We Honor the game here! #BetterAthletesBetterPeople
Double-Goal Coach Job Description: Coaches play an incredibly influential role in the lives of athletes. Often players spend more time with their coaches than anyone else outside of the home environment. Therefore, it is important that school and youth sports organization (YSO) leaders and administrators take care in setting standards of success for the coaching staff, especially when hiring 1st-time coaches. At Positive Coaching Alliance, we believe these standards are reflected not just on the scoreboard. While winning is important, it is more important that coaches teach life lessons through sports. We consider a coach that focuses on both of these outcomes to be a Double-Goal Coach®. A school or YSO where every coach is a Double-Goal Coach will almost certainly find success. Coaches will model and teach players respect through Honoring the Game. Players focus on mastering their sport, which leads to higher effort, learning and improved athletic performance. Athletes also will also have more fun and feel good about what they are accomplishing because coaches are empowering them with positivity as they fill their Emotional Tanks.
ELM Tree of Mastery: Athletes who only focus on the scoreboard might have a hard time staying motivated in the face of a tough opponent or when things are not going their way. That’s why Positive Coaching Alliance recommends coaching athletes to focus on a mastery approach, which leads to a task-orientation to success, helping athletes feel increments of success while developing skills for their sports and other aspects of life. In the book excerpt found below, PCA Founder Jim Thompson outlines a coaching toolkit for the ELM Tree of Mastery (ELM standing for Effort, Learning, and Mistakes are OK). This toolkit contains six steps for successful implementation of ELM. The first step is for coaches to introduce and reinforce the ELM Tree of Mastery message to their athletes. Coaches play an integral role in convincing athletes to adopt the ELM approach while seeing a pro and big-time college sports entertainment industry so focused on winning. The second step is for coaches to introduce a mistake ritual, to help athletes recover quickly. Focusing on effort goals and tasks rather than scoreboard winning means that athletes can feel comfortable trying new things and failing at first. For athletes to do that, they need coaches who walk the talk in terms of Mistakes being OK and helping athletes move past them. The rest of the steps, outlined in further detail in the excerpt below, are: Make effort goals a part of your team culture Improve performance with stretch goals Maximize effort by rewarding unsuccessful effort Using targeted symbolic rewards.
Second Goal Parent: PCA’s mission is to make high school and youth sports a Development Zone™ to develop Better Athletes, Better People. Parents have an especially important role to play as a Second-Goal Parent® who helps their child become a Triple-Impact Competitor® who makes self, teammates and the game better. The Big Picture in Youth Sports A Second-Goal Parent recognizes that there is a Little Picture and a Big Picture in youth sports. The Little Picture concerns things like whether the child is playing the right position, the team is winning, etc. The Big Picture, which often gets drowned out by the Little Pictures, is about what the child is learning from youth sports. There are two broad goals in youth sports: striving to win and building character so kids develop into successful, contributing members of society. As important as winning may seem, Second-Goal Parents let coaches and athletes worry about the first goal of scoreboard results. Second-Goal Parents have a much more important role to play: ensuring their children take away from sports lessons that will help them be successful in life. That is the Big Picture. Endless Procession of Teachable Moments If you embrace your role as a Second-Goal Parent, it will transform the way you see youth sports. It will help you seize the endless procession of teachable moments that will come your way again and again when you are looking for them. What might have seemed like a disappointing loss or a failure by your child becomes an opportunity to rein- force resiliency. A tough competition in forbiddingly hot, cold, or nasty weather can prompt a conversation with your child about learning to enjoy challenges. Whether your child succeeds or fails on the playing field, you will be able to use the experiences to reinforce the kind of person you want him or her to be.
