Encourage With A Plan

Talking points for parents after a tough practice or match. You are a parent first, but there are times when your child will come to you for feedback or advice. Most of those times the conversations will be after a difficult outing. If you're having difficulty finding a positive or finding a way to encourage your child, you can look to the deliberate practice framework. Rather than commenting on the total performance, you can break the performance into smaller parts to find a positive to emphasize.

Distracting Emotions

Managing distractions and emotions during a match.

Their Anchor

Being a parent is the most important role you can play. It develops resilience and a love for the sport. Your child will have many coaches, role models, and positive influences in their academic and athletic lives, but they rely on you, the parent, to be their foundation.

We All Do It!

Even Will and Mark find themselves getting to involved.

Developing An Expert

One of the differences between experts and novices is what information they choose to gather. Experts focus on gathering information using relevant cues and only take in information directly related to their task. Novices take in information that is not relevant to their task. Not knowing what cues are related to accomplishing their task causes an overload of decisions.

Playing Big!

What coaches can do to help players in pressure games. One of the main take-aways that I wanted to share is how players change when their emotional levels get too high or low when the match might mean more to the player (semi-final or championship match, playing a rival team, playing against a great player, or player that gets under your skin, poor officiating, college coaches in attendance…you get the idea).

Changing The Flow

Learning how to change the flow of a game from the bench

What Did You See?

Find out what information the players see when making a decision? Every coach or parent has asked their kid, "What were you thinking?" sometimes, it is said in a caring way, and others out of disbelief. It is a great question to ask and important to know.