Kids need confidence and here’s how to give it to them:
give them strength!
I don’t mean just physical strength. I also mean emotional, spiritual, and intellectual strength as well. All of it. Strength is an important part of all of existence as well as success in sports.
Every day, we see parents putting their kids into sports programs for many different reasons. Some parents want to encourage their children to make friends and be more social. Others hope their child will be the next Michael Jordan or Christiano Ronaldo. Either way, we as sports coaches appreciate and respect the many reasons parents trust us with their children.
For us, we also have our many different reasons for continuing our pathways forward as coaches. Some of us love to play the chosen sport and realize it’s possible to pay our bills by continuing to be part of the promotion of the game. Other coaches truly feel ‘called’ to the industry and have a real love for the impact we have on our students.
We see this ‘calling’ more in coaches who work primarily with children. It is a beautiful thing to consider the idea that as a coach, we can positively impact the future of a child for the rest of their life. It can also be a scary thought when you really think about that responsibility.
When I picture my own childhood, I include stories my parents tell about my first tennis coach. He had a huge smile on his face and did a wonderful job of offering me a very nice first tennis experience and I’m now certain this is extremely important for the likelihood of a child continuing to play any organized sport. I have no idea if Fred (that was his name) was a specialist in young, beginner tennis players, nor do I have any idea how my parents found a tennis coach at all. We didn’t have the internet back then, so how did anyone do anything?!
In spite of the seemingly archaic lifestyles at the time, my parents did a great job of allowing little Shaun to experience a few sports, so I was able to choose my favorite as well as the ones where I excelled. I was personally willing to put in the extra physical work to strengthen my body in preparation for the next steps of any development but all of us were often sent home with physical ‘homework.’
At TennisForChildren, we have incorporated the extra physical work needed by most children into our monthly and yearly schedules. By taking advantage of the typical ‘down time’ enforced by inclement weather, we take children on a physical path seemingly not offered by other programs targeting younger, beginning level athletes.
I have heard coaches talking about their less physically gifted younger players because they won’t progress without extra planks, push-ups, and jump rope work. The coaches are often accosted by parents asking why the children have not improved quickly enough. And unfortunately, it’s possible that this improvement is viewed by some arbitrary standard, comparing their child’s development to the other kids, in a likely “apples and oranges” fallacy.
I often find myself counseling other coaches to remind themselves of two things:
- – If you have a specific program that you don’t prefer to do yourself, be sure to outsource that program to someone who is a true specialist in that area. In our case, we specialize in building the emotional, intellectual, and physical strength of young, beginner tennis players so the Director of tennis can utilize their instructors to the best of their strengths, and
- – Continue to remind parents that physical strength and body awareness is often a precursor to sports development especially when implemented during the initial coordination installation.
At TennisForChildren, we offer OffCourt workouts in addition to the tennis classes to help young children get to know their bodies as they grow, gain strength, and therefore build overall confidence on the court as well as in their daily lives.
March 2022
SjB
