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Life Lessons Life Lesson #65: Keep the Kids Playing! KEEP THE KIDS PLAYING With Opening Day around the corner, I’ve been busy conducting my favorite event of the year – Lifeletics Coaching Clinics. Working through these Coaching Clinics provide me a great opportunity to interact with today’s coaches. And while I am able to speak with and learn from thousands of youth coaches, it’s always eye-opening to step back and listen to the buzz from different leagues and various communities. I hope to share several of the hot button topics in months to come and future Life Lessons. For February, I’d like to focus on this simple phrase: Return your smiling kids for spring 2011. Over the fall months, I finished a draft for my second book: Human Kinetics’ Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Baseball. Human Kinetics’ is the nation’s largest sports and fitness publisher and already has football and basketball publications in their Survival Guide Series for coaching youth sports. I was selected to write their baseball book and what a great experience it has been. Currently, the book is in editorial review and I anticipate I’ll be getting it back for a round-two here any day. In researching and gathering information and material, I interviewed hundreds of coaches for best-practices and suggestions and to dive deeper into the role of a volunteer youth baseball coach. From tips like having an extra snack supply in your car to bringing an extra glove to all team events, people had some really great ideas to share. I can guarantee that this book will truly provide a roadmap through the trials and tribulations of managing a baseball team. Along with interviewing friends, coaches and board members, I was able to interview the nation’s top executives for youth baseball in America. It was amazing to hear how similar their goals were in communicating to today’s coaches. In a nutshell, I posed the following question to as many higher-ups as I could: “What message would you pass along to the individual baseball coach in 2010?” Without any hesitation or wavering, the answers were remarkably similar: 1. Keep the kids smiling. 2. Keep the kids having fun. 3. Keep the kids playing. 4. Keep the kids coming back to play baseball next year. They were clear to communicate that competition would take care of itself. Some leagues will be hyper-competitive, win-at-all costs while others will play more for fun and development. They support the individual league and its ability to determine what level works best for its own community members. However, they were adamant to remind coaches that baseball should be fun and at the end of the season, kids should want to come back to play again. Their answers were so powerfully simple that I’ve combined into one short phrase: Return your smiling kids to play again in spring 2011 This season, you might win a championship or you might not. You’ll definitely leave the kids with more skills and development that when you got them. And there is simply no way to avoid plenty of highs and lows along the way. But in the end, your job as a youth baseball coach is to have your 12 athletes return to spring ball in 2011 with smiles on their faces. Here a suggestion to start your practice off with smiles. This has gone over really well during this spring’s Lifeletics Coaching Clinics. Varying the RUN in Run / Stretch / Throw Before getting started with your on-field drills and station instruction, the team must warm up and stretch. We call this simply ‘run, stretch, throw’ or RST. One easy way to keep your practices fun and fresh is to mix up your definition of run: Option #1 – Jog Send your athletes to touch a tree, jog along the fence, or around the field to get loose. Perhaps this option is used when you feel rushed or short on time. Option #2 – Relay Race Break the team into two or three lines and design a relay race. Involving competition does magical things to mask or hide the cardio aspect – even during a warm up activity. Involve side-to-side, forward and backward running… bear-crawls, tumbles and rolls… hops, cuts and spins. Anything to get those smiles going while loosening up. All that’s needed are some cones to mark distances or movement changes (but you can get as creative as you like). Option #3 – Dynamic Warm-up This option involves easy and fun agility / footwork movements designed to warm up the body while training athleticism and coordination. Examples include: high-knees, side-shuffles, Carioca, backwards running, skipping for height, butt-kickers, etc. Use this as a fun way to train athleticism, get loose, and maybe, just maybe get a few laughs. RST is a single example of how keeping this season’s goal in mind can change your practice plan. Not only will the kids smile more, but so will you. What a simple and positive goal to share as we stare down the beginning of 2010 spring season. Topics for practice will change daily and you’ll play a different opponent for each game, but one overarching phrase can guide your entire season: Return your smiling kids to play again in spring 2011 I look forward to getting back to monthly Life Lessons on a more regular basis. Please reply with any suggestions or questions that I might be able to address. Remember, it’s a collective effort and sharing of information that makes our impact more powerful. Play hard and have fun! |
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