IN THIS ISSUE: TRAINING CHAMPIONS THE RIGHT WAY
August, 2009
Volume #11 Issue #1
COMPETITIVEDGE.COM PRESENTS
FALL 2009
If you haven't noticed, this is my first newsletter in many months. I apologize for the very long delay! My only excuse is that since last August (2008), I have been putting all of my energy into developing a new Mental Toughness Blog. The blog, which I add to several times a week, covers some of the hot topics in sports today related to sports psychology, mental toughness training and parents & coaches in youth sports. In addition to articles, you'll also find video links to compelling stories of courage, motivation, mental toughness and what it takes to become a champion. If you haven't been on the blog yet, I'd highly recommend that you check it out. As always, please feel free to duplicate any of the articles or links and pass them on to teammates, coaches or parents who might be interested. Your feedback and comments about the blog and/or newsletter are also very much welcome.
IN THIS ISSUE: TRAINING CHAMPIONS THE RIGHT WAY - There's a really interesting article by Paul Kix in the August 24th issue of ESPN Magazine about Tosh (Tony) Farrell, an English soccer coach who for the past twelve years has championed a coaching philosophy called the Everton Way. Tosh is the head of international development for the Everton Football Club, a Liverpool based club in the English Premier League. If you don't know football or what we in America call soccer, then you need to know that the English Premier League (EPL) is the highest level that the game is played on in the world. It's the PGA, NBA, MLB, NFL and USTA, etc. of football.
Farrell flat out knows how to develop athletic talent and his system is known in soccer circles for having turned more young players into professional league first-teamers (24) than just about any other system in the world. Five of his players were just 16 years old when they made it to the top level of the EPL! Manchester United forward Wayne Rooney was one of them along with Everton striker James Vaughn, the youngest player ever to score an EPL goal. With this kind of consistent success, you might want to pay very close attention when Tosh Farrell speaks!
If you're an athlete, parent or a dedicated coach in any sport with dreams of success and a strong commitment to the pursuit of excellence, then listen up! Tosh's principles can help you or your kids get as far as possible in their sport!
The problem is that most U.S. athletes in virtually every sport, along with their parents and coaches are going about training athletes the absolute wrong way. They mistakenly cling to a number of performance-limiting beliefs that significantly stunt the athlete's development, leave him/her vulnerable to repetitive performance problems and contribute to that athlete only reaching a fraction of his/her potential. To make matters worse, our American approach to competitive sports often creates debilitating performance anxiety, a boatload of unhappiness and both of these then lead to burn-out and/or premature drop-out.
To fully grasp the Everton Way and Tosh Farrell's approach, you have to first understand the environment from which it was born. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, the Everton team in the EPL doesn't have the financial support to compete with the big boys like a Manchester United or a Chelsea. These big moneyed clubs can afford to buy their talent from all over the world. Everton, instead must rely on their own ability to develop talent, something that they do better than almost anyone else. Their belief: Great footballers are made, not born. I repeat, GREAT ATHLETES ARE DEVELOPED, NOT BORN.
Another compelling rule that all English clubs have to contend with which puts Everton at an additional disadvantage is that teams are only allowed to recruit players (as young as 9) to their youth academies who live within an hour's drive of their training complex. If there's a club you're interested in but it's outside of this hour radius, you're out of luck! Can you imagine the loud squawking sound that would arise if this rule applied to all levels of youth sports in this country, i.e. travel, AAU, middle and high school teams? That would mean no more recruiting of “blue chippers” from all over the place. The EPL recruiting rule, which aims at fairness, actually hurts Everton because one quarter of it's scouting region is in the Irish Sea!
Despite this or maybe because of it, the team has perfected a teaching strategy that enables it to more than hold its' own against its' richer, more fortunate competition, a teaching strategy that anyone, athlete, coach and parent can use in their own sport to help them take their game to that next level. What's the grand secret behind the Everton Way? Clandestine and esoteric techniques and game strategies? Top secret drills and conditioning exercises? Specially designed competitive experiences? Hardly!
This so-called high-powered training system utilizes most of the training techniques that are used at every other major soccer academy around the world. The difference is that there is much more attention paid to the details in the Everton Way than in any other school.
Let me briefly review some of the basic principles of the Everton Way:
1) The very best coaches should teach the youngest players, because lifelong habits are formed early.
2) All instructors should coach according to their expertise, which means that you will never see an Under 16s coach extolling the unbelievable talent and potential of a 10 year old player.
3) Winning doesn't matter until kids are about 16. What does matter is technique and development. (I repeat) WINNING DOESN'T MATTER, TECHNIQUE AND DEVELOPMENT DO!!!!!!
4) Every year, at least one player who signed as a 9 year old, years before will debut with the pro club.
I would like to comment on one or two of the above principles that Tosh Farrell uses in his training, because here in America, we are in desperate need of them, especially #3, WINNING DOESN'T MATTER, TECHNIQUE AND DEVELOPMENT MATTER!!!! Why are we in such need? Because we are going about our athlete training totally wrong and, as a result, we're making a terrible mess of it and compromising our children's potential both on and off the playing field.
What many coaches, parents and athletes today don't seem to realize is that our too early and overblown obsession with the outcome, with winning championships, beating certain opponents, achieving rankings and avoiding losing, grossly stunts athletes development, holding them back in their quest to become the very best that they can be. Our current system of “finding and developing” talent in most sports inadvertently sabotages this talent.
U.S. Soccer is one sport that is just beginning to realize this, probably because of the difficulty this country has been having in producing top quality players and successful national teams. Because of recent failures and disappointing finishes in World Cup competitions, US Soccer officials decided that they needed to do something dramatic in relation to player development because what they were currently doing with their younger athletes clearly wasn't working. They needed to figure out why, so they did something really smart. They began studying successful youth sports programs from over a dozen other countries. What did they discover?
US soccer had been placing far too much emphasis, far too early on winning. They discovered that according to these really successful programs, they needed to emphasize coaching and teaching more while de-emphasizing the importance of wins and losses!!!! Successful programs around the world spent far more time developing their players' skills, understanding and execution of the game than they did having their athletes involved in playing competitive matches!
This, of course, is right out of principle #3 from the Everton Way, “winning doesn't matter until kids are 16. What does matter is technique and player development!” So, what in the world has US Soccer done with this blasphemous, anti-American information? Abandoning the typical sports thinking of North America, they have actually decided to push back the focus on winning so that it begins only when a player makes a National squad starting around the age of 16 and 17! HOLY WE'RE-NUMBER-ONE! What in the world is going on here?
Do we have a group of self-esteem promoting do-gooders who want to drain all the fun out of competitive sports? What is this garbage? You don't focus on winning until a kid is 16? I mean, at 16, their competitive career is almost over! You mean to tell me my soon-to-be four year old grandson won't have a chance to make the elite travel team, fly cross country to California and play in the 6 and under National tournament? If he doesn't do this, how is he supposed to get looked at by the elite 8 and under coaches and make their travel team? If that doesn't happen, then explain to me how this poor boy is supposed to have a prayer to make the 10 and under squad that has a chance to compete in Barcelona in 2017 in the Junior, Pee Wee World Cup? And let's just jump ahead a few years and view the negative effects of this. What chance will he then have of making the varsity of his high school program? And, if he doesn't get an early start to compete at the high school level, it will really stunt his development as a soccer player. What will this mean for that college scholarship we're going after? I mean, this just isn't right! What it is, is anti-American!
Well, guess what? It certainly is anti-American and therein lies the only hope we have in this country for changing our misguided approach towards competitive sports and giving athletes a real shot at truly reaching their performance potential. Here's the problem the way that I see it:
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM WITH TOO MUCH COMPETITION TOO EARLY
Learning anything, be it physical or mental, best takes place in a relaxed, non-pressured environment where the learner feels free to make mistakes and fail. Without this freedom, there can be no true learning because making mistakes and failing are such an integral and important part of the learning process, especially in competitive sports! It's only through the clear feedback of exactly what you are doing wrong that you are then able to learn what to do right.
When you introduce stress and anxiety into any learning environment several things happen:
First, the athlete-learner begins to experience much more difficulty integrating what's being taught. No longer relaxed, the anxiety present in the situation interferes with the athlete-student's ability to take in and utilize the lessons. Both our brain and body shut down under extreme stress.
Second, the anxiety generates physical tension within the athlete which dramatically disrupts the learning and execution of physical performance skills. The secret to learning and peak performance across all sports at every level lies in staying calm and relaxed. A nervous, tight athlete is one whose timing is consistently off, foot speed is slower and who experiences significant problems with smooth execution of proper mechanics. In sum, a nervous athlete is always a serious underachiever!
Third, anxiety interferes with the athlete's all-important ability to concentrate on what's important and block out everything else. Concentration is another critical key to athletic excellence. If athletes in a learning or performance situation focus on the wrong things going into or during their experience , their stress level will immediately rise shutting down the learning process and dramatically interfering with performance.
This sets into motion a self-perpetuating cycle of nervousness ----> increased muscle tension ----> disrupted concentration--------> all resulting in either poor performance or difficulty learning followed by even more nervousness, additional muscle tension, further disrupted concentration and then another bad performance, etc. Caught in the grips of this negative cycle, athletes will lose their self-confidence, further heightening their performance anxiety.
There is nothing that generates performance-disrupting stress quite like competition with an overblown emphasis on the importance of the outcome. If you make winning and losing too important, then you will effectively short-circuit a young athlete's ability to learn the game effectively and perform to his/her potential. In essence, this is what we've done with far too many sports in this country. Coaches and parents have gotten on the “we're #1” bandwagon and have made the wins and rankings far more important than the child-athlete's learning and emotional well-being. Because there's more at stake when the athlete goes into a game, match or race, he/she begins to experience much more stress.
This stress is dramatically heightened by coaches and parents who have become far too invested in the child-athlete's performance.
If a coach measures his/her competency by the outward performance success of his/her teams and individual athletes (like most coaches do), that is, if he/she defines professional success in terms of winning and losing, then this outcome measure will be present in almost every interaction that this coach has with his/her athletes.
When the team is successful and executing flawlessly, that coach will feel good about him/herself and be more relaxed with the players. However, when the team loses or struggles, this coach will feel unsuccessful and internally threatened. With losses, this coach experiences that his/her competency is being called into question. As a result, the coach will be more vulnerable to getting angry, openly frustrated and impatient with athletes who make mistakes or who are seen as “responsible” for the failures.
In its' extreme form, a coach whose ego is on the line whenever his/her team steps on the field might become emotionally abusive to those players who screw up in practices and during games. He/she might yell at, publicly punish or humiliate anyone who doesn't “produce” the way that the coach expects them to. Blinded by the threat that they feel to their own ego, these coaches completely lose their perspective and forget that they are working with psychologically fragile, impressionable children!
This kind of coaching behavior immediately corrupts the learning environment and creates an atmosphere of emotional danger for the young athlete. (No, regularly yelling at and demeaning young athletes doesn't make them physically or mentally stronger and it certainly doesn't help them perform better!!! Just the opposite!!) No longer feeling safe, the athlete starts to worry about failing and disappointing/angering the coach. With the athlete's anxiety level so high and his/her focus on the coach and “not messing up,” learning and peak performance become impossible.
In many ways, coaches of younger athletes (15 and under) who over-emphasize the importance of winning at the cost of fundamentals and technique are being seriously short-sighted. They're engaging in a “penny wise-pound foolish” kind of mentality. By getting their players to focus on the importance of winning, these coaches are inadvertently compromising their athletes' long term learning and acquisition of skills. In the long run, this approach always backfires because it directly interferes with the athletes being able to develop a solid foundation of correct mechanics. To me, it's like getting your athletes to focus on winning the warm-up rather than properly preparing them for the real game!
Think about it: How terribly important is it for your 10 and under team to win the league or qualify for Sectionals, States, Regionals or Nationals? So what if the kids win Nationals. What does that really mean? The kids may tell you that it's the most important thing in the world to them. But the kids are not the ones in charge here and they're only following your lead as the coach. The bottom line is that you as the adult are in charge, and if you get into the habit of downplaying the importance of the outcome, and instead, emphasizing the values of having fun, learning proper fundamentals and technique, then the kids will soon get this critical lesson!
This is the attitude and mindset that John Wooden, the Hall of Fame UCLA basketball coach used so successfully with his college players! The Wizard of Westwood won 10 straight NCAA National championships by stressing the value of attitude, teamwork and, most important, proper fundamentals! Wooden never talked about winning or the competition with his players. Instead, he talked to them about executing their game plan and playing to their potential. When his teams successfully did this and lost, Wooden viewed this loss as a “win.” When his teams won the game but failed to properly execute, he treated this win as a failure and then encouraged his players to learn from it and correct the mistakes that they had made.
Wooden completely took the pressure off of his players to win. He did not go ballistic when his athletes made mistakes. Instead, he intuitively understood the value of making mistakes and failing in the learning process. Because of this, he created a safe learning and performance environment. This enabled his players to relax and take risks whenever they played and to quickly let go of their mistakes whenever they made them. To me, creating this kind of training and playing atmosphere where learning and fundamentals were the primary goal explains so much of why Wooden was so success.
On the other hand, coaches who over-stress the outcome, short-circuit this learning process because their overt and covert messages to their players is the same, “Better not screw up because if you do, it will hurt our chances of winning and then we might lose. And, if we do, it will be your fault!” As a result, athletes are placed under far more performance pressure and are therefore more vulnerable to being distracted by fears of “screwing up.”
Swen Nater, one of Wooden's players who also spent some time in the NBA recently talked about why Wooden's approach was so successful: (See Mental Toughness Blog 7/22/09)
“Wooden, the 'winningest' college basketball coach never mentioned the word 'win' to his players. Instead he kept us focused on becoming the best that we could be, rather than trying to beat some other team. Making the effort to become our very best, individually and collectively gave us peace of mind, (providing a safe learning and performance environment) whether we won a game or not. Here's the point: When a coach approaches winning and losing in this way, that coach maximizes his team's chances for outscoring the other teams. It's almost an oxymoron. The less you concentrate on beating the other team, by concentrating on your own perfection, the more you increase your chances for winning.”
“This is true because the coach that works to maximize his own team's potential will:
1. Pay particular attention to the teaching of the fundamentals of the sport (The Everton Way)(You cannot become your best if the foundation is not there. You cannot reach the stage of creativity without the basics, i.e. Michael Jordan and Coby Bryant.)
2. Create practice plans that aim to condition the players, both physically and mentally.
3. Devise ways to promote and create true teamwork (A team cannot reach its potential without everyone sacrificing personal glory for the benefit of the team.)”
Wooden's approach as a coach, stressing the critical importance of learning and executing proper fundamentals was very successful with college players. Can you imagine how much more critical it is for younger athletes to have this very same approach? Coach, Let yourself learn from a proven master teacher. Bag the over-emphasis on outcome, on wins and losses and start really training your players to become champions!
Turn down the volume on outcomes. De-emphasize the importance of winning and beating certain opponents. Take the performance pressure off of your players and instead, encourage them to make mistakes, fail and truly learn.
Try to keep the bigger picture in mind here when you're working with these kids. First off, you're not just coaching a sport, you're coaching about life! Actively create a safe learning environment for your athletes where they feel free to take risks and make mistakes. Make teaching solid fundamentals your main priority. Do not allow yourself to get distracted by winning and losing. The outcome is not what is important here. With a foundation of solid mechanics and healthy life principles, your players will be able to go so much further in their development both as athletes and individuals.
Along these same lines, understand that your won-loss record does not begin to accurately define the quality of coach that you are. Being undefeated or winning the conference championship does NOT make you a great coach any more than finishing with a losing record makes you a lousy one. While others, i.e. colleagues, athletes and their parents may mistakenly believe that there's a direct relationship between outcome and coaching effectiveness, they're flat out wrong! You can be untrustworthy, play favorites, coach through fear, be a terrible communicator, an abusive teacher and a down-right rotten role model and still go undefeated and qualify for Nationals! As far as I'm concerned, the sum total of all of this makes you a really bad coach and I wouldn't want you within a mile of my kids!
One final, real-life example of winning coaching that creates champions: Earlier in the summer I was asked to speak to a girls' U-17 soccer team from Florida on the night before their National tournament. This was the first time that the team had qualified for nationals in club history.
The coach, Luis Torres had trained most of these adolescent girls since they first began playing soccer as U 10's. When the girls were 13 and Torres took over this particular team, he had a preseason meeting with the girls' parents. In it, he told them very clearly, “You are going to play a big part of this program and our success. To do this, you have to buy into what I'm doing here. As the coach, I am not out to win anything. If you and your daughter want to win, then find another program to play for. Instead, my job is to teach your girls to love this game and to reach their individual potential. The whole process is about having fun and developing as a player and person.”
Torres made the parents an integral part of the program. He gave them roles to play revolving around the management and functioning of the team, NOT the coaching and he made sure they played their proper role. Like Wooden, Torres downplayed the importance of winning. And by doing that, paradoxically, he created winners. His team went all the way to the finals of Nationals where they dominated a very close match only to lose 1-0. More impressive than this are these statistics: No soccer players from the area of Florida where this team is from have ever made the National Team pool. Since Torres took over 5 years ago, he has helped place 6 players into that same National pool! Torres said it best, “It's all about giving each of these kids an opportunity to love the game and reach her potential. It's NOT about the winning.”
What can you as a parent learn from Tosh Farrell and the teaching principles of the Everton Way? How badly do you want your child to be successful in his/her sport?Do you want to be a positive force in your child's physical and emotional development that helps him/her really enjoy the sport, learn quickly, excel as a performer and feel good about him/herself? These are some very important questions that I'd like you to consider right now because far too many well-meaning parents get this competitive youth sport thing wrong.
From what we've been discussing in this newsletter, you have a very difficult job ahead of you. First, as a parent, you need to learn to go against the “tide” in competitive youth sports. That is, you need to really begin to grasp the critical importance of having your child in a program like Luis Torres' that emphasizes enjoyment, fundamentals and skill development while simultaneously downplaying the importance of competing and outcome. High-powered under-16 teams that stress rankings, traveling to multiple tournaments throughout the year and who value winning regional and national championships should be avoided. Teams with coaches who are overly-competitive and who place a higher value on winning than teaching the basics should be avoided.Coaches who are screamers and who consistently yell at their young athletes for making mistakes and failing should be aggressively avoided.
It's your job as a parent to protect your child's emotional and physical well-being.Their supposed “tremendous athletic potential” is not a good enough reason to put them in any program that is more concerned with winning than it is with skill and people development. Regardless of what a coach may say, your child's self-esteem and happiness are far more important than whether they play on that “winning” team. I know of too many instances where “high powered” coaches who are proven “winners” (only in the narrowest sense of the word) regularly subject their athletes to emotional abuse. These are not programs that you should want your child to participate in because no outward athletic success is worth the sacrifice if your child is physically or emotionally at risk.
What this then means for you as a parent is that you have to change your order of priorities. That is, you have to change the way that you measure your children's athletic development and success. No longer can you afford to use the extremely myopic lens of rankings, winning or losing. Even if your child is on one of the top ranked teams in this country, he/she can still hate the sport, feel badly about him/herself and be totally miserable. What's more important to ask yourself than whether your child is winning or losing are the following: Is my child developing as a player and person?Is he/she having fun and loving the sport?Does he/she feel good about him/herself?Is he/she regularly getting a heavy dose of the game's fundamentals and strategies?Are my son or daughter's coaches good people and good role models?Is my child being taught a healthy attitude about failing and making mistakes?
Please understand that any athletic success that is achieved without positive answers to these questions balances out as a significant failure! Your child can only achieve long lasting success as a result of being in a nurturing learning environment where he/she has fun, feels good about him/herself and is free to take risks and fail. Without this there is no real winning!
So what does this then mean about your behavior in relation to your child-athlete? You have a significant role to play on the athlete-coach-parent team, a critical role. Your child's ultimate success and happiness depends upon how well you play that role. In addition to making sure that your child is in the right kind of program playing for the right kind of coaches, you have a specific job: You must take on the role of supportive, support “player.” What does this entail?
You want to be your child's “best fan.” A “best fan” is someone who sticks by their player/team NO MATTER WHAT, through good times and bad. A “best fan's” support never, ever waivers and, when their team struggles, a “best fan” is right there for the team. On the contrary, a “fair weather fan” is only supportive and positive as long as the team is winning. The instant that team begins to stumble, a “fair weather fan” pulls his/her support.
When your child loses and is emotionally down, what they most need from you is your unconditional love and support. They need you to hug them, pick them up and reassure them that they and everything will be OK. What they least need from you after a failure or loss is your criticism of what they did wrong and your disappointment. You always want to try to keep in mind that you are a parent first and that your child's happiness and feelings of lovability come first, trumping the outcome of any silly athletic event, regardless of how superficially “important” it may seem in the moment.
A very important part of your support role on the “team” involves NOT COACHING!!!!! Coaching is never your job as a parent, unless you actually are the coach. What do I specifically mean by “coaching?” Coaching involves overseeing the athlete's goal setting and taking steps to try to motivate him/her. Coaching is providing pre-competition advice or strategies and after-competition critiquing. Coaching also includes questioning the athlete on what he/she is doing in training and offering suggestions and critiques about that. Coaching is demanding that the athlete put a certain amount of time into training every day and criticizing him/her when that's not done. Coaching is forcing your child to do extra, cross-training and making him/her feel guilty when they're not working hard enough.
The problem with coaching is that it often involves providing negative feedback to the child-athlete and pushing him/her outside of their comfort zone. This is really a coach's job and NOT a parent's. If you as a parent get too caught up in coaching and the outcome of your child's competitions, then chances are pretty good that you are way over-involved. This kind of over-involvement will leave your child feeling that you care more about their sports performance than them. Please understand that this kind of parental “help” will ultimately backfire, especially if it's not welcomed by your child!
Here's a little rule of thumb to keep in mind about your role on the team and not coaching:
A coach's job is to shove 'em while a parent's job is to love' em.
When I was first starting out as a young tennis player I had enough natural athletic ability to beat most of my friends, but my fundamentals and technique were totally lacking. I was an extremely competitive kid who hated losing with a passion. To make matters worse, I had a bad habit of comparing myself with the competition which only created more urgency inside of me to win.
The first time I began taking formal tennis lessons, my entire game was thrown into disarray. I was asked by my teaching pro to change my grip, swing, stance and just about every other aspect of my game. Because he could see how much that left me struggling he told me, “In order for you to get better, you must first allow yourself to get worse. You have to unlearn your bad habits before you can learn the good ones. In this process, you will temporarily not be as good as you used to be. Kids who you could easily beat will probably beat you for a while. Forget about the winning and losing for a little bit and just concentrate on learning these new techniques and within a short amount of time I promise you your game will be better than it ever was.”
And he was absolutely right! My competitive game went straight down the tubes while I struggled to learn all of this new stuff. There were times when I was losing to weaker players that I was so frustrated and upset that I was seriously tempted to bag the proper fundamentals and go back to my old “winning ways.” However, every time I was pulled towards trading the proper mechanics for winning, I kept hearing his voice in my head. “If you make these changes, as painful as they'll be in the beginning, you will end up a far better athlete for it and then the winning will come!”
As a result, years later I became one of the top ranked juniors in my state and then went on to play Division I tennis for The University of Massachusetts. At college, I won the conference championship my junior and senior years and was runner-up as a sophomore. This could never have happened if I had been unwilling to give up the winning for the proper fundamentals.
I recently worked with a swimmer who struggled with a similar dilemma. Should I spend my practice time focusing on good technique or on making sure that I beat those two other guys who really tick me off? His two other teammates went out of their way to talk it up any time that they were able to beat my swimmer. Naturally, he found it tremendously annoying and wanted nothing more than to kick their big-mouth butts every time that he got into the pool. The problem of course was that you can't do both: You can't work on proper mechanics while you are competing and winning is important to you. You can only work on good technique by making the outcome and the competition unimportant.
The question that you have to seriously ask yourself as an athlete is this: Do I want to get much, much better as an athlete and have a great shot at reaching my potential or do I want to win now? If you're a dedicated athlete with big dreams, then the answer should be obvious to you. Curb your immediate competitiveness and work on your fundamentals. In the long run you'll become a much more talented athlete for it!