This article was provided by Coaches Toolbox

A list of personality traits that successful athletes tend to have in common.

You probably don’t agree with all of these and would change the wording on some of them, but my hope is that this stimulates your thinking on how you can more clearly define and list for your athletes what you feel leads to success.

We all have our own definition of success. I like John Wooden’s definition: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”

Or, you could use some of these as ideas for your athletes in a system similar to Jon Gordon’s One Word concept from his book One Word That Will Change Your Life

A starting point for creating your own list…

DRIVE: Desire to win or be successful; sets and maintains high goals for themselves in athletics; responds positively to competition. Desires to attain athletic excellence.

AGGRESSIVENESS: Believes one must be aggressive to win; will not allow others to push them around in competition.

DETERMINATION: Willingness to practice long and hard; often works out willingly by themselves; persevering, patient, and unrelenting in work habits. Works on skills until exhausted.

GUILT-PRONENESS: Accepts responsibility for own actions; accepts blame and criticism even when not deserved; willing to endure physical and mental discomfort.

LEADERSHIP: Enjoys the role of leader and may assume it spontaneously; attempts to influence or direct others in a positive way.

SELF-CONFIDENCE: Have unfaltering confidence in themselves and their capacity to deal with things; handles unexpected situations well; speaks up appropriately for beliefs to coaches and players.

EMOTIONAL CONTROL: Tends to be emotionally stable and realistic about athletics; will rarely allow feelings to show and performance is not affected by them; not easily frustrated by bad breaks, calls or mistakes.

MENTAL TOUGHNESS: Accepts strong criticism without feeling hurt; can bounce back quickly from adversity; does not need excessive encouragement from the coach.

COACHABILITY: Receptive to coaches’ advice; considers coaching important to becoming a good athlete; accepts the leadership and cooperates with authorities.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS: Tends to be exacting in character, dominated by a sense of duty; will not attempt to bend rules and regulations to suit own needs; places the good of the team above personal well being.

TRUST: Accepts people at face value, believes what the coaches and teammates say and does not look for ulterior motives behind their words or actions; tends to get along well with teammates.

The Way to Victory

Victories of life are won not on the fields nor in the marts where the deci­sive struggle takes place, but in the obscure and forgotten hours of prepara­tion. Success or failure lies in the hands of the individual long before the hour of the final test comes.

In the higher fields of success, there are no accidents; we reap precisely we what we have sown and nothing else; they do well precisely what they have prepared to do and they do nothing else well.

The world puts its force into us when we put ourselves in right relation with it: Experience makes us constantly wiser if we know how to rationalize it: Time deposits all manner of treasure in our imagination and memory if we hold the doors open.

Nothing is lost upon a person who is bent upon growth, nothing wasted on one who is constantly preparing for their work and life by keeping eyes, mind, and heart open to nature, people, books, and experience. All things that we have seen, heard, known and felt come to our aid at the critical moment to make our thought clear and keep our illustration luminous, our speech eloquent and inspiring.

This post was provided by Change the Game Project

By John O’Sullivan

Imagine youth sports was a room. On one end of the room, there is a door where everyone enters. At the other end, there is another door where everyone leaves.”

So began a long conversation I had with Peter Hugg, the Head of Football (soccer) for Football New South Wales in Australia, on my recent trip to Sydney. Peter has a long history in the sport, having been involved in three World Cups, three Olympic games, as well as head of Football for Western Australia and high-performance manager for Soccer Australia.

“We spend a lot of time finding ways to get kids to come through the entry door, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the burn rate when they get into the room. So many kids just pass right through, out the back door and onto the next thing. We have to put our focus on the kids in the room!”

I couldn’t agree more. And I believe nearly every sport governing body in every sport feels the same way. All but two sports in the US are losing more players each year than they are adding (hockey and lacrosse are the exceptions). It’s not just about getting kids in the game; it’s about keeping them.

How can we keep them? Sports across the United States are currently releasing their version of Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) plans, called the Athlete Development Model in the US. These mimic plans in countries such as Canada and Australia, and they provide an important framework for providing athletes with the right type of experience at various ages and stages of their development.

My worry is that the message of LONG Term Athletic Development gets emphasized and marketed, often at the expense of the one thing that actually keeps kids in sports for the long term: S.T.A.E.

Short

Term

Athlete

Engagement.

In our recent podcast with Dr. Jean Cote, one of the world’s leading researchers into coaching and youth sports development, he said it best:

“If sport was only about skill development…and was not practiced by people who have emotion, and care and are human beings, if they were robots, then you would say yes, just do skill, just do deliberate practice…but the problem is that sport is not only about skill development…and sport specific skill. Sport is about motivation, interest, drive, grit, persistence, and resilience, and those types of subjective skills are very important aspects of elite athletes and long-term sport participation and that is the problem… these thing are harder to measure… so we default to skill, and practicing repetition of backhands…But people are not robots, we have to teach the other qualities that combine motivation and interest. That is what play and diversity of sport will do.”

In other words, before we pour in the long-term deliberate practice aspects of sport, focused on what today’s training will provide to an athlete five years from now, we must simultaneously engage our athletes in the short term.

There is no long-term development without short-term engagement! The two go hand in hand.

I do believe that our sport governing bodies see the importance of this, and the ADM done right, as USA Hockey has done, has led to more athlete engagement, and increased retention rates (they have increased their retention of 9-14-year-olds to 91%!). They are keeping the kids in the room!

So how do we do this? How do we keep our athletes engaged in the short term and developing over the long term? Here are some critical qualities that every experience, on a weekly basis, should have:

Enjoyment: we have said over and over, this is the cornerstone of any long-term participation. Kids, especially young ones, will not voluntarily continue to pursue something they do not enjoy. Telling a 7-year-old “This will matter when you are 18” means nothing. It may be true, but it does not make it relevant to him or her. But working on those aspects of development in an enjoyable manner will keep them engaged. The best way to do this is playing lots of games, and ditching the lines and overreliance on unopposed activities. Let them play, add constraints and conditions, manipulate numbers and space, but let them play!

Developing Competence: Kids need to see and feel themselves improving. We cannot default to “fun games and fooling around” at the expense of teaching. Getting better is one of the primary ways children describe “fun” in sports. A quality, engaging sports experience has to teach technical and tactical aspects of the sport, and help children on the path to improvement and mastery. We can teach through games, add defenders and decisions, and kids will develop competence quicker than blocked, repetitive training of a single skill in isolation. Competence and engagement go hand and hand when done correctly.

Nurturing Confidence: This is one of the byproducts of competence. A child who works hard and sees himself improving gains confidence. That confidence is enhanced, or shattered, by the coaches, parents, and team dynamics (more about this later). Our job as coaches and parents is to ensure our athletes are growing in confidence, not by shouting false platitudes at them, but by helping them have a growth mindset, teaching them to embrace the process of improvement, and never letting our words and actions in emotional situations – such as the ride home – sap their self-esteem and belief. We can teach, correct errors, and still help athletes believe in themselves.

Building Connection: Positive team dynamics are a top “Fun factor” for kids in sport. This means coaches must intentionally and continuously build positive, highly-engaging team dynamics, even in individual sports (see the PGA Junior League in Golf for an example). Great teams drive engagement, and engagement keeps kids in the game. By the same account, lousy team dynamics, infighting, lack of trust, bullying, and the like will never promote long-term athlete development nor will they help engagement.

Giving Kids Autonomy: If you want engagement, kids need to own the experience. We can introduce them to sports, but eventually, the experience must become theirs, and not ours. It must be their dreams, their goals, and their intrinsic motivation to play, not those of the adults. Be aware of your kids’ goals for playing, be in tune with when they might need a break or some time away, and pay close attention that sport is something they do, not who they are.

Providing Time Off: Even professional athletes get time away from a sport to recharge their batteries, heal up physically, and refocus. Time off allows athletes to work on movement, strength, flexibility, and injury prevention. It also allows them to pursue other interests, hobbies, and passions. If a child loves to play a sport, a few weeks or even months of downtime from organized practice and competition will not reduce their love of the game. It will make them really excited and hungry to play again. They might even play some pickup. That is engagement.

Intentional Character Development: It is our job to intentionally teach character through sport, not only because we want kids to have the character to sustain their talent, but because developing character also creates engagement. Sports help develop grit, resilience, integrity, empathy, respect, and other traits that help them find success. When they work through the process and embrace the struggle to overcome an obstacle or learn a new skill, that feeling of accomplishment and confidence is intoxicating. Athletes want more of that. They say “what’s next?” That is engagement.

The introduction of Long Term Athlete Development Models in sports are an important step in integrating the technical and tactical development of young athletes with their psycho-social needs, emotional capabilities, and ages and stages of development. If we want to keep kids in a sport for the long term, it is critical to have a roadmap based on something more than a hunch.

But we must always remember the words of Dr. Jean Cote. These kids are not robots, who simply need programming and technical practice. They are human beings. They are individuals who do not so easily conform to a one size fits all roadmap. They do not develop in a linear fashion. They need interest, motivation, persistence, and enjoyment. We can never, ever forget that within each stage of LTAD, we must focus every day on STAE

Short.

Term.

Athlete.

Engagement.

Great programs, exceptional coaches, and informed parents know that you cannot have one without the other. They know that it’s great to get kids in the door, but that we have got to make that room a great place to be where they want to hang out a while!

So what do you think, can we do both?

Coach O’Sullivan is a former college and professional player as well as a high school, club team and college coach. He is offering a FREE video series that is part of his Coaching Mastery program. For more information about gaining access to that program click the link above or in the image below. The video series includes a wealth of coaching education including some motivational and team building ideas used by some of the most successful coaches.

By John O’Sullivan, Founder of Change the Game Project

Coaches, imagine if there was a way to gain insight, understanding, and connection with your athletes by asking a simple question? There is. let me explain how.

A few years back, I coached a talented, yet underperforming sixteen-year-old girl I will call Maddy. She was incredibly inconsistent in her play and often looked very depressed. She was definitely lacking in confidence. Her friends told me she was unsure whether to continue playing or not. After trying multiple ways to help her play the way I believed she was capable of, I called her in for a meeting.

I spent the first 30 minutes of our time together offering my thoughts and suggestions, but as I rambled on and on I could tell she was simply tuning out. Here I was, the highly experienced coach, offering my years of wisdom, and she wasn’t listening.

“Maddy, if you don’t start taking my advice, I can’t really help you. I don’t know what else to say,” I shrugged.

“It’s all good stuff coach, but none of that stuff helps me with my problem,” she replied.

“Really?” I exclaimed. “Then perhaps you better tell me what the problem really is, because I clearly am not helping right now.” I waited for her answer.

‘It’s my Dad,” she said. “Whenever you play me on his side of the field, he is constantly telling me what to do, where to be, when to be there, and I can hear him and see him getting angrier and angrier with me. I think I play a lot better when I play on the side where the teams sit, and away from the parents. At least that way I can’t hear him.”

I thought about it for a second, and she was right. She did seem to play better on the team side of the field. I could honor this request, without affecting the team much. “I can help with that Maddy, no problem at all. Why didn’t you ever say something about that before? I can certainly help you with your position, and more importantly, I can go and speak to your Dad. Why did you wait until now to tell me?”

“Because you never asked,” she said stone faced.

My heart sank. She was right. All season long, I watched this girl struggle with her play and her confidence, and all I did was get upset and frustrated with her. I tried to solve the problem, without ever knowing the problem. All I had to do was ask one simple question, but I never did.

“What is one thing you wish your coaches knew that would help us coach you better?”

It is the question that changes everything. Not only for the athletes but for us coaches too.

Kyle Schwarz is a third-grade teacher at Doull Elementary School in Denver, CO. A few years back, she decided to start asking this question of her students in order to get to know them better, and the responses blew her away.  As she details in her great book What I Wish My Teacher Knew, and as written about in this great article, the answers to this question open up a whole new level of insight from teacher to student, enabling a deeper connection, and the ability to teach the child, not simply the subject. As some kids wrote to her:

“I wish my teacher knew that my dad works two jobs and I don’t see him much.”

“I wish my teacher knew that I don’t have pencils at home to do my homework.”

“I wish my teacher knew that my dad got deported when I was 3 and I haven’t seen him in 6 years.”

“I wish my teacher knew that my family and I live in a shelter.”

“I wish my teacher knew that I am smarter than she thinks I am.”

Kyle Schwarz has certainly tapped into something here, not just for teachers but for coaches. The more we know about the kids we coach, the better we can serve them as both athletes and as people. When I read her book last year, my first thought was of Maddy and her situation with her father. I thought “why don’t coaches ask this same question from their athletes?”

Recently on our Way of Champions Podcast, Dr. Wade Gilbert, Jerry Lynch and I discussed how this year I started asking the kids I coach to finish the following sentence. We have also been suggesting to coaches at our workshops to have their athletes finish the following sentence, in writing, to be collected by the coach:

“One thing I wish my coaches knew about me that would help them coach me better is…”

The insight this exercise has given me to the kids I currently work with is unbelievable. Coaches who have done this with their teams have shared some of the responses they have received as well. Collectively, to protect anonymity, some of the things we have learned from our athletes are:

“I don’t like to be first in line to demonstrate new things. I usually don’t understand how to do things until I see them once, and it is kind of embarrassing when you ask me to go first.”

“When I make a mistake I would much rather you pull me out and tell me what to fix than yell it out in front of everyone.”

“I get really nervous when I am not playing well and my dad is at the game because he gets really upset in the car on the way home.”

“I don’t like to shoot because my old coach used to yell at me whenever I missed a shot, so now I prefer to pass.”

“I am sorry we don’t stay at the team hotel but my dad says we need to camp to save money.”

“I would practice more at home like you ask me to but last time I went to the park some older kids stole my ball.”

Coaches, the more our kids know how much we care, the more they will care how much we know. When we connect, when we show them respect and encouragement, when we communicate well, and when we listen to what they have to say, we build trust and let them know we care. The best way I have found to be a better listener is to start by asking good questions. And the best thing I have ever asked my players is for them to complete the magic sentence:

“One thing I wish my coach knew about me that would help him/her coach me better is…”

Please try this with your teams, and share with me what you learn. Don’t make the same mistake I made years ago with Maddy, assuming she didn’t care or was simply unteachable. Ask her! I am confident that it will have the same impact on your coaching as it did with mine. Good luck

Coach O’Sullivan is a former college and professional player as well as a high school, club team and college coach. He is offering a FREE video series that is part of his Coaching Mastery program. For more information about gaining access to that program click the link above or in the image below. The video series includes a wealth of coaching education including some motivational and team building ideas used by some of the most successful coaches.

For the right athlete, playing up a level can improve development, increase exposure and build confidence.

Sir Matt Bubsy, the manager of Manchester United, once said, “If they’re good enough, they’re old enough”. While some disagree with Bubsy on the controversial topic of “playing up”, there’s no denying it benefits players who are ready for the challenge. Playing up allows competitive athletes to develop quickly, get more exposure and build confidence.

Drive Development

As competitors, young athletes have a burning desire to become better, to take their game to the next level. Playing up will offer athletes quicker development because they have to keep up with older, stronger kids in an environment designed to test them. Without size on their side, they’ll have to rely on improving their technique and agility.

But their competition will also be smarter tactically. While playing up, players are exposed to a faster-paced, more experienced game. Players have to develop their cerebral understanding of the game faster to stand a chance. This forced focus on skills and awareness of the game can really advance a player’s development.

Get More Exposure

Older teams play in competitive games and tournaments, so the athletes will be more likely to get noticed. Normally an eighth-grader wouldn’t be getting looks from college scouts — but if he or she is playing on a team of freshmen, there’s now a stronger possibility of catching a coach’s eye. Just one year can make a huge difference in a player’s future.

Not only are older teams more likely to be seen by recruiters, they’re also more likely to use video. Watching and learning from video at a young age will help players prepare for playing on teams at a higher level. They’ll also have a full history of their growth to showcase. This early exposure can play a very important role in getting players to the next level.

Build Confidence

Playing up an age group may take an initial toll on a player. But in the long run, playing up can have a positive impact on their self-confidence. A player’s belief in their own abilities plays a key role in performance. This kind of confidence doesn’t always occur naturally — but is a skill that can be learned through focus, effort and preparation.

Being able to compete with older, more experienced players is encouragement in itself. Far-fetched dreams, like making the varsity team as a freshman, will become realistic. Players will feel more capable and self-assured in their abilities because they’ll know the tough environment they chose has lead them to reach their full potential.

Though a great opportunity for athletes who want a challenge, playing up is definitely not for everyone. Factors like the amount of playing time, how the player will stack up physically, and the intensified mental demands are important to consider. Overall, the player’s best interest should be the number one priority — for some, that’ll mean playing up a level.

Want more coaching insights? Check out our resource center.