A Coach’s Guide to Maximizing the Youth Sport Experience

Work Hard, Be Kind

Mary Fry, Lori Gano-Overway, Marta Guivernau, Mi-Sook Kim, Maria Newton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367254131
• eBook ISBN: 9781000690996
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book guides sport coaches, parents and administrators in creating a caring and task-involving sport climate that helps athletes perform their best and have an enjoyable and meaningful sport experience. It introduces the concept of a caring and task-involving climate and provides a "how to" guide to creating this climate in sport.

Firstly, this guide introduces the caring and task-involving climate and summarizes research highlighting its many benefits. Secondly, the five features of this climate are presented along with the reflective exercises for developing them within a team. Coaches will see strategies in action, sample conversations, and a variety of ways to implement the features of a caring and task-involving experience. By describing how it may be implemented and methods for overcoming possible challenges, this book finally highlights how parents and sport administrators can support the creation and preservation of caring and task-involving climates.

By helping teams develop caring climates that optimize athletes' sport experience and performance, this book is essential reading for coaches, sport administrators, parents, and sport psychology practitioners. It will also be of great interest to those who have minimal training in sport psychology, but who are involved in sport at many levels, such as youth and high school.

PART I

Introduction

1

A Caring and Task-Involving Climate

The Key to Maximizing Sport Performance and Experience

Highlights

• Coaches play a major role in helping their athletes reach their potential.
• When coaches help athletes define success based on their effort and improvement, athletes reap many physical, mental, and emotional benefits.
• Coaches are key players in creating a caring and task-involving climate on their teams that trickles down and sets the state for great sport experiences.

I was one of those kids that participated in every sport imaginable and as a result I’ve had many coaches over the years. It is interesting to realize, good or bad, all of them had a tremendous impact on me. I recall Chuck who coached my community softball team when I was 12. He was a ‘man’s man’ – a big muscular guy with a bushy mustache. I would ride my bike as fast as I could to practice because he treated us like we were the San Francisco Giants. For those 2 hours we were his universe. Practices were planned out to the minute and every single drill was focused on effort and improvement. Every dropped ball (and there were plenty) was an opportunity to learn and improve. Every player – both good and bad – got all of Chuck’s attention and expertise. All of us – a pretty ragged bunch I imagine – were his Giants and he treated us with so much respect that to this day I still stand a little straighter and am proud of that team. I went on to receive some of the ‘best’ coaching in the United States and I can say that nobody ever quite lived up to the caring and task-involving climate that Chuck created. I think it just goes to show that coaches matter at every level and at the heart of good coaching is the coaching climate.

Maria Newton

My first career goal was to become a female coach that would express care for female runners, and understand how the body changes their experience during puberty. As a competitive runner, I had only experienced ego-involving coaches who were only focused on my performance. Then one day Coach Kim came into my life; he was a coach who cared about all athletes and had their best interests in mind. He tried to look at things from his athletes’ perspective and it made such a difference. He motivated the team to be the best student-athletes we could be, and he helped us thrive in both school and sport. He not only coached us in our sport but also helped us become the best people we could be.

Mi-Sook Kim

My dad was the main force behind me being active and participating in sports. He taught me to ski when I was 6, took my sister and me skating, swimming but most of all, he got us into hiking in the Pyrenees. He taught me endurance, pacing myself, persistence and to keep going beyond what I thought I could do. It was never about how high we could go but about completing the journey together. In school, it is not my coaches I recall most but my teammates. Thinking back though, I know my experience was ingrained by the atmosphere those coaches infused. My days were full of gymnastics, relays, basketball but also hours of unstructured play, dodgeball, jump rope and improvising games. The connections we built with each other last to this day. It was not until college that I realized that not everyone had a positive experience in sport and that success was often defined by being the best instead of being our best together. I was lucky to land at the Sport Psych program at Purdue, with great people that became best friends and a mentor who taught us about task-involving climates. Since then, I have been fortunate to work and learn from athletes and coaches to focus on helping reflect sports as they were for me when I was young.

Marta Guivernau Rojas

I really lucked out in middle school and high school in that I had coaches who cared about me as a person and motivated me to do my best. My Dad reinforced this notion that you always work hard and try to make yourself better. However, when I went to college, I learned that not all of my teammates and classmates had the same experience with coaches. They were yelled at for not performing well, pitted against one another, and did not have a good relationship with their coaches. These experiences made me realize that coaches really make a difference in the lives of athletes.

Lori Gano-Overway

When I graduated from college I was fortunate to walk right into a premium job as a tennis coach at a large school district in Texas. Whew, what a learning experience that was as I (the lone coach) began coaching the boys and girls’ teams (over 50 athletes) with full fall and spring schedules. My goal was to help bring out the best in every athlete I coached, and I realized quickly that such an aim was tougher to deliver than I expected. As I look back now, I realize that I somehow instinctively knew that the keys to maximizing the sport experience for my athletes were directly tied to encouraging high effort; giving instructional feedback and noticing improvement; creating a team bond where all athletes felt connected; and deeply caring about each athlete on the team. I’m not sure how I knew this … maybe it was because I had parents and siblings who reinforced these concepts throughout my life, or some good coaches along the way that helped me internalize these views.

Mary Fry

We (the five authors of this book) have similar stories. We grew up with sport being a huge part of our lives. We spent many hours in our sports, interacting with a variety of coaches and teammates, and learning and developing on so many fronts because of our sport involvement. Arguably, many of our most meaningful childhood and adolescent experiences were associated with our sport experiences. We played sport through high school and college, and we used our sport experience to coach a variety of athletes. For each of us, having exposure to coaches who created a positive environment where effort, improvement, and caring were pervasive, left their lasting imprints on us.

At some point after our college experience, each of us decided to return to school (go to graduate school!) and take the opportunity to learn more about optimizing athletes’ motivation in sport. Early on, each of us read work by John Nicholls and Joan Duda, two researchers who were addressing these very issues. We were hooked from that moment, and we have spent the last two plus decades learning, conducting research, and applying these concepts with a variety of athletes across different ages, levels (youth, high school, college sport), and skill levels. We have seen over and over again how the key to having great sport experiences is very much in the hands of coaches who know how to create the right environment for athletes. As co-authors, we have traveled very similar paths in our sport involvement, studies throughout graduate school, and our work as college faculty. We have written this book to share with others information about how to be part of this movement to create a caring and task-involving climate that results in positive sport experiences for all athletes. Though some coaches may be more interested in the material (Chapters 3–13) directly related to practice, we want to provide some information up-front in this book about the theory and research upon which all our recommendations are based.

Introduction to Nicholls’ Motivation Theory Applied to Sport

Though multiple researchers were involved in developing theory and conducting research early on that laid the foundation for our work, John Nicholls played the biggest role.¹ Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing until his death in 1994, he was doing the groundwork for understanding the motivational processes that were key for helping individuals maximize their potential. Basically, he developed a comprehensive theory that outlined three fundamental components of motivation (See Table 1.1). For the sake of brevity, we are providing a brief overview of Nicholls’ theory to give our readers some background for how this work has evolved.

Table 1.1 Key Elements in Nicholls’ Motivation Theory

Nicholl’s Motivation Theory Applied to Sport

• Children’s Understanding of Sport Ability • Athletes’ Personal Definitions of Success (Goal Orientations) • Athletes’ Perceptions of Their Team Environment

Young Athletes’ Understanding of Sport Ability

The first component of Nicholls’ theory details how children’s cognitive development occurs over the elementary school years. He described how very young children are incapable of understanding the concept of ability. They believe that high effort is synonymous with high ability (i.e., Whoever tries the hardest will perform the best), and they do not distinguish these concepts until they reach the upper elementary school grades. They also are incapable of distinguishing various levels of task difficulty. That is, adolescents and adults understand that if a small portion of athletes are able to do a task (hit a jump serve), it signifies high ability. Young children, instead, lack the mental capacity to recognize these distinctions. Instead, in their minds, all who try hard have high ability and will perform well. Worth noting is that children do not display a mature understanding of luck until they are approaching adolescence. Across the elementary years they are still believing that individuals have some control over performing well in luck tasks (e.g., “If I try hard I can do well in my Candy Land game” [a popular children’s game based on luck]). Nicholls’ research in this area, helped show how adults have a much stronger understanding of the concept of ability than do children.

One of the reasons Nicholls’ work in this area was so significant is that he was able to show that children’s delayed cognitive grasp of the concept of ability, serves as a protective factor to help them stay highly motivated through the elementary years. In fact, it is typically not until the middle and high school years that youngsters lose interest in school and other activities. Young children believe that high effort leads to positive outcomes and they do not yet accurately judge their ability in comparison to others, so there is no reason to withdraw effort.

Athletes’ Development of Their Personal Definitions of Success

Eventually, though, all young people achieve this mature understanding of ability (around the age of 12 years), which leads to the second component of Nicholls’s theory: Personal Definitions of Su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Features of a Caring and Task-Involving Climate in Sport
• PART III Special Considerations in Creating a Caring and Task-Involving Climate in Sport
• PART IV Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Index