Finding the Right Coach for Your Kid

Summary

• Finding a great coach for your kid depends on a couple of factors: 1. Your kid’s age and skill plus 2. Coach’s education and attention to the athlete
• Using a quadrant can help determine the right coach for your kid.
• Lets start with education range. Educated to non-educated. Education can be from courses, certifications, or formal education. An example of the range, someone that knows nothing about the sport to someone with a PhD in exercise physiology and every certification in a sport.
• Understand, a non-educated coach is not always a bad coach. An under 5 year old soccer team may have a coach that doesn’t know anything about soccer. This may benefit the kids by allowing them to play with less structure. However, as the kids get older and their level increases, a coach’s education must increase.
• A coach’s attention to the athlete is the other range to consider. I call this “Athlete vs. Sport”. A coach focused on the athlete is best simply because they are building a kid up to be able to play that sport to the best of their ability.
• Be careful of coaches that are too focused on the sport. They tend to be focused on the win and what professional teams are doing. What professional players are doing is not always best for kids.
• 4 quadrants emerge; 1 Educated/Athlete Focused, 2 Non-educated/Athlete Focused, 3 Educated/Sport Focused, 4 Non-educated/Sport Focused
• Top 2 quadrants are best for most athletes. As the athlete’s skills and ability goes up, they will need a coach in quadrant 1.
• Last factor that makes a good coach for your athlete is communication. A coach that is highly educated and is focused on the athlete is great but must be able to communicate all of their knowledge to the athlete.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. So you have a kid and you want to find a good coach for them. Well, that's great, but how do you know you're getting a good coach? Because not every coach is great for your kid. It depends on, well one, what age is your kid and what level are they playing at? But when we're looking at a coach, there's a couple factors that I like to take into account. And the best way I can describe it is using a quadrant. So we're going to go over a couple of things.

We're going to go over the first factor, which is education. Now, a coach is either educated or non-educated, and it's not a black and white thing. So it's not like they're either educated or they're not educated. This is more of... think of it more as a scale. So if you put the scale out, on the right side you've got the non-educated, which also can mean non-experienced, right? And you'll see this with soccer. When the kids are four years old and they get a group of kids together and they need a coach, and so they're just asking the parents, can you volunteer to basically stand there with a clipboard? And so the coach may have no experience, no clue of the rules, not know what soccer is all about, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. That could be a great thing actually because it allows the athletes, these four year olds to play almost unrestricted and just to play. And that's what they need at that time. Right? So when they get that, they can become more creative. They can just enjoy the sports. Just because they're non-educated or don't have any experience doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

But, as they get older, as the level of play goes up, you're going to want to go in toward experience, educated. And so on the left side you're going to see that we've got somebody maybe that has a PhD, right? They know the best angle of attack to kick the ball. They use terms like max velocity. They have experience in taking kids to the Olympics and getting gold medals or something, right? So that would be the other extreme. Again, not necessarily the best coach for your athlete, especially if they're only four years old. It kind of depends on your kid's age as well as level. And then you can decide whether they need to move up, to level up.

Second factor is the athlete versus a sport. Now what does that mean? Well, the athlete and the sport are completely different. And I think one of the biggest problems with youth sports is that we put too much emphasis on the sport and not our athletes. What I want to do is separate that and make sure that you realize that we're not building a soccer player or volleyball player or swimmer, whatever sport you're in, you're building an athlete that can participate in that sport, an athlete that is strong, not just... and in my definition, strong physically, mentally, emotionally and socially so they can be great in that sport. And so if you're looking at a coach that is coaching the sport, you're going to see them more focused on the win, the athletes are just there to try to get that win in there, the sport is the most important for them. And when you see a coach that's just focused on the sport, they're going to do things that the major leagues are doing or the professional levels are doing, which isn't always the best for your athlete. So be careful on getting a coach that is very focused on the sport itself.

You want a coach that is... Again, this is a scale that is going up toward the athlete, that is focused on the athlete, that is looking at their best interest because remember the coach only has them for a small amount of time, right? If they're just focused on that season, they're just going to try to blast through that season and get up as many wins as they can. But if you're focused on the athlete, you know what your job is as a coach and that is to develop the athlete to be strong, again, like I said, physically, mentally, emotionally and socially so that they can participate in that sport or other sports. And so if the coach understands that, they can develop your athlete for the big picture and that's what we want.

So if you look at these in the different quadrants, you've got quadrant one, two, three and four. You want to be on the top half. Right? So the quadrants one and two. But as they get older, as the level goes up, you'll want to be in quadrant one. So anywhere in that quadrant, right? You've got educated and then they're focused on the athlete. That's great, that's what you want. But there's another factor that plays a big part.

Last factor. What makes a good coach for your kid is communication. Because again, let's say we're in that first quadrant now. You've got a highly educated, highly experienced coach and they're focused on your athlete. But if they cannot communicate to them, if they can't find that same frequency because it's like a radio, your kid just hear static, right? And if the coach knows how to tune that in and then find that same frequency, then your kid's going to hear instructions that they need to increase their level or increase their skill or whatnot. Now communication is huge because it's actually what links the knowledge that they have to your athlete. If you don't have good communication, you're not going to transfer that experience that the coach has to the athlete.

All right, to sum it all up, in a coach we are looking at education. We are looking at whether they're focused on your athlete or the sports. We are focused on that communication because that communication is probably the biggest thing being that it allows the knowledge and experience of the coach to transfer to your kid or to your athletes. And so I hope that helps in deciding or looking at, do I have a good coach for my kid? It does depend on your kid's age, your kid's level and the communication.

So take care. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. Please leave a comment. Let me know what you're thinking, what you'd like to see in the future, and yeah, hit that Subscribe button. I'll see you next time.