Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash
If you work in junior or community sport and haven’t watched this TED Talk by Matt Young yet, I would highly recommend it.
The commentary Matt provides about the junior sport experience is harrowing, at times humorous, but mostly frightening in its accuracy. Opening with a very direct reminder that the reason kids often quit sport is adults, this sets up the scene perfectly to remind us all that junior sport is first and foremost for the kids, by the kids.
I have watched parents arrive to some junior sporting fixtures with lawn chairs, wine chilling in an esky, picnic blankets and shade tents all ready to go, just as Matt described. Thankfully, not all of them subscribe to the “my kid is going to play for Australia” fallacy, but there are always some.
It has taken many years, but there is a “stages not ages” system in Australian cricket now. This means there is more emphasis on gaining cricket skills and experience through fun weekly matches than developing elite 9-year-olds (I’m looking at you football ⚽️). Teams are sorted based roughly on cricket experience to a certain extent, with my current team ranging from 7-12 year-olds.
As expected at this age, girls come in all shapes and sizes, with varying years of cricketing experience. For the physically mature, their height, limb length and tactical knowledge suit the game of cricket well, often helping them stand head and shoulders above the others. Literally. For the parents of these seemingly skilled athletes, it becomes part of their identity that their child is successful. They are proud when, in the words of Matt Young, their children run out of other kids to pommel. What these parents often fail to realise is that this pressure to perform as a child, in a growing body, in an evolving environment, and at a social stage where being better than everyone else is difficult to navigate, your voice from the sideline will likely be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back.
📣 JUST RELAX!
...someone yells from the sideline of our Stage 1 match on a balmy Friday night. I don’t even have to look at them to know that they are referring to the girl who has come out to bat last. She swings and misses an easy opportunity to score, and the call comes again, this time in a more booming voice. How relaxing. She becomes visibly frustrated and it’s easy to see why: she’s batting last because she’s the most skilled batter and today, just like every other batter, she only has 13 balls to score as many runs as she can. While it is acceptable for her teammates to swing and miss the ball, to forget to run, and to get out on occasion, it has already become clear that she plays to a different standard based on the expectations of others.
She does not look like she is enjoying herself.
Being in this position pains me. I can see it all over her face that this sport of endless possibility is becoming a chore, already. After she bowls, she looks directly at her yelling parent for approval, despite tearing through my team in another over which frightens my batters. Upon returning to the field, she spends the rest of the game instructing her teammates, who become more dejected each time they’re singled out. It’s a dangerous cycle: the skilled athlete wants to impart their knowledge, the same way someone has evidently done to them, through yelling, direct instruction, and the occasional positive reinforcement tacked onto the end so it doesn’t come across as harsh. They don’t realise that this is a learned behaviour, but from the sideline as an observer, I can.
One of the actions that Matt Young suggests in his talk is see something, say something. I wish in this moment that I could have. But the reality is, I cannot as a young female coach approach an oversized male parent and tell him that his interruptions are detrimental to his daughter’s development. I hate confrontation and (barely) manage an anxiety disorder, plus I am the opposition coach. I can’t even have the conversation with the parents of my own athletes and be taken seriously, because they don’t see that our training sessions (which have helped the athletes develop in leaps and bounds) do not contain constant feedback or any yelling.
My training sessions feature limited feedback and focus on discussions after learning tasks to understand what the athletes are thinking and feeling. They look very different to the average training session because I have specialist knowledge in how female athletes develop (thanks to a PhD in the area), some developmental psychology, and a decade of coaching experience. As such, I often allow the athletes to design mini-challenges based on the skills we’ve learned to see how they would like to test themselves. There is plenty of positive reinforcement but it is not constant. The athletes understand that I do not want them to be dependent on whether I think something is good. I think they, as people, are brilliant, and we value effort and exploration above anything else. But they know that something can be good without me saying so, or something can not go so well and that’s totally okay too. For every comment you make from the sideline, they lose their ability to self-determine their performance and by extension, their worth.
👧🏻 For every comment you make, that child loses an opportunity to learn for themselves.
Maybe some science will help the cause. In a football ⚽️ experiment, Wulf and colleagues (as referenced in Davids et al., 2003) considered the effect of feedback frequency and type on performance in a task. The feedback type would either describe how to move to the athlete (”position your foot below the middle of the ball to lift it”) or describe the pattern of movement (”kick underneath the ball”). During practice, and during a later retention test, the group with reduced feedback (1 in every 3 trials) displayed more effective performance. In other words, feedback once in every three trials is as functional for learning constant feedback. Also, telling an athlete how to do something, rather than allowing them to explore how to move for themselves is detrimental to the performance of complex skills.
So to the parent yelling from the sideline, whether it be positive, encouraging, a gentle reminder to RELAX or even to motivate them to keep going, please refrain. These capable, competitive and fierce athletes deserve the space to determine how the game is going for themselves.
At the end of the day, all they really need from you is to hear how proud you are.