4d (edited) • General discussion
The #1 Mistake Every Coach Makes
The biggest mistake I see coaches make has nothing to do with Xs and Os.
It's how they talk to kids.
We default to teaching the way we were taught — like we're talking to another adult. That doesn't work on a 6-year-old. Two things go wrong at once: the tone, and the words themselves.
"Stay square to your guy" means nothing to a kindergartner. Say it anyway, and you'll get blank stares. Get frustrated when they don't get it, and you'll get worse than blank stares.
Here's the fix. Before I introduce anything new now, I spend a few minutes before practice finding the phrase that actually lands in a kid's head. "Stay square" became "keep your belly button pointed at him." Same instruction. Completely different result.
That one substitution changed more practices than any scheme I've ever installed.
Tone matters just as much. A correction that reads as normal coach-speak to a teenager reads as harsh to a 6-year-old. Firm and encouraging beats sharp and correct, every single time, at this age.
And this isn't just a "kids will like you more" thing. It's a results thing. Every rep where a kid doesn't actually understand the instruction is a wasted rep — you can run the drill 20 times, but if the words never landed, you taught nothing 20 times. Translate the language, and the same 45 minutes teaches twice as much, because they're absorbing it instead of guessing. My team didn't win our league because we had better athletes than anyone else on the schedule. We won because they actually understood what I was asking them to do, so what we practiced on Tuesday actually showed up on Saturday.
If your practices feel like you're talking and nobody's listening — check the words first, then check the tone. It's almost never effort. It's translation. And it's the fastest way I know to turn practice time into results you can actually see on game-day.
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The #1 Mistake Every Coach Makes
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