Coach Steve’s new book guides parents through youth sports
USA TODAY Sports’ Steve Borelli (a.k.a. Coach Steve) has a new book to help parents through the tough moments parents face when their kids play sports. Get your copy here: Coachsteve.usatbook.com
USA TODAY Sports took a deep dive into the work of the Million Coaches Challenge (MCC), which is implementing a broader approach to coaching than wins and losses, and the work others are executing around its ideals. We look at how sports, and those who lead it, can build a more holistic individual independent of the level of success one achieves as an athlete.
Part II: What training a ‘quality’ coach looks like
Read part 1: How to find a ‘quality’ youth coach? Look for these characteristics
Have you ever felt neglected as an athlete?
Justin White played club soccer throughout his youth, and then in high school for four years in the Washington, D.C., area. He was also part of U.S. Youth Soccer’s high-end Olympic Development Program.
He wanted to play in college, and this was a showcase program that featured its players in front of collegiate coaches. Looking back, though, White felt his ODP coaches perceived him as having a lack of value to the team. His confidence, his interest, and his performance declined.
“I still love the sport,” says White, now working on a dual master’s degree in sports psychology and counseling at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, “but actually, ironically, it was coaches that kind of were in the way of me continuing on.”
In his academic life, White has become part of a growing effort that looks to change the national landscape of coach training and intentionally teaches life and leadership skills through sports. As a graduate assistant, White has gotten heavily involved in Coach Beyond, which began in 2021 with investment from the Susan Crown Exchange as part of the MCC, and has trained 77,000 coaches across the country.
It has expanded its work to Kansas, Maryland and Indiana, where White is part of its Hoosier State epicenter at Ball State. Through research and implementation of training, he is learning what it means to be a coach, an all-inclusive experience that doesn’t leave anyone out.
“Every athlete’s different, every athlete responds differently,” White says. “That’s what makes it so hard sometimes. You don’t know everything, and I think that leaves opportunity for growth.”
Coaching is a role, whether we are paid or a volunteer, where we also negotiate our country’s mental health crisis, constant distractions of screens and social media and pressure – from parents or just the world – that we need to be better than those competing against us.
“The expectations and cost of college has become astronomical,” says Samantha Bates, the director of research for Coach Beyond at Ohio State, where the program began. “So your child getting a scholarship could be the potential way that you pay to go to college. That stress is real. The ACT and SAT scores everywhere are going up.
“And then we have a workforce of coaches who are not educators anymore. And so you’re getting frustrated that maybe this coach is a parent and doesn’t have this background to help your child go to college. There’s all these mismatches happening across the system that I think are creating a boiling pot of just like unrealistic expectations and a changing workforce and a child who’s surrounded by a lot of dysregulated adults.”
We spoke with White and Bates about the coach training they are administering and why it gives coaches confidence. The conversations offer insight that could help you manage your own athlete’s health and development.
Look inside yourself: What does it mean to be a coach?
Think about the term “Coach Beyond.” It challenges us to search for meaning behind the confining spaces of what it traditionally means to coach kids: To occupy their attention for an hour or more a day or week, to work or “run” them harder and harder as they get older, to win games as the ultimate prize.
White saw something deeper when he engaged them in support of kids’ mental health, one of Coach Beyond’s 10 key training areas.
Coaches were asked to put themselves in scenarios to create a positive environment, or one built on three pillars: Trust, inclusion and building relationships.
“I think it’s setting those expectations early and saying, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna hold my word to it regardless of what happens,’” White says. “So, if it’s, ‘I’m sending the expectation that everyone be at practice 10 minutes early, as a coach, I will make sure that I am there 10 minutes early just by what I’m saying. And I think it’s also just making sure that everyone is involved, whether it’s getting their athletes to be a little bit more autonomous and guiding warm-ups or just get them more involved to make it seem less authoritarian.”
He saw the ultimate desensitizer to that hard-nosed type of coaching come during training when coaches were asked to respond to unique situations, such as a student sharing an inappropriate photo with the group and accidentally adding the coach to the group text.
“A lot of the times, they don’t know what to do,” White says.
Which is kind of the whole point: Our job as coaches is often to make the uncomfortable more comfortable, sometimes in areas we consider outside of our wheelhouse.
And still, as survey data on a national scale from 2022 and more recently in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas and Maryland backs up, coaches’ primary coaching philosophies extend far from the field or court. They want their athletes to learn new life skills, create a sense of belonging through sport and to set their own goals and work toward them.
Coaching is most effective when it’s an all-inclusive and interactive experience
Coach Beyond offers one-hour training courses (free online) in such areas as fostering a positive team environment, improving mental strategies for athletic performance, developing leaders, promoting life skills in athletes, promoting positive behavior and engagement, managing stress and pressure as coaches and supporting athlete mental health.
The last has been the most popular course. It’s an area that has poured into the national consciousness since COVID in a world where approximately 40-50% of our coaches, according to data from Ohio and the national coach survey report, are not educators.
According to Coach Beyond research, one in five young people are struggling with a mental health issue, one in four children have experienced at least one or more adverse childhood experiences such as divorce, loss or incarceration of a loved one, or a mental health diagnosis or substance misuse issue of a parent or caregiver.
In addition, suicidal ideation is at an all-time high among high school students who play sports.
Put another way, a young athlete, especially as the stakes get higher as they get older, is often walking onto a field with the chaos of a busy subway station going through his or her head.
The training module introduces ways coaches can perform non-invasive wellness checks. For example, they can ask teammates to get in pairs and ask one another: Where are you sitting on the bus?
Are you in the front, middle or back? Are you not quite on? Are you hanging on? Are you chasing after it?
These are simple ways we can relate what is going through our minds. Maybe we have a midterm looming, or we’ve just had a fight with a friend or loved one, or we’re physically or mentally exhausted for another reason. A teammate can then say to the coach, “You might want to follow up with Joe or Jen.”
When it comes time for a coach to talk to the student, Coach Beyond has adapted QPR into a coach-specific model (Question, Pause, Persuade, Refer) based on feedback from athletes:
- When we question, it’s open-ended, using sentence stems like, “Can you share with me …”, “Talk to me about …” or “can you tell me …”
- We persuade by pausing to validate feelings and listening to problems without judgement before offering hope and encouraging the athlete to seek support and tell others (such as parents).
- And we refer by linking them to support (such as a school counselor) and being knowledgeable about getting them connected (having contact information handy).
The idea is to make it a shared experience. We don’t want to put the onus on students to be alone in telling others what’s happening. We can help with facilitating discussion and be teammates in problem-solving together.
“We went out and did focus groups all across Ohio with over 50 high school student athletes,” says Bates, the director of research for Coach Beyond at Ohio State. “And the number one thing they said to us that they wished their coach did more of was pause and listen instead of try to fix. Don’t fix it. And then two, don’t tell me, ‘Back when I was your age.’ Because it’s not helpful and kids felt like that was incredibly discrediting to their experiences. And so we really tried to add in that extra pause to think about what athletes were telling us where it’s like, ‘I don’t always need them to fix it, and I really don’t need them to tell me about themselves. I need them to just say that sounds challenging or I hear you.’ ”
Why does coach training matter?
An Ohio State randomized study to examine the impact of Coach Beyond training found it can produce more positive team climates and positive athlete outcomes, while athletes on teams with trained coaches reported higher season win percentages.
Small changes in our coaching styles (as presented in scenario videos in the training) can make all the difference. Among online participants, the percentage who reported being moderately or extremely confident in supporting student-athletes with mental health concerns has increased from about 40% to around 80% through Coach Beyond training.
According to Bates, who has been tracking with colleagues state policies as related to coach education and mental health, the number of states requiring mental health training for school-based coaches has continued to grow. No states, to their knowledge, had this as legislation or a training requirement in 2020, and the number has reached 10 states.
The way we coach is constantly evolving.
“When you think about like the tipping point,” Bates says, “it’s all of the leaders start to move a certain direction and they’re saying, ‘Hey, being tough is not leaving someone out because the easier path is to leave someone out. That’s not tough.’ So I do think we’re starting to see some coaches reframe what tough looks like, and tough also doesn’t have to look like not giving up. It’s putting in effort. It’s continuing to strive for excellence and focusing on mastery. And so when they understand those different things, I think we’re starting to see a tipping point where they’re reframing the toughness and the masculinity as masculinity can also look like being a great friend and checking in on people.”
How a parent is an important part of the coaching process
One in-person Coach Beyond training session known as Building a Community of Support walks coaches through communication strategies for kids, other coaches, administrators and parents. It underscores, however, how all of us in this space can develop our communication skills and lower defensiveness.
The training uses a communication method known as SBAR:
- Name and assess the situation: I want to talk to you about your sideline behavior in recent games.
- Give background including context but without feeling: Over the last three games, there were multiple moments where comments to officials became loud and continued after calls.
- Connect the behavior to the impact with assessment: I’ve observed how this distracts our team and doesn’t reflect our program’s expectations for behaviors.
- Make a recommendation that includes a solution-based double ask: I recommend we keep sideline comments positive and respectful moving forward or there will have to be a conversation about consequences.
The same framework can work for an athlete talking to a coach about playing time. By speaking to one another, Bates says, we are not only learning, but creating communities of practice.
And whether we’re coaches, parents or athletes, we all appreciate having another tool in our toolkit to help us be just a little bit better at what we do.
“Continue to educate yourself,” says White, the former soccer player turned Ball State graduate assistant exploring this treasure trove of data. “I think from a coaching lens, you know a lot, but do you know everything? Ask yourself: How well versed you are in that role. When you think of yourself as a coach, do you think of yourself as specifically focusing on that sport or are you also accounting for athletes that you’re working with, especially at the youth base?
“At the high school level, they’re balancing academics with trying to have a social life with friends, set themselves up for college. So they have a lot on their plates, so it’s thinking through, like, are you also checking in on what their lives are outside sports?”
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He played baseball in high school, rowed in college and spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents to a college and high school baseball player. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com.