Halftime and Other Moments
How did you get into coaching? For many of us, it happened by accident. Your kid’s U8 soccer team needed someone to herd the cats, or your summer job at the pool turned into something more. My story is about walking through the lodge at my home ski area and randomly bumping into one of my old coaches, who recommended that I talk to the head of the local ski club - which became more than a decade of winters spent with kids on the snow. However you got here and however long you’ve been here, you’re doing something important, impactful, and sacred. Important because sports hold a lot of potential; impactful because you’re in a position to shape people in ways big and small; sacred because it’s up to you what the tone of that impact will be.
So now you’re here, and even on that U8 soccer team, the stakes of your role are high. How do you use the power and privilege of your position? Each coach has their own philosophy, focus, and way of communicating with their athletes. If you’ve been in the coaching game awhile, you’ve honed these viewpoints and skills over time; if you’re new, or find yourself with an age group that’s different from what you’ve known, maybe you’re just beginning to figure it out.
Either way, as the season really begins to get underway, there are a few important things to keep in mind:
Know your audience. Maybe you’re used to coaching high school athletes and you now find yourself with a U13 team for the first time, or maybe you’re used to coaching boys and now you find yourself in front of a team of girls; maybe you’re just getting going and all you have to draw on are your own experiences of being coached. The most important thing you can do is get to know your players. Coaching 12 year-olds the way you would coach 16 year-olds is not going to work; the younger kids are not cognitively, emotionally, or physically capable of doing the things that the older kids will be able to accomplish. Expectations and goals, language and drills all have to be developmentally appropriate, and joy, well-being, growth, and learning to embrace challenge need to be at the center of everything you’re doing.
Keep it moving. Stagnation kills growth, but more importantly it kills FUN. Too much standing around – whether between drills, or during drills that involve too much waiting – is going to suck the enjoyment and engagement right out of what you’re doing and will slow or stall the process of development. The physical stop-start-stop-start and the mental checking in and out that occur when there’s too much standing around listening to an adult explain things also puts the kids at risk for injury. So, keep things moving, and keep your explanations short and sweet. Say what’s crucial, but in general say less.
Keep it positive. By this, I of course mean kindness, patience, enthusiasm, encouragement, consistency, and emotional positivity. These are crucial pieces of a healthy and supportive growth environment. In this case, I also mean “positive” in the sense that rather than telling them what you want them to NOT do - which they already know, trust me - and making veiled (or not veiled) references to the bad things that will happen if they fail to follow your instructions, tell them what you want them to do and what benefit will come of it. Telling them what to avoid can convey the threat of your power being used against them; this will breed fear of mistakes, timid play, and hesitation or indecision. Giving them something to move towards, on the other hand, gives direction and agency; this is also “positivity.” Doing this is critical because the human brain does not understand or process the word “don’t.” If you tell a person “don’t do this,” all they think about is that thing. Putting your players in a position to succeed means helping them focus on the positives, and on the positives.
Keep it simple. I have spent many hours on sidelines and in locker rooms before, during, and after games. One thing that I see happening way too often – something that can easily sabotage a team’s confidence and capability – is coaches giving way too much information. A pre-game whiteboard with 9 priorities on it or a halftime dissertation about adjustments; how long before you confuse or lose the attention of your athletes, or worse, scare or overwhelm them into timid or flat play? How much can your players really process? The answer is 1-3 things, and that’s it. I have, time and again, witnessed the moment when athletes shut down or get scared because they’ve been overwhelmed with information from their coach, and of course it shows on the field.
Halftime is not the appropriate moment for a laundry list of your observations and conclusions from the first half; those are what you use to guide your practice plan for the next week. During a game, it is much more effective to look for themes or through-lines in what’s happening on the field - including at least one thing that’s working! What are a couple of things that they can pay attention to or do that will help clean things up or bring the team back to what’s important in that moment? Keep it simple, direct, positive, objective (without your own emotional reaction), and make sure that what you’re asking of them is appropriate to their level of development.
Wait to evaluate. I remember my little league coach gathering us in right field after every game to “break down” what had just happened. Especially after a loss, those meetings felt endless, partly because I didn’t need to hear all the things we’d failed to accomplish in the game we had just played, and partly because I was hungry. The combination of emotions – mine, my teammates’, and those of my coach – and hunger, made those post-game breakdowns an exercise in counterproductivity.
We have to recover before we can evaluate performance. Whatever the outcome of the contest, emotions hijack the ability to be objective, and objectivity is how we learn and make use of whatever just happened. Especially after a hard-fought game, don’t bother trying to recap. Instead, give yourself and the players time to transition from emotional to strategic. This is accomplished through physical and mental recovery, and you go a long way to fostering real improvement by waiting until the next practice to break things down (bonus points if you allow your players to participate or even take the lead in that breakdown). “Everybody get good recovery, eat a good meal, hydrate, rest up for a good week of practice, and we’ll come back together and recap on Monday” are words that might just change the tone of your season.
As you approach early tournaments, scrimmages, and league play, put your focus on growth and connection. I understand that players, parents, coaches, and fans love a winner; if we didn’t, sports wouldn’t be for us. However, the players in your care - including the high school and college kids – are children to varying degrees. Most of them play primarily because they love their sport, love to move their bodies, love to learn, and love being with their friends, and these are key elements in a sustainable youth sport culture. Their most powerful, formative, and lasting experiences – good and bad – and therefore the trajectory of their long-term development as people and players, will be dictated by the environment that you create. It is absolutely possible to create fast-paced, competitive, joyful, high-performing AND process-focused, supportive, self-determined sports spaces. In light of that, a bonus:
We do not own players. They’re not “my guys” or “our girls.” If anything, it’s their team and their experience, and your job as their coach is to be a facilitator, to teach them and to help them take command of it, maximize it, to learn about and express themselves through the active participation in it. This language of possession is pervasive in sports, and when applied at the youth level it turns kids into commodities that are used in the transaction that gets the coach/parent/fan/club director the results they claim that kids want, when really that is an adult desire for prestige playing out through the experience of a child.
Of course no coach, parent, or club director would ever say that; they would be horrified by the insinuation that they’re using kids as currency. However, it’s not about the adult perspective; how do the kids receive and internalize the messaging created by that kind of language and by the way it makes them feel when they walk into the gym?
This leads me to one last thought for you to consider: Winning can be an aspiration, but it is not an appropriate expectation or sole definition of success. Want it, but beware needing it. The need or expectation to always win on the scoreboard creates unnecessary – and usually counterproductive – pressure. Beyond that, winning is only beneficial as a goal if it is clear that the value of your players is not determined by wins or losses and if you focus on the controllable things that put your team in a position to have a chance to perform in a way that could lead to a win. If that read like a very long sentence with a lot of “ifs” in it, then you’re right no track; there are a lot of uncontrollable variables that must be navigated in order to MAYBE achieve the desired outcome on the scoreboard. So what can you do instead?
Your standards need to be about values that you can choose to embody and control rather than things that depend on others. So, focus on – praise, reward, and model – things like effort, determination, connection, courage, respect, accountability, compassion, curiosity, integrity, humility, positivity, and kindness. Of course we like to win games, but how you define success beyond winning will go a long way towards crafting the kind of experience that will keep your players engaged and coming back for more.