The quick and most likely first thing that comes to a
parent’s mind when their child, a player, complains about playing time is the
subjective thought that everything they are saying is right. I’m not suggesting
that your child ever lies to you or is lying to you. Maybe they truly do think
they deserve playing time for the work they’ve put in. A lot of times these children's coaches have been around the game, whether they’ve played high school and
college ball or they’ve coached for five, ten, sometimes twenty or more years.
Most of them know what it takes to succeed in the sport. That’s not to say that
there aren’t a few out there that you have your opinions about that might be
true. Now, all of that being said, I encourage parents to be involved and ask a
couple of objective questions that may help your child earn the playing time
they want.
1. Have you done everything you can possibly do to distance yourself from the competition (your teammates and opponents)?
If the answer is yes, and oftentimes, it is not, ask your child
the next question. Also, if the answer is yes, find your school’s website, find
the athletic page, and finally, find the calendar of events leading up to this
sport’s playing season. Did they really do everything?
No, I’m not suggesting that your child meets with a $100/hour batting coach in
the off-season. Did your child go to everything
he/she could in which all of his/her teammates had the same opportunity to go
to?
OK, so now that you’ve established that they haven’t gone to
everything (assuming they haven’t), it is up to you to determine if they
reasonably went to the majority of the things they could go to in order to get
better (because honestly, the kid that makes it to every single thing in the
off-season is one in a million). However, if your kid went to a seven on seven
and one day of weight training in the off-season and you thought they did a lot
that off-season, the coach is probably right in seeing it the other way around.
2. Do you compete with your teammates every single day?
As an assistant football coach, I see too many players who
are content with going through the motions with their teammates every day in
practice. If you aren’t willing to compete against your teammates and show that
you deserve playing time, what makes us, as coaches, think that you are going
to compete at a high level in a game? It’s a hard concept to get through to
kids that competing against their friends is what will earn them playing time
and ultimately make their teammates and themselves better players and people.
This doesn’t just mean competing on the practice field, though, this means
competing with grades, competing with weights, speed, routes, competing to be
the better wide receiver, lineman or quarterback. Who has the highest on base
percentage, who hits the most home runs or who throws harder? The word compete
is something your child should hear on a daily basis, because at the end of the
day, if you have a competitive will to be the best you can be at everything you
do, you will ultimately win in life.
So in closing, if you ask your child both of these questions
and you conclude that the answers are collectively no and no, does your child
have an argument for playing time? I guess that is up for you to decide, but I
can tell you from a coach’s perspective it’s probably one of the reasons they
aren’t seeing the playing time they want. I would suggest to them that maybe
they should work on both of these things for the following season (and coaches will notice). If you get one ‘yes’ out
of the two questions, maybe you can help them understand that they should
continue to do that and start to work at the other. If you get two yes answers
and they are both reasonably true (it is very rare to find a player with that
character today), before you instantly start pointing fingers at the coaches,
objectively ask yourself just one final question: is it possible that my child isn’t the most athletically gifted at
his/her given position? I’m not a parent, but I can imagine that is a very
tough question to ask yourself. And if the answer to that question is ‘yes, it
is possible’, understand just one final thing: if your child has both of these
traits and isn’t athletically better than their peers or teammates, it’s not
the end of the world. You as a parent, and we as coaches, have succeeded
because this child is prepared to take on the world and succeed in something
much, much bigger than sports – life.
Like this blog? I strongly recommend Super Bowl winning
coach Pete Carroll’s book Win Forever,
which can be purchased directly from the bookstore on the right. Parents, read
this book and have your athlete read this book. Fellow coaches, I promise you will
like this book.
Follow me on Twitter: @ClarkJarstfer
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Feel free to comment with some feedback.
Check out my other post: 3 Reasons Why Kids Need Football
Feel free to comment with some feedback.
Check out my other post: 3 Reasons Why Kids Need Football
Thank you for reading!