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While perseverance sounds like a very serious skill, it can be fun to learn for your young athletes if you make persisting through tough challenges into a playful activity. These activities for every age group will spark conversations around perseverance while encouraging experimentation and play.
When you coach a young athlete who’s shown ‘natural talent’ or who has committed to one sport, it can be tricky to handle their expectations for their future in sport. Check out these tips on how to handle early high performers and their expectations around success and perceived failures.
A strong team ensures that every member is receiving necessary feedback—but also feels appreciated and valued. It’s easy to point out what an athlete did wrong in a critical moment during a game. Is there something you could do instead?
In coaching, the only constant is change. Nearly every coach will eventually hit a point in a season or school year where change is coming or needed. This article gives advice on how coaches can help empower your athletes to be true leaders on the team, and navigate big and small changes.
Research shows that early specialization is unnecessary and may hurt athletes and their performances. Here are five things to know about sport specialization in younger athletes.
It is critical that coaches develop the person, not the athlete. Developing the person allows the athletic skills to grow, but the opposite is not necessarily a guarantee.
Reading is a critical skill for volleyball athletes and coaches. This excerpt from an upcoming Coach Academy module will describe what reading is and how coaches can teach it to their athletes.
June 15 is the initial contact date for volleyball college coaches at the NCAA Division I and Division II levels to reach out to rising juniors. Once this date hits, more direct communication can begin between college coaches and the student-athletes. What does that mean? We’ll go through five things to know about June 15.
Watching the kids in a small indoor gym training over three nets, I thought of all the lines we put kids into, the way we ignore the net, the way we inflict pain via the forearm pass and the way 6v6 is experienced by beginners. I get angry inside at knowing billions of kids over my lifetime have walked away from our sport for a lifetime because their introduction to the game is BORING. We must do better when we introduce this sport.
Mental wellness can be difficult for parents, coaches and other guardians to cope with when it comes to young athletes. Is a bad grade on a test just because an athlete didn’t study, or is it a sign of something deeper? Coaches and parents should be on the lookout for signs that an athlete’s mental health is suffering, and while they may not be equipped to help the athlete, guardians can help connect an athlete with the right professionals.
