The truth is, most often, sports don’t teach life skills; they expose them. Competition reveals underdeveloped life skills; the athlete has to be taught how to improve that individual skill set.
If you’re paying a technical coach to fix stroke mechanics, please don’t assume they’re teaching your kids life skills. The common misconception is that your child’s coaches are teaching those critical abilities. Most often, parents assume that the coaches are educating life skills, and the coaches assume that the parents are teaching them. Guess what? No one is.
Solution: Psychosocial competence or life skills are abilities and behaviors that enable athletes to deal with the demands and challenges of competition on and off the tennis court. Be mindful of who’s developing the character traits of your child daily. The type of individual your child becomes is dictated by who is nurturing them.
