about equal.

    8. How should you handle a kid that just had a bad game? (a) Don’t talk to him until later, (b) Tell him everything will be okay – everyone has a bad game, or (c) Explain to him why he played badly and how he can do better next time.

    ¹ Actually, Dr. Drew Pinsky is not a clinical psychologist PhD, but rather, a board-certified internist who specializes in substance abuse. He comes off on TV as a clinical psychologist because those are the topics he’s called upon to discuss. However, he’s an MD who did his residency in internal medicine before going down the dark side to become a talking head on CNN and HLN.

    CHAPTER 2. WHY SHOULD I DO THIS?

    To answer the question of why involvement in youth sports is a good idea, many reasons could be given. For example, you could go on line and watch countless YouTube interviews with authorities on youth athletics, experts in child development, and a host of notable sports figures who will attest to the virtues and benefits of participating in youth sports. My approach is more modest. I’m going to discuss the four reasons that

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