“It’s not the kids.” It’s the adults. I am not sure how many times I heard that phrase over the summer. Had to be above 50.
When you go to the camps, tournaments, and events that fill the summer, you talk to a lot of people. You meet folks from all over the country. I feel blessed in that regard. Hearing that many perspectives is a good thing. More people need to get out and talk to others. Not just people from their own town. People from everywhere. Learn who they are. Learn their story.
What you learn pretty quickly is that there is a common message traveling the country. The kids are not the main problem with the behavior. The adults are. Different states. Different sports. Same complaint coming from coaches, parents, evaluators, and people who just watch enough games to see the pattern.
Coaches are not exempt
And it is not only the people in the stands or the lurkers on Facebook. It is the coaches too. How they behave. Personal threats against kids under 18. Acting like children in the face of adversity. The vitriol that comes out of their mouths.
Is that the role of a coach?
A coach is there to help a young student-athlete become the best human they can be, not just the best athlete. Being a coach does not give you a green light to act like an idiot. Your role is to be a role model. To give a young person an image worth growing toward.
If coaches are giving personal threats of violence to a young person, holding no composure, and speaking in ways a role model should never speak, is that really accomplishing the ultimate goal of coaching? Is that truly going to help your team win? Or is it just an adult losing control because a scoreboard bruised their ego?
If you think this is a personal callout of specific coaches, it is not. That list would be way too long to attach to this article.
Go watch a youth league game this weekend. Any sport. Watch how AAU and travel coaches treat the game. Lack of honor. Lack of respect. No real values. No projection of how to act like an adult. You see it at every level. High school. Middle school. And for sure in the youth leagues. The younger the kids get, the more embarrassing some of the adult behavior becomes.
Parents still matter, even if we have said it before
I have hit on parents in other articles before. It is a dead horse at this point. But it still has to be said. You are a role model for these young student-athletes too. How you act. How you handle adversity. That is a direct reflection of how they will grow up.
Then there is this unbelievable notion of rules for thee, not for me. It is incredible. If someone else’s kid breaks a rule or a law, it is the end of the world and they should be punished. If your kid does it, it is automatically somebody else’s fault. Truly incredible. That double standard does not just stay in the stands. Kids hear it. Kids learn it. Kids carry it into the next argument, the next season, and the next group of adults watching them.
The kids already figured something out
The world has changed in one big regard. Kids have not changed that much. Adults have. AAU, travel sports, and social media have changed the landscape. That old mystery of the kid from another town has slowly disappeared.
A lot of these kids play travel ball together. They throw together. Shoot together. Work out together in the off months. They get to know each other. Most of them are friends. The hate that lives in the adults is not sitting in the kids the same way. They see through it now.
They will compete their tails off during the game. Then they will take pictures with each other afterward. This idea that we have to hate our opponents feels like something from the past. I never believed that anyway.
Hate and emotion disappear after the second snap. What is left is discipline, execution, and focus. You play harder for teammates you love than you do against opponents you hate. The kids seem to understand that better than a lot of the adults watching them. Maybe that should tell us something.
Transactional coaching vs. transformational coaching
Adults get wrapped up in this because they believe their lives are defined by what 18-and-under kids do on a field or a court. That is transactional coaching. It is shallow. And it leads to failure.
When you coach transactionally, even success does not feel like much. You finally taste it and hear coaches say, that was it? Transformational coaching is different. It helps students change their lives well past the on-field accomplishments. They become successful in their work. They build strong families and relationships. They carry the lessons from sports into the mountains and valleys of life.
That is success. That is winning.
The coaches aiming for that goal usually win more games on the field too. Weird how that works. When you stop treating kids like scoreboard props and start treating them like people you are responsible for shaping, the whole thing gets healthier. And better. The wins come. The kids last longer. The culture stops rotting from the top down.
So no, it is not mainly the kids. It is the adults. The coaches who forgot the job. The parents who cannot handle adversity. The grown people who need a teenage scoreboard to feel important.
The kids are competing, connecting, and moving on. The adults should try catching up.