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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.
Every year, student-athletes participate in summer camps, combines, tournaments and showcases to sharpen their skills and gain exposure to college coaches. College coaches value the opportunity to evaluate a player multiple times on video as well as in person. Attending these types of events can be a crucial step in your recruiting process, but they can be costly and time consuming, so make them worth your while.
As a coach, your teams almost certainly contain a diverse multitude of athletes with different life experiences, and assumptions about them can be dangerous. Here are tips for acknowledging your current assumptions and create a more equitable team environment.
Creating strong boundaries is an important and often overlooked piece of the coaching dynamic. A lack of boundaries can not only impact a team’s success, but also lead a coach to experience burnout and negative mental health effects.
