Athletes Rushing to Sport-Specific Training Sacrifice Self-Taught Skills and Imagination

August 13th, 2010

Originally published by Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, Summer 2010.

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The Internet’s interminable need for new and original content makes web sensations out of five-year-old Little Leaguers and eight-year-old basketball stars. This season, various sports sites, including Yahoo! Sports, promoted dribbling sensation Jaylin Fleming as the world’s greatest nine-year-old basketball player. Last year, 6th grader Jashaun Agosto had his 15 minutes of fame when a Seattle television station’s segment showing him making shot after shot went viral. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! Sports touted New Jersey’s Ariel Antigua as the best five-year-old baseball player ever!

These internet sensations are the outliers, not the norm. Those who appear destined for greatness at an early age rarely reach sustained excellence at a competitive level due to the many varied factors of professional success. For every O.J. Mayo identified in junior high school as a future superstar, there are dozens of Demetrius Walker’s, the former Sports Illustrated cover boy hailed as the next LeBron James in 2005, who recently transferred from Arizona State University to the University of New Mexico after averaging only four points per game in 23 games as a freshman.

Unfortunately, the outliers grab the headlines, distort our perceptions of the path to success and alter our approach to youth sports. Others gravitate to these stories and attempt to emulate their success. We rush the development process and ignore developmentally-appropriate play activities because another child developed a skill a few years earlier than normal, and a television station desperate for feel-good stories featured him in a segment that captivated the Internet.

Childhood is moving quickly from a time of exploration and discovery to a pre-professional training environment. Rather than encourage children to play on their own and engage in self-discovery, parents set appointments with pitching, goalie or shooting coaches to train their offspring so their child can keep pace with the perceived status quo.

Sports, in their most basic form, are a form of play. In Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Stuart Brown, M.D. defines play as an activity possessing the following seven characteristics:

  1. Apparent purposelessness – play is done for its own sake
  2. Voluntary
  3. Inherent attraction – it’s fun
  4. Freedom from time – we lose a sense of the passage of time
  5. Diminished consciousness of self – we are fully in the moment; we stop worrying about looking awkward or stupid
  6. Improvisational potential – no one way to do things
  7. Continuation desire – pleasure of the experience drives a desire to continue

Developmentally, many view play as superfluous because it is fun, and therefore not serious practice. However, play offers the same learning experiences that drive the desire for more intense training. When I was young, I shot in my driveway for hours while engaged in self-initiated play. I was not training to be a professional player; I chose to play because I preferred playing outside to sitting at a piano and because shooting free throws cleared my mind.

Playing in my front yard or going to a neighborhood court for 3v3 games was fun. Hours flew by. I made up new moves or copied moves that I saw on television. If I dribbled the ball off my foot or airballed a shot, I chased down the ball and tried again and again until I mastered the move. I did not avoid mistakes but embraced them as challenges.

This play offers the same or better opportunities for skill development as more intense training sessions. In fact, a great trainer manages to engage many of the same characteristics as the child-initiated play. Regardless of the trainer’s knowledge, the child’s learning depends on his self-motivation and desire. If the child does not want to improve or does not value the lesson, he will not invest the time and effort required to learn something new. Play, however, is inherently fun.

Play differs from training because of its purposelessness. When a player moves from playing for the sake of playing to training for sports success, the motivation starts to change from fun to goal-oriented activities. In an athlete’s development, one naturally progresses from a period of play to more training-based activities. This progression is natural and gradual and occurs after a player has played a sport and developed an affinity for the sport and a desire to continue participation at more advanced levels.

The irony in the rush to eliminate these playful periods in favor of more specific training is that the prodigies’ initial skill development occurs through play, as the child explores different ways to manipulate the ball and engages in hours of self-initiated practice.

In 2001, I coached a nine-and-under team with amazing ball handling ability. At the AAU National Championships, we stayed at the same hotel as a 13-and-under team from Minneapolis. As our van pulled out of the hotel to get to one of our games, the players from Minneapolis were outside doing different ball handling drills and tricks. While idling in the driveway waiting for a coach, one of our players jumped out of the van, grabbed a ball and perfectly executed one of the moves that the other players struggled to perform.

Our players did not develop these skills through training-based activities. While we did ball handling drills, we did not do typical drills. One coach led the players through follow-the-leader type drills and incorporated different tricks out of streetball videos. However, these activities only enhanced the players’ motivation. Their development primarily occurred outside of practice.

After almost every practice, our top two ball handlers wasted time while their parents talked by going 1v1 in a hallway, trying to find ways to dribble past or through each other in a small, confined area. Nobody told these players to practice while their parents talked. Instead, they made their own games, and the games happened to enhance their skill development greatly. As they practiced, they did not have some higher goal; they simply wanted to have fun and one-up each other.

When we eliminate play at a young age, drills become tedious as the player loses his freedom, and he engages in more and more adult-initiated activities. Rather than trying new things and exploring different moves through play, players follow the coach’s instructions. Learning follows explicit instructions rather than through self-initiated exploration and imagination.

There is a time in the athletic development spectrum for training and specialized coaching. Unfortunately, more and more, parents seek this specialized training before their child plays the sport and develops the desire to train to be a better player.

By skipping these playful periods, players miss out on the self-discovery and exploration. They develop in an environment of extrinsic motivation and schedules, and an atmosphere of pleasing parents and coaches rather than playing for the sake of playing. They play in competitive environments at an earlier age where people focus on their performance and they worry more about how they look or perform as opposed to staying in the moment and engaging in an activity for the sake of playing. Often, this early training atmosphere leads young athletes to quit the sport at an early age because the sport loses its fun: the sport is no longer play.

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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Why I am rooting for Jeremy Lin

July 20th, 2010

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Early Sunday morning, I walked to the court where I train a 9th grader every weekend. He is generally late and sleepy when he arrives, but today he was on the court and shooting. As soon as I was within earshot, he said, “What do you think of Jeremy Lin?”

For those who do not follow the NBA Summer League or Ivy League basketball, Jeremy Lin is a point guard from Harvard who played with the Dallas Mavericks at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. He is an Asian-American, the son of immigrants from Taiwan. He was overlooked by nearly everyone as a senior in high school despite leading his high school to the California state championship with a win over national powerhouse Mater Dei; even nearby Stanford University offered only an opportunity to walk-on. Now, as an undrafted free agent, he is on the cusp of a guaranteed NBA contract, the holy grail for every young child who picks up a basketball.

While basketball fans concentrate on the athleticism of John Wall or the psychology of DeMarcus Cousins, from a developmental perspective, Jeremy Lin is the most important rookie in the 2010 class. I am rooting for Lin for the impact that his success will have on players like the one that I trained this morning.

While everyone hopes that race is a non-issue in the 21st Century, it is. Living in California, I have trained and coached a number of Asian-American players. While they love to play, there is often a sense of the glass ceiling – regardless of effort or talent, the Division I scholarship or the professional career is beyond their grasp. They look at D1 basketball and the NBA, and they do not see many players who look like them (Irish basketball players suffer from the same issue).

When I was young, many white players suffered from the same self-imposed glass ceiling. It is easier to blame one’s genes or race for one’s inability to achieve his dreams, and this pervades athletic and talent development. We create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I coached at a high school with a heavy academic emphasis and a large concentration of Asian-American students. Few if any actually believe that they could play college basketball. Their teachers, parents and coaches emphasize more realistic pursuits, like the orchestra and advanced calculus. When something must be sacrificed, sports are the first to go because sports are viewed as superfluous, as there is no future in sports. However, is an NBA career any more outrageous than a first chair position in the Los Angeles Philharmonic?

Before Roger Bannister broke the 4:00-mile, it was viewed as a ceiling of sorts. However, once he broke through the barrier, dozens of runners ran under 4:00 in the following months. The 4:00-mile was a mental barrier, not a physical barrier.

As Steve Nash flourishes in the NBA, he inspires white suburban players all over North America. No longer can a white player blame his race or genes, as Nash proves that a white player can excel in the 21st Century NBA without having to be 6′10. Lin has the chance to have the same impact for Asians and Asian-Americans, as to this point, only 7′0 Asians have had much basketball success.

I am not interested in the economic impact of a successful Asian-American player. My focus is developmental. We spend too much time looking at race, and not enough time controlling things within our control – our effort, skill development, practice habits and more. Once one player breaks through the perceived barrier, it becomes easier for others to set higher standards for themselves.

From a developmental perspective, I am interested in eliminating excuses. I want players to create their own positive self-fulfilling prophecies rather than allow prevailing myths to create a perpetually negative self-fulfilling prophecy to limit one’s dreams, goals and effort.

Jeremy Lin may never be an NBA all-star. However, his impact as a player may not be felt immediately; instead, his greatest impact may be felt a generation from now when young Asian-Americans no longer view college or professional basketball as an unattainable dream, but a worthwhile goal to pursue diligently.

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development

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How much of a coach’s job is player development?

April 14th, 2010

The April 19th ESPN the Magazine features an interesting question and answer with Stuart Scott in relation to former University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow:

Alex [Japan]: But why wasn’t his [Tebow's] motion fixed at Florida?

Stuart: Did it need to be fixed? He won a Heisman and two titles there. Maybe he’s not NFL ready, but he did what was necessary in Florida and is willing to do what’s necessary in the NFL. He’s a dedicated athlete.

Stuart Scott’s answer begs a question: what is the coach’s responsibility to his players and his team? Is his sole job to maximize the potential of the player at the college level or is he responsible for preparing the player to succeed at the next level?

College coaches cry about their role as teachers. However, if their job is to maximize their players’ performance at their level, with no responsibility to the future, is that really the role of a teacher? Is an Algebra teacher solely responsible for ensuring that her students pass an Algebra test or is their some responsibility that they are prepared for the next year of math work?

If we accept that the job of a millionaire college coach is to maximize his players’ and team’s talents at the college level – just win baby! – because it is essentially a professional level, what about a high school coach? Is a high school coach’s job to maximize his players’ and team’s talents and win a league, section, area or state championship or does he have a responsibility to develop his players for the next level, too?

For instance, if I have a great 6′4 player, should I maximize his potential as a high school post player, without developing the tools to play on the wing in college, because it gives my team the best chance to win a championship or am I responsible for also developing those wing skills that allow the player to move on and play at the next level?

At what point does a coach’s primary role shift from teaching and developing skills to maximizing potential and winning games?

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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A Story of Athletic Talent Development

April 5th, 2010

Originally published in the March/April 2010 Los Angeles Sports & Fitness.

In grade school, everyone talked about the Morrison clan. At that time, they were four brothers (they added a little sister when we moved to high school) grouped between six grades, and each excelled athletically. He was the strongest, fastest child in his grade. Before I knew anything about competitive sports, my dad showed me their names in the box scores from local swimming events in the Sunday paper. Before I realized that soccer was a real sport – it was never on television, and I had never seen it played outside our recreational season – they played on a “competitive team.”

Three played Division I soccer, and one was a 1st Team All-American and professional player. They also played high school basketball (at least one was team MVP) and baseball (despite not playing Little League) and probably would have played football if it did not conflict with soccer. Since they were my only grade school friends who excelled in soccer (and swimming for that matter), we figured that they were born as good soccer players or their dad made them into good soccer players somehow.

Every town seems to have a similar family. In Sports Illustrated in February, Gary Smith detailed such a family from Grand Forks, North Dakota: the Lamoureux family. By now, the Lamoureuxes may be famous – the twin daughters, Jocelyne and Monique played for the U.S. Women’s Hockey Team at the Olympics. Their four older brothers are All-American or professional hockey players in their own right.

Smith recounts the typical story of athlete development. The story starts with parental support, as hockey is not a cheap sport to play with all the equipment to buy and team and rink fees to pay. Chauffeuring six children to hockey practice and games can be a full-time job, and none of the children can excel without that type of support to allow the children an opportunity to develop their talents.

Of course, when six children excel to such a degree, other parents get jealous. Rather than celebrate their achievements or learn from their experience, people criticize the parents. As Smith writes:

“There was only one way that many Lamoureuxes could play the game at that level of aggression and skill, some Grand Forkers grumbled: Those children had no choice, they were over-scheduled robots. Why, their father was planning to ship the boys to Russia and the girls to Winnipeg to master the game. He beat them if they didn’t play and work out hard went the wild rumors heard by the kids. He made them do drills and box each other in their basement.”

People said the same thing about the Morrisons. When other people succeed, those who are not as successful create excuses to explain their own lack of success and to knock down the successful. However, these comments show a lack of understanding of the talent development process. While there are some famous examples to the contrary – Pistol Pete Maravich, Jennifer Capriati, Todd Marinovich – pushy parents are not the way to develop talent. Successful people – in sports, school or business – are self-motivated and choose to engage in the activity for their own enjoyment and satisfaction.

Moreover, often the circumstances leading to excellence are lucky or pure happenstance. I do not remember why or how the Morrisons ended up on a swim team when they were so young. As I recall, he may have been the only one in my class with a pool in his backyard when we started first grade, so maybe that had something to do with it or maybe his mother or father was a swimmer (I never asked).

In the case of the Lamoureuxes, one reason for their athletic prowess was purely coincidental. In North Dakota, there are streams called coulees cut from the Ice Age. In 1987, a developer in Grand Forks knocked out a bank and created a 70×200-foot hole and filled it with water. The Lamoureuxes did not notice this on the next cul-de-sac when they moved into the neighborhood. However, as Smith explains:

One freak year the shallow coulee froze in late September, and a few other times at Halloween. But it almost always congealed by mid-November, a month or more before the local rinks opened, allowing the Lamoureuxes—who spent 20 hours a weekend at the coulee and another dozen during the week—to amass thousands more skating hours than their peers.

Recent books like Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers cite and support K. Anders Ericsson’s research into expert performance that has found that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Living around the corner from the coulee, something that occurred completely by chance, provided the young Lamoureuxes a giant advantage, and they made the most of their advantage by playing early and often on the ice.

While The Talent Code and Ericsson’s The Road to Excellence argue for more structured practice, in Developing Sport Expertise, Jean Cote and Jessica Fraser-Thomas argue that deliberate play is as instrumental as structured practice, and this play counts toward the 10,000 hours needed for expert performance. They define deliberate play as “activities such as backyard soccer or street basketball that are regulated by age-adapted rules and are set up and monitored by the children or adults engaged in the activity. These activities are intrinsically motivating, provide immediate gratification and are specifically designed to maximize enjoyment.”

As Smith explains, the Lamoureuxes would engage in deliberate play for hours, all the while sharpening their skating and stick skills, as well as developing their game awareness.

“They’d bundle up in long johns, extra socks, sweatpants, snow pants, sweatshirts, winter jackets, bomber hats, two pairs of gloves and sometimes, at 20 or 30 below, when the prairie winds hurled a mix of snow and dirt that locals called snirt, in wool face masks that made them look like frosted fiends…

“The kids would launch practice shots at Phil, who’d begun goaltending in his diapers…Then they’d play free-for-all, a cacophony of chirps over big saves and takeaways, until someone shouted, “Sticks in the middle!” At that they’d fling their sticks into a heap, one boy wading into the pile with his wool hat pulled over his eyes, blindly grabbing two at a time and tossing one to either side again and again till none remained, divvying up the group into two teams.

“When they raced along the railroad ties girding the embankment on the Howes’ side, they were flying along the boards at the Montreal Forum. It was their Forum, no adult eyes on them, emboldening Phil to call out, “I’m Richter!” and Jacques to yelp, “I’m Messier!” and Pierre-Paul and Mario to turn into Leetch and Lemieux, and all of them to try the wriggles and whirls and between-the-legs sorcery they saw on TV.”

When we explain athletic success, these are the moments that we ignore. These days, everyone has a personal trainer and sports lessons. Around the same time that Smith wrote about the Lamoreuxes, Luke Winn wrote about University of Virginia star basketball player Sylvan Landesberg. Winn asks him about his trainers, as he had a “dribbling coach, a shooting coach, a weightlifting specialist and a boxing instructor,” in addition to his club-team coach and his high school coach. This is the modern-day way to develop a star athlete: surround him with more and more high-priced instructors.

However, regardless of the instructors and coaches, great athletes spring from a love of playing the game – they are not manufactured by specialty coaches.

“The first layer of the heart—that’s what the twins’ coach in high school, Gordie Stafford, would call that deep-down-in-the-tissue love for the game that was being implanted at the coulee. That’s what no organized version of a sport could implant in the chest of a child, what no dynasty dad or minivanning mom could ever arrange. That’s what made the Lamoureuxes lucky.”

Talent development has more to do with playing hockey on a frozen pond in below-freezing weather than working with the right coach. A coach or trainer can augment a player’s development by giving him some technical tools, but without the intrinsic motivation and pure desire to play the game, the technical skills are insufficient. The great athletes develop the “deep-down-in-the-tissue love for the game.”

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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A High School Coach’s Impact on Professional Basketball Players

March 23rd, 2010

Carlo Rotella of the Washington Post wrote an article about the NBA’s D-League and followed up the article with a chat. When asked about some of the things that surprised him, Rotella answered:

I was a little surprised to find how unanimous the players were–at least the ones I talked to–about their high school coaches as the ones who had the most influence on their game. Most didn’t see college as the place where their game developed the most. The story they tended to tell was that their high school coach taught them the basics and then playing pro taught them the pro game, often abroad and often the hard way.

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Does Every Player Deserve Playing Time?

March 1st, 2010

This season, I coached in a program that believed every player deserves to play in every game. I never coached this way. I usually stuck with an 8 or 9-player rotation.

From the outset, I told the players that they were not guaranteed playing time; they earned their playing time through practice. However, I played every player in every half of every game with the exception of two times when I benched a player for a half for a failure to communicate about missing a bus and missing practice.

Upon reflection, I believe in playing every player for several reasons:

1. Development. I had 12 players on the team. If I used a nine-man rotation, three players would have seen little to no playing time. During the season, the gap between the nine and the three would widen. Instead, one player who likely would have been outside the rotation hit a game-winning shot in a win that preserved a tie for the league championship and another player who would have been outside the rotation played a pivotal role in a 15-point fourth quarter comeback in the semi-finals of a tournament.

2. Inconsistency. At this level, you never know who will perform well in any given game. Players are inconsistent which is one reason they play junior varsity and not varsity. With 12 players ready to play, we had a good chance that someone would be on their game. We won a tough game without our two best players scoring a point because their back-ups stepped up and had great games. The players who played the majority of the minutes at the end of the season were not the same as those who played at the beginning of the season.

3. Practice Intensity. Because every player received meaningful minutes, every player was engaged in practice. Because every player played, every player continued to improve throughout the season, meaning more balance in scrimmages. In the past, as the season progressed, the starters improved more than the bench and the disparity between the two grew. This season, it did not matter how I split up the teams.

4. Team Morale. I did not see any of the usual petty jealousy that happens when some players sit on the bench and others play all the time and the bench players feel they deserve more time. Instead, players supported each other. Before our last game, one player suggested a new starting line-up so she would have a chance to start. One girl who this change would benefit was the loudest to disagree even though it would have been her first start of the season. Instead, she favored the regular line-up, the player who earned the starting line-up, because, a she said, “the game is important:” a win meant a tie for 1st place and a loss meant a tie for 2nd place.

During the season, we almost always out-played teams in the fourth quarter. We had a 15-point comeback in the 4th quarter against a good team; out-scored a team by 9 points in our one overtime game; came from 8 points down with 6:00 left against the co-league champions; and came back from 5 points down with 4:00 to play against the 3rd place team. Much of our 4th quarter success, I believe, was due to our lack of fatigue. We pressed and worn down other teams who refused to play their bench.

During league, we had several 40 and 50 point wins because our level of play did not drop off when we substituted five non-starters into the game. Our non-starters were accustomed to playing major minutes against good teams, so by league play, they were superior to some teams’ starters.

I do not play that every player should feel entitled to playing time regardless of their effort. I am not a fan of mandatory play leagues. However, I do believe that at the developmental level, every player who puts forth the effort and shows up to the practices deserves an opportunity to play.

In Little League, teams often put the worst player in right field for his mandatory two innings and hope that he draws a walk in his one mandatory at-bat, while the top players play shortstop, first base, pitcher and catcher and bat 3-4 times each game. How is the worst player supposed to have a chance if everything is slanted to favor the best players? The coach creates the self-fulfilling prophesy: he expects more and more from the favored players and less and less from the benchwarmer. Often, the difference between best and worst is a small gap at the beginning of the season, but widens through the season because of the opportunities afforded the chosen players. Also, the difference at the beginning of the season often has as much to do with age as anything else.

If development is the coach’s goal, every player should receive an opportunity to play meaningful minutes, provided that the player earns the minutes during practice through his effort and concentration. There is no reason to punish a player for not being good enough; that’s why he is playing: to improve!

By Brian McCormick
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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The First Step to Athletic Greatness and Lifelong Physical Fitness

August 23rd, 2009

Originally published in Los Angeles Sports & Fitness.

shootingAt the gym this week, I watched a seventh grader work with a personal shooting coach for an hour. After his lesson, his mother spoke to another coach and had the coach watch her son and offer pointers. Then, the child shot for another hour as his mother watched and critiqued every shot. After the child had shot for two-and-a-half hours, he started to whine. He wanted to go home. His mother told him to make 20 free throws in a row. Eventually, a team had practice and kicked him off the court.

When I was young, I imagine there were days when I shot by myself for two hours. I know I set goals like making 20 shots in a row before going inside. However, I made the decisions. I initiated the practice, I set my own goals, I decided when to finish. My individual practice was child-initiated and based on my motivations. I practiced because I enjoyed shooting.

The mother initiated the child’s practice, setting goals, hiring trainers and talking to coaches. The child did not want to continue. He was not enjoying the activity. His body slumped after every missed shot that prolonged his practice, he whined and he threw the ball. Maybe the mother wanted to teach her son a lesson about practice habits, work ethic or discipline. However, I saw a child starting to hate basketball.

In the United States, we face an obesity epidemic. Children are fat. However, we also have turned childhood sports into a scholarship chase. I believe the obesity issues stem from the same misguided philosophy which turned youth sports into the pursuit of the ephemeral dream, rather than a time for fun, activity, learning and exploration.

Parents rush their children into competitive athletics because they do not want their son or daughter to fall behind. These efforts are misguided. K. Anders Ericsson, author of The Road to Excellence, believes “when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.”

Ericsson believes a person needs hours of deliberate practice to become an expert performer. In a sense, the mother provided an environment for deliberate practice. This is the approach parents take. They know their child needs to practice and work hard to be successful, so they start the child down this path at earlier and earlier ages, like the mother of the six-year-old. However, the parents miss the first requirement: kids must love what they are doing. Pushing a child into an activity too hard and too soon often has the opposite effect, turning the child against the activity.

When a child quits sports at an early age, he is less likely to resume these activities later. Kids love to learn and explore. They do not compare themselves to others. They enjoy playing and learning. However, as we age, we become more self-conscious and more aware of others.

A teenager is unlikely to try a new sport because he does not want to fail. People associate a failure in an activity with a character flaw and worry others might like them less just because they cannot shoot a basketball or catch a football. While it is easy to dismiss these feelings, how many adults actively pursue activities in which they are not very good or have never tried? Now, imagine doing so during adolescence. No wonder P.E. is the worst class of the day for many kids.

hopscotchOnce upon a time, children played hopscotch at recess and jumped off swings at the highest peak. They jumped over (or into) puddles and skipped just for fun. Jumping rope was a game children played to song.

Now, as recess disappears and the pursuit of a scholarship grips parents as soon as their young prodigy takes his first steps, personal trainers painstakingly count the number of foot touches in a plyometric workout to prevent over-training and burnout. Depth jumps are prohibited for all but the most advanced children. The play activities of past generations are regimented training activities used to prepare young athletes for sporting success.

In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin, a world champion in chess and Judo, writes: “the most important factor in these first few months of study was that Bruce [his first chess coach] nurtured my love for chess, and he never let technical material smother my innate feelings for the game.” Eventually, Waitzkin moved to more intense levels of training and instruction. However, this occurred after he developed a passion for chess and a desire to pursue the sport.

In the gym, the mother failed to nurture her son’s love for basketball though her efforts stemmed from a good place. As we change physical activity from fun games to training activities, we lose children who are uninterested in or psychologically unprepared for the competitive nature of youth athletics.

The media points to the dedication of Tiger Woods at an early age to illustrate successful athletic development. However, how many young prodigies never make it? These are the stories left untold. Parents and coaches latch onto the Tiger Woods’ story, but nobody learns from Todd Marinovich or Jennifer Capriati or the dozens of others who quit sports altogether before they reached any level of noteworthiness. Rather than looking at Woods as the rule, what if he is the exception? What if he developed in spite of the pushing, not because of it? What if Woods, like Waitzkin, developed the passion for the game first and then engaged in the deliberate practice which elevated him into the world’s greatest golfer? The media only captures part of the story; maybe the real story is the fun games that he played with his father when he was young which generated his intense interest in golf.

Youth sports are not the pre-minor leagues. Children are not miniature professionals. Whether the goal is to develop your child into an All-American or just to keep your child active, the method is the same: youth sports should be fun, child-centered, exploratory and learning-oriented, not a competitive cauldron or pre-professional training.

Brian McCormick is the Performance Director for Train for Hoops.

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