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LESSON: Parental Pre-Game Sabotage
Jake is a 12-year-old all-star soccer player out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He’s got serious skills and should be every coach’s dream. Sadly, he’ll never make the all-stars, the high school squad or play NCAA ball. His issue is his father. When Jake and his dad get out of their car before the game, the coaches cringe as his teammate’s positive attitudes sink like lead balloons.
Mr. Cantanoli, Jakes dad, is stuck in the 1960’s old school Drill Sergeant mold. He believes that his high-stress level presence is actually needed and is helping. Before each game, age-old parental blunders spew out of Mr. Cantanoli’s mouth.
“Let’s go! We HAVE to win today!”; “Losing isn’t an option”; “Hey coach, make’em do 20 more push-ups for smiling & laughing!; This isn’t a joke!”; “I want a perfect 12-0 season!” ; “No one should score on us!…NO ONE!”; “We don’t lose… EVER!”
Within minutes, Jake and his teammates seem totally dazed and confused on the field. They hesitate, make mindless errors, they don’t trust their training or their teammates, they are not synchronized, they are so petrified to make an error and get reprimanded by Mr.Cantanoli, that they are frozen with fear.
Why? The answer lies in the sadly uninformed Mr. Cantanoli and his poor advice.
In order to achieve great outcomes, players need to de-stress, relax and only focus on their performance goals. Topics like: the job description of their field positions, seeing the field (broad vision skills), solid dribbling and passing, running the pre-set patterns and the actual plays developed in practice. The players need to focus on their offensive and defensive responsibilities. What they don’t need is the irrelevant clutter that Mr. Cantanoli is actually putting in their heads right before the game.
All of the terrific performance goals that the coaches spend weeks to perfect get lost in channel capacity when Mr. Cantanoli pulls the player’s thoughts away from their task at hand- which is to only focus on their performance goals.
Jake eventually loses interest in playing soccer because of his father’s negative behavior. Unfairly, Jake gets all the blame and is labeled a quitter by his dad. If your child read this story would he/she relate? Parents of today’s athletes need to be educated about the proper protocols of sports psychology.
“In most sports, there are two types of errors. Forced and unforced. The trick, of course, is to systematically cut out the unforced.”
“Spotting errors is a nice start. Spotting the cause of those errors is even better.”
