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It’s Not Them; It’s Us – Better Coaching With Young Athletes: Brett Klika

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When my child was learning to swim, the instructor was shouting out instructions and our daughter just wasn’t getting the message. The coach would say things like, use your hips instead of your knees, and a small child isn’t going to know what that exactly means in terms of their anatomy. We have to keep in mind that children aren’t fully developed humans yet and their cognitive abilities aren’t fully formed, and they may not have all the necessary vocabulary down before hand.

Key Takeaways:

Oftentimes, when young athletes fail to follow their coach’s sometimes shouted advice, it can seem to the coach’s that their directives have been ignored.
This is not necessarily the case. The way that one person says something is not necessarily the way a second person understands it.
One coach shouted at a swimmer to use her hips, all the while getting nowhere. What he failed to see was that while the swimmer understood “hips:, she did not know what using them should entail.

“This communication disconnect is often a limiting factor in how positive or negative our interactions are with our youngest athletes.”