6 Tips From Coaches: How to Be a Good Sports Parent

Coach Tip #4: “Trust the coach’s decisions and strategy, even if you don’t understand it, rather than defaulting to a mindset of suspicion and fostering that suspicion in your child.”

You knew this one was going to be here, and you were right. Coaches have many, many different reasons for what they do, that parents will not always understand. In part because parents don’t have access to all the information the coaches do, and in part because we are all just different: two different people in the exact same situation might value or decide different things.

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All the parents agreed that parents shouldn’t accept truly dangerous or abusive behavior. (For example, one coach mentioned a parent who rightly alerted them to an assistant coach’s practice of withholding water breaks as a form of discipline!) But in most cases, the coach needs to be able to make decisions, to experiment, and to do what they believe is best for the team without worrying that parents will be on the phone the next day or rolling their eyes with their kids.

One Junior Varsity coach told me, “In rec leagues and club sports there is a lot of focusing on drills. It is simply easier when you have a large number of students, to focus on drills and say, ‘This is the best way to build skills.’ But actually, as long as you have a decent skill base of some kind, we try to minimize the drills and actually do gameplay. It is messy and ugly and chaotic … and that’s what the real games often look like! So if we train that way, then when ugliness happens in the game, the students are used to it. But every year I get phone calls from parents whose students played in county leagues or club sports, saying ‘My child is not getting enough of the practice they need to compete, because you’re not running enough drills!’ and I have to spend time on the phone explaining why we do it this way, and encouraging them to not join in with their student when they second guess us. Our students end up being far more prepared because they are not thrown by the tempo and chaos of the games, so eventually the parents come and say ‘Oh I get it.’ But it is frustrating to have to spend those hours on the front end because the parents default to thinking I’m crazy, rather than the parents defaulting to a position of trust that there IS a reason I’m doing this.”