Stop the Youth Sports Craziness

Our own member Paul Kalemkiarian presented the program at out meeting. He is a Certified Positive Coach by the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA).  Paul began his speech by citing some bad moments in coaching gathered by the Positive Coach Alliance and himself, for example

  1. A baseball brawl between two teams is lowlighted by a player attempting to throw a ball into the opposing team’s dugout, instead striking a fan that was taken to the hospital.
  2. The highest-profile women’s sports brawl in U.S. history breaks out between the WNBA Detroit Shock and Los Angeles Sparks.
  3. Angered by an official’s call in an Olympic-medal Taekwondo match the contestant demonstrates his superior skill by kicking the official in the face.
  4. In a dispute over playing time at a game for seven and eight year olds, a soccer dad aims his gun at his daughter’s coach.
  5. A 60 year old man during a soft ball game reaches in to the snack shop and grabs a 16 year old and holds him up to a wall an tells him “I am going to take you out” in front of all the young players. This happened in Arcadia and was witnessed by Paul. 

Next a slide show and video were presented that illustrated that coaching is more than winning it is an opportunity to positively affect the players self esteem. In 1998 Jim Thompson wrote a book and created Double Goal Coaching. The goal of PCA is that every athlete deserves a Double-Goal Coach, one who is teaching life lessons as well as striving to put points on the scoreboard.

The concept of “Honoring the Game” represents the behavior PCA wants to model. Honoring the Game is getting to the ROOT of the matter, where ROOT stands for respect for the

Rules,

Opponents,

Officials, and

Teammates

1) Rules: Coaches and athletes must not try to get away with illegal behavior when officials are not looking. Coaches must teach athletes to respect the rules, even when it is possible to cheat without getting caught. PCA wants teams to play within the spirit of the rules and refrain from “bending” them when it dishonors the game.

2) Opponents: Without opponents, competitive sports make no sense. A worthy opponent calls out the best in us. Respect opponents and remember they are members of our community. We want to try our hardest to win but not at the expense of demeaning or demonizing our opponents.

3) Officials: Officials have been selected and trained to enforce rules to keep sports from degenerating into chaos. Officials are not perfect (just like coaches, athletes and parents!) and sometimes make mistakes. However, there is no excuse for treating officials with disrespect when they make errors. Players and their parents to show respect for officials even when they disagree with the call.

4) Teammates: The games children play has a great tradition. Teams need to play the game in such a way that they can be proud.

To illustrate the concept of positive coaching to the club, Paul handed a basketball to Bob Daggett and another basketball to Imy Dulake. To Bob he made critical comments about his playing in an imaginary game. As he did that Bob bent over and Paul released some air from the basketball with a hissing noise all could hear and see. Bob was losing self esteem  To Imy he found something to complement her about her play (even though it was not good) her ball stayed full and she was proud looking. He repeated this several times.  After about the 5th time he did criticize Imy’s play but she was able to take it without her ball and self esteem taking a hit.

In closing Paul made the point again that the Magic Ratio of positive enforcement to criticism is 5:1.