Parents Are Positioned Best to Develop Athletes

Summary

• Parents have the best opportunity to raise happy, healthy, and high performing athletes.
• Your main role as a parent is to transform your kid into an athlete.
• Coaches' main role is to fine-tune your young athlete into the best player for the sport your kid has chosen.
• An athlete is made of four elements. They must have strength and control in all 4 elements; Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Social.
• As parents, you have the most influence on all four elements. You can spend more time than a coach or trainer can.
• A coach will be working on coaching the sport. Which will involve strength, conditioning, and skill work.
• You do not need to focus on what the coach is working on because you have plenty of other things to focus on
  • Physical: recovery
  • Mental: visualization and toughness
  • Emotional: control
  • Social: interactions with others
• Remember you have a great opportunity to develop your kid into an athlete. From there your young athlete can be coached to be a great player in any sport they choose

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid To Athlete, helping parents raise athletes. And I just want to say, parents, you are in the best position to raise an athlete. And if you're thinking, well, isn't that the coach's job? No. The coach's job is to develop a player, a soccer player, a baseball player, a volleyball, swimmer. Whatever sport that your kid is doing, their job is to get them to be that player, the best player that they can make them. Right? And yes, they will be developing an athlete in the process. But if you think about it, parents, you are in the best position to really develop a complete athlete. And I can say this because of what an athlete is. And if you look up the definition on Google, yes, you're going to find that it says, "Somebody with strength, stamina, skill for sports or games or exercises." And that's only a fraction of what an athlete really is.

So if you look at what I call my definition or the K To A definition, it's basically a person... So this is what an athlete is, "A person with strength and control in four different elements, physical, mental, emotional, and social." And if you look at all four of these elements, you can see as a parent, you have a huge influence on all four of those elements. And so we need to be able to understand that we have a big impact on developing an athlete. So let's go over some of those elements.

First one, physical. Now, yes, your coach is going to be working on strength and conditioning, skill work. So we don't have to worry about that. You can, if you'd like to help, but we have a lot of things we can work on as well, such as recovery, right? If your kid can physically recover, then they're more likely to get back out on the field, get back out into training and give it 110%. So we need to work on physically by helping them recover. And it could be as simple as promoting good sleep habits, right? They're getting enough sleep, they can recover better. So that's just physical.

Now, mental, if you've played sports, you know sports is a mental game. And there's a lot of techniques and strategies that we can help our kids with, such as visualization and certain things to help with mental toughness.

Now we're going into emotional. Kind of the same thing. There's a lot of different strategies and techniques that we can do to help our kids with emotions. And I know that a lot of people are thinking, well, emotions are a sign of weakness. And I want to say it's not a sign of weakness. Again, my definition says strength and control, right? I don't want to eliminate emotions. I want to control the emotions. Because if you think about it, emotions are a lot of energy. And so if you just take out the word emotions and put energy in there, that's what we're doing. We're trying to harness and manage that energy so that we can use it. And so there's a lot of different techniques, a lot of different strategies that you as a parent can help with your kid so that they can manage those emotions.

So now social. Social is being, just working with your coaches, working with your teammates, right? And it doesn't have to be just people on the team. It could be people outside that. And I always like to have people imagine your kid, let's say they made the game-winning shot in a championship. All of a sudden it's like, boom, they won the game. They're probably going to get interviewed at the end. I consider this to be part of the social, right? Social interaction with anybody.

So after the game, they're going to get interviewed. They're going to have cameras, mics, somebody asking them questions. And if they can present themselves well, then guess what? Not only is that going to help them build that confidence, as in like, hey, I just answered well, but other people also see that. If you're looking at colleges later in the future and somebody's, a college scout, is looking at your kid and they're like, "Well, they're a good player. They may not be the best. That's fine. But they represent themselves well. They represent their team. Guess what? They might represent our school well." And so just looking at social being a big part of being an athlete is I think critical as well.

So again, four different elements. You've got physical, mental, emotional, and social. And as parents, we have a huge influence on developing all four of those. And the coach is trying to develop the best player, right? Best soccer player, baseball, basketball, whatever sport your kid is playing. They're trying to get all the info, all the skill work, and training to develop that player. So we don't need to, as parents, get in the way of the coach, because we've got plenty of work to do on our own. Right? To develop that athlete so that the coach can take our athlete and mold them into and fine-tune them into whatever sport your kid wants to play. Anyway, let me know what you think about that in the comments and hit that subscribe button, because I will see you on the next video. Thanks for watching.