in search of a hook

Dr Kenneth Ginsburg on resilience

just listened to a brilliant and human presentation on resilience and children by Dr Kenneth Ginsburg, and what we can do to help them weather life storms, deliberately and intentionally.  Directly connects how I go about coaching my youth soccer teams, using athletics as the vehicle for important life lessons. his work is definitely worth your time

PK Subban: hockey player

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P. K. Subban is making u remember why we are all hockey fans. What a fantastic game by this rising young talent tonight;  he is all hockey player right down to the end of game interview when he had the best game face and playoff attitude I can remember seeing in a long time.  2 words said it all, and were basically the same answer he gave to every spin question offered to him:   “All business”  Good luck Habs!

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Bob Probert remembered

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Mickey Redmond, as always, hits exactly the right note in remembering Bob Probert (#24):

“He came to play hard every night, he was blue-collar and he came to embody the spirit of the city of Detroit,” longtime Red Wings broadcaster Mickey Redmond said. “I think that’s why the people forgave him for every little downfall he had. They realized nobody’s perfect. They loved the way he played the game.

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What to say at halftime when we’re losing

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It’s my opinion that your halftime speech should be the same each game, regardless of the score. And I say that because I think you should be focusing on the things that really matter and that is: are the players executing the game plan that we have agreed upon and are they putting in their best efforts as players and members of our team?

So I believe that your halftime speech should be focusing on those elements and not on the score. The score is the outcome of all the little things that you should be focusing on such as effort, technique and game plan. If you take care of those things, the score will be what it should be at the end of the game more often than not.

If you’re focusing on the score then you’re communicating that winning is what is most important and not the quality of their play and their attention to detail.

I believe therefore that your speech at halftime should be in the form of questions. You should be asking your players to evaluate their performance, to identify what’s working and what’s not working, to focus on a few things that we want to do better in the second half and to suggest ways that we can reinforce our strengths and improve our weaknesses.

I like to ask my players to grade themselves in the areas of effort, having fun, supporting the team, respecting the other team and reminding them how much we love this game.

Inevitably, players are going to know the score and it’s going to affect them because they’re under a lot of pressure from family and friends in school to focus on the scoreboard. It’s a central part of our culture in many ways.

What we can do is athletic coaches them is help them place the score into context here to improve on the score means we have to improve the way we play fundamentally and his team and those are the things we should focus on. Our morale will improve when our play improves and so that should be the focus of our speech and our play in the second half.

Remember that by making it a player’s responsibility to identify what must be done then we have taught them to carry their own burden and we’ve made them stronger people and better teammates.

Isn’t that what we want from our sports programs anyway?

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Developing leadership in all our young athletes

Like anything involving kids, you want to make sure that you start with the absolute basics and set them up for success. That’s what you would do if you were teaching a new foot skill in soccer, and leadership shouldn’t be any different.

Stay focused on the basics of leadership with your kids. Here are a few ways that you can reliably improve their leadership.. Try these on for size and you will be amazed at how far they can get by the end of the season:

Develop a club approach to leadership that involves mixing age groups, so that the older players have an opportunity to share their knowledge and and experience in leadership with their juniors.. This way they get to use their maturity and seniority to their own advantage. You would be surprised at how eagerly our great young people will rise to the occasion and take on responsibility for helping the younger ones.

Like anything, though, the leadership role of our older players must be something that is explicitly valued by the club and in the coaching philosophy. You need to set these young athletes up for success by modeling excellent behavior with them in their formative years and consistently throughout their career. In this way, by the time they get to the senior position they will be fully prepared to take on a leadership role.

A good way to get started is in the teaching of individual skills and in leading the team through warm-up and stretching exercises at the start of practice and cool down and stretching exercises at the end. These can be ritual routines that are easy to learn and yet give our young people an opportunity to exercise excellence in practice.

Selecting captains for the team as an important way for kids to take on leadership roles during the actual play of the game. I like to rotate Kinship among the kids in the reward for their hard work during the week of practice and this makes can explicit connection between hard work and leadership rewards.

Finally, go out of your way to praise leadership and others, especially when the take the initiative to make on the spot corrections were to share their knowledge work to enforce the high standards of your club. In this way we showed that we value their initiative and leadership.

Enjoy the season!

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Helping kids understand what success in sports is all about

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Kids end up playing sports for a whole host of reasons. It’s not always the case, in fact it’s rarely the case, that a desire to succeed is the number one reason for their playing. it’s much more likely that they are enrolled in sports on behalf of their parents, or because their friends are doing it, or because they are curious, or they need something for fitness. The explicit desire to succeed is rarely the primary reason for joining.

Now that you have them on the team, though it’s important for you to set the tone about how to incorporate success into our vision for the team. It’s important that kids learn how to compete in a healthy manner and appreciate the importance of setting goals that can include winning the game.

I think it’s far more important though, it is important that the coach and parents decide explicitly, before the season even starts, on the definitions of success for the individuals and for the team. The coach needs to express his or her philosophy of success and have buy-in from the parents so that we speak to the young student athletes with a consistent and clear message.

For example, I use these five coaching points to define success for our kids: play hard, have fun, support the team, love the game and respect the other team and ref.

These are reinforced at every practice and every game. These are the measures by which we will judge our own success. I ask the girls to evaluate themselves before, during and after each game in order to emphasize what it takes to be a winner of our team.

It’s common in young teens to experience crisis of confidence. By having these simple and repetitive touchstones, we can help them focus on the things that really matter and thereby learn what the game has to teach us about life.

By making our expectations and standards clear, and creating a bridge from the field of athletics to the field of life, we are helping our young student athletes develop the skills you will need to define their own success in the future.

By having them grade themselves at each and every game, they get in the habit of comparing themselves against their goals which will help them achieve their goals in the future.

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Appreciative Coaching: The Power of Positive Self Talk

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One  of the biggest challenges that young soccer players face is the issue of inner dialogue or self talk. By this I mean the inner narrative that goes through players had unconsciously or somewhat consciously as the game unfolds in front of them. A lot of things go into what a player here since I better head. Depending on their background and upbringing and culture and the nature of your coaching, they can hear very different things going on and this will have an important impact on how they play the game and how they experience the game as they continue to develop.

If your coaching style is aggressive and judgmental and directed towards the person, it would not be surprising for the player self talk to also be aggressive and judgmental. This can create feelings of intimidation and pressure on the field. This would make it difficult for the player to relax and enjoy the game and to be in the kind of creative mood that is ideal for expressing themselves on the field.

We can affect the self talk in a couple of important ways. I consider to be one of the most important coaching obligations especially with younger players to help them develop the inner resources that enable them to deal with the pressures of the game and their life.

The first thing you can do is provide the player a set of easily remembered words to use as they tried to make sense of the very fluid game. Phrases like “we clear the ball wide and up the side”, repeated often in practice and during games and during question-and-answer sessions make it easy for the player to remember what to do in that tactical situation. Consistency,  repetition and memorable phrases give your players the tools they need to shape their own internal dialogue.

The next important thing you can do is to set the tone for how to approach the results of their efforts. Remember that the game of soccer is so dynamic and volatile that our plans rarely come off without a hitch. We should expect the ball to take funny bounces and for other players to make surprising plays. Our mindset should be one of positive initiative, trying to do the best we can and then accepting the results, and moving onto the next play without being judgmental. In this way we have an opportunity to help our players seize the moment and enjoy the beautiful game.

Self talk is an important part of the young players emotional resilience and personal development. It’s a psychological part of the game that coaches should pay special attention to.

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Haitian Women’s national soccer team needs help

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This is a request for help to me that came from a close, personal friend of mine, Gaspard D’alexis, that I feel compelled to share with you.

Gaspard is the coach of the Omega Soccer Club here in Kansas City, and he is a pure and gentle soul, who has answered the call for help from his homeland of Haiti to help them rebuild their lives. Our teams have shared a partnership over the last few years and I ‘ve gotten to know him well.

Latest news http://www.kansascity.com/2010/04/20/1890727/kansas-city-coach-picked-to-restore.html

The soccer community in Kansas City is mobilizing to help him, but I thought I would do more by sharing his story with you.  My daughter plays on his team and I am helping his teams while he is in Haiti. Your thoughts and prayers are welcome; if  you can do more, I can testify to the need and the integrity that touches everything Gaspard does.

here is a moving ESPN documentary story of the Haitian women’s nation team that says it far better than my words can: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=100427/Haitisoccer

Hello Friends,You are receiving this email because you are among the special people I have had the privilege to work with, directly or indirectly, either in the past or in the present time. You might not know, but last month I was appointed Head Coach of Haiti ’s National Women’s Soccer Team by the Haitian Soccer Federation.  I am filling one of many voids created by the terrible earthquake that ravaged Haiti . The Head Coach, a friend of all Haitians, was one of the federation members who perished during the earthquake.

There are no words I can use to describe the current situation in Haiti and there are no words I can use to describe the way I feel about it. However, if I could have given my life in exchange for Haiti ’s misfortune, I would have done so without hesitation. Since the tradeoff did not happen and God put me on a different path, I promise to do my very best in what lays in front of me as the head coach and as a fellow Haitian and that is to help the Haitian people. It will take time, but with hard work, effort, and help “a lot of it” there is hope for a better tomorrow for Haiti .

My job description is not only to coach the women’s senior national team, but also to build the women’s soccer program in Haiti . I am doing so with very little money and few resources. One can ask why the importance is on the Haitian Soccer Team when the country needs everything.  The response is that soccer is a passion for the Haitian people and it brings unity among them. It reinforces hard work and common goals that give hope of improvement for all Haitian people.

“Walking together united in memory of you

We want to play regardless the circumstance
We may not have a field left to practice
We may now be living on the grass of our stadium
We may not have the proper equipment
We may, for now, only eat to survive
We know we are the lucky ones
We want to play because we are thankful for what we have
We know that surviving is our friend for a reason
We know that you are looking upon us
We want to make you proud of our effort
We want to make you smile wherever you are
We want to give you reasons to hope
We know hope is all we’ve got for now.
We know that hope is what we can afford…”

I’m trying to raise enough money to create a monthly allowance of $50.00 for each player on the national programs. We have currently sixty girls in three different age groups. The yearly budget stands at $36,000 and would cover all players for a year. The allowance will impact directly and positively sixty families. For most of the Haitian players it would be their only income to buy the bare minimum like water, soap and rice among others. Please, go to our web site at:www.haitiwomenssoccer.com if you would like to help me help Haiti . And then, you should please send to me an email to let me know the level of your help.

Thank you very much,

Gaspard Dalexis

Haiti National Women Soccer Team: 9807, Woodland Lane , Kansas City , MO 64131 913-484-1595

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Appreciative Inquiry meets soccer

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I got back to Kansas City this Sunday two hours after the last game was completed and I missed my girls taking second place in the statewide tournament by a fraction. They lost on penalty kicks, 3-2, after an overtime. It was a great tournament and an exciting championship game played at a very high skill level with an excellent team from Topeka whose parents were of a good sort, that is they understand the game is for the kids to play enough for parents to critique. They come all the way from Topeka (90 minute drive) to play in Kansas City and they are in our division in our league and we will see them again on Mother’s Day.

At practice on Monday I decided to use an appreciative inquiry approach to learning about the tournament and to reinforce the strengths of our team which is the tightknit social bonding of the team. After a strenuous workout and cool down session, we were in our team circle getting ready to cheer when I asked each girl to tell me their favorite story about one of their teammates in that tournament. Pretty soon I had 50 excellent vignettes about what happened in the tournament in each girl got to hear another teammate praising her for her hard work.

I couldn’t shut them up.

I then asked him to tell me about what they thought was the funniest moment in the tournament which included my daughter talking other players down, kids getting kicked in the face with the ball, scoring an own goal off a header from a corner kick and we all generally had a hilarious time.
Practice concluded on one of the highest notes ever and I really could see the girls bonding with each other even more.

This technique reinforces our top five: play hard, have fun, support the team, love the game, and respect the other team and ref.

I even found myself asking “what” style questions, by having them provide as many details of the sites, sounds and feelings of the tournament. I really feel like I was there and so I plan to use this technique in the future.

I picked up a book entitled Appreciative coaching: A positive process for change, by Sara Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann Clancy (2007) (San Francisco:Jossey-Bass)to see how AC might inform my soccer, teaching and business coaching. I’ll let you know how it works out.