Youth Coaching Survival Skills: coaching your own child

Written by Tucker White – US Lacrosse CEP Trainer

As the season approaches, many of you will find yourselves in the all to familiar situation of coaching your own son or daughter. Positive Coaching Alliance provides valuable tools to help coaches with this particular situation. Here are three tips excerpted from the Coaching for Winning and Life Lessons Workshop. More can be found in the workshop workbook you receive when you take the course online or in-person.

1) Ask permission. Ask your child whether or not they want you to coach their team before you sign up for this role. During this discussion, be sure to explain why you want to coach the team and how you will coach the team (coaching philosophy).

2) Recognize that you wear two hats. One hat is for your role as parent. The other is the coach’s hat.

Explain this to your child before the season. Tell him that you will need to treat him just like everyone else on the team when you are wearing your coach’s hat. Assure him that when you put your parent hat back on, he is the most important person in your life (along with other family members).

You can say to your child, for example after a game or practice, “I’m taking my coach hat off now and putting my dad hat on.” Some parent-coaches go so far as to have a special cap that they wear only when they are coaching their child’s team, and which they remove after the game.

3) Be sensitive to favoring or penalizing your child. Many coaches give their child advantages (like starting games or playing favored positions) that the child hasn’t “earned” by effort or talent.

Nothing poisons the well with other parents and players as much as when a coach unfairly favors her own child.

However, many coaches are harder on their own child than they are on other players, expecting them to be perfect. Because of our emotional commitment to our children, it is hard for us to be objective about our own child.

You may find it useful to ask another person (perhaps a trusted assistant coach, not your spouse!) for an objective evaluation of whether he thinks you are treating your own child fairly compared to how you treat other players on your team.

Coaches,

We are constantly looking for resources to share toward the improvement of our players and organization.  Below are some links to websites featuring various lacrosse drills and skills for player development:

• www.kudda.com
• www.lacrossecoach.org go to the free subscription and download it.  Some vaulable tools for coaches
• www.sportskool.com go to the sports tab and click on lacrosse.  This is the company that produces the Comcast OnDemand sports videos. 

Should you come across a worthwhile website, please pass it along and we'll post it here on the Lightning Coaches' page.