{"id":1059,"date":"2010-09-02T04:12:32","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T10:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.nsr-inc.com\/\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2010-09-02T04:12:32","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T10:12:32","slug":"allow-young-athletes-to-face-vulnerabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/allow-young-athletes-to-face-vulnerabilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Allow Young Athletes to Face Vulnerabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

Develop the Whole Person Instead of Creating Prima Donnas<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is an epidemic we don’t like to see, but we admit its prevalence — young athletes who, if they\u00a0don’t get their way, or feel they are being treated unfairly, choose to pack up and move on to\u00a0what appears to be the next best thing, or they complain and mope around like toddlers who have been told they can’t have another cookie.\u00a0 Enough already.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Young athetes should be encouraged to work through issues with their coaches.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Back in the day, if a kid\u00a0felt that he or she was being mistreated in some way, parents commonly used the occasion as a life-learning, character-building \u00a0opportunity.\u00a0 It was old school learned the hard way from their parents.\u00a0 The last generation of athletes, with fewer choices than today, were forced to tackle their problems head on and deal with the consequences.\u00a0 There was no crying in sports, period.\u00a0 Kids either played through the hard times\u00a0or quit, and in most cases quitting was a stigma nobody wanted to be saddled with for years to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, it’s more likely a family will become incensed by the coach and skeedattle with a cursory,\u00a0“Let’s get outta\u00a0here,” all the while\u00a0ignoring the longer term consequences to their kid.\u00a0 Honestly, this shoot-from-the-hip thinking\u00a0is not a responsible solution regardless of the era.\u00a0 It’s a\u00a0cruise vacation\u00a0from reality which\u00a0can cause\u00a0irreparable\u00a0harm to the athlete.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s the Me Syndrome<\/em> and no one is the better for it.\u00a0 We like the old way better\u00a0and call for parents of budding, young athletes to reconsider how they handle the egos of kids whose lives will benefit more from dealing with tough situations and making hard decisions than being protected from the cruel, cruel world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

No one can dodge crisis.\u00a0 Everybody encounters it.\u00a0 The boss gets mad, a co-worker gets jealous, equipment breaks down, supplies run out — these are all things which will happen to everyone sooner than later.\u00a0 In sports it’s usually much sooner.\u00a0 Learning\u00a0various ways to cope with and overcome\u00a0problems, or crisis managment,\u00a0allows kids to develop valuable life skills.\u00a0 Pulling them out of the bull ring\u00a0too early never allows them to look real fear in the eye, to\u00a0experience their own vulnerabilities.\u00a0 They don’t\u00a0learn to make courageous choices.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Choices are a part of life.\u00a0 Choosing to cope with difficult people and learning to thrive in\u00a0challenging circumstances is far better than\u00a0throwing up one’s hands as if working with authority figures or insensitive coaches is out of the question.\u00a0 Better to face the music now and practice how to deal with it than to run into a buzz saw of a boss ten years down the road and not have a clue how to survive.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Sports teach high school athetes life and character-building lessons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We\u00a0see the\u00a0unsettling results\u00a0too often as pampered youngsters go on to believe that\u00a0when life’s obstacles are encountered running away is a\u00a0more viable option than\u00a0constructively working through them.\u00a0 How on earth did we get to this absurd point?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every athlete eventually\u00a0faces his or her share of dilemmas in athletics.\u00a0 From disagreements about playing time to how they are spoken to or disciplined, these are age-old conundrums.\u00a0 As a high school athlete in rural Virginia, I\u00a0vividly recall\u00a0having to deal with\u00a0a tough-as-nails coach who seemed\u00a0determined to break me down.\u00a0\u00a0He was succeeding, too.\u00a0 When I had\u00a0had enough and went to my parents for help, my father said, “Son, this is something you need to handle.\u00a0\u00a0We are\u00a0not there every day.\u00a0 You are.\u00a0 We do not know the coach well enough to criticize his\u00a0decisions from our point of view.\u00a0\u00a0If you want the situation to change,\u00a0you’ll have to\u00a0figure\u00a0it out.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

That very evening I called the coach and asked for a one-on-one meeting.\u00a0\u00a0We met in\u00a0his office at the school that night and I poured my heart out to him.\u00a0 This was not your warm and fuzzy guy, to say the least, so looking him in the eye and pushing myself into uncharted waters was the most uncomfortable thing I had experienced to that point in my life.\u00a0 There were known risks involved and my parents were unflagging in both their encouragement and determination that I go it alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regardless of the outcome, I wanted him to know what affect this was having on me and what I was willing to do to make things right.\u00a0 More hustle.\u00a0 Less taking my role for granted.\u00a0 More leadership.\u00a0 Less moping.\u00a0 And, after three years of playing for\u00a0him, he finally opened up and told me his\u00a0story and why he had made the decisions he had. It was a revelation.\u00a0 Even if I never played a minute of basketball for him again, I got it.\u00a0 It wasn’t all about me.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That conversation\u00a0changed my life.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0learned nothing about basketball that night, but\u00a0what I took away with me imbedded in my character.\u00a0 My father was a wise, wise man.\u00a0 He knew that this particular encounter and experience would be a watershed moment for me, and it was.\u00a0 Watershed moments are good.\u00a0 Kids today need more of that same sort of dousing.\u00a0 It’s hard, but\u00a0critically necessary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Athletics are all\u00a0about learning life’s lessons.\u00a0 Yes,\u00a0athletes remember the\u00a0practices, the\u00a0locker room banter along with the\u00a0gratifying wins and devastating losses.\u00a0 But, more than anything, athletes learn how about real life issues such as how to cohesively work with others toward a common goal, how to support one another in disappointing times, how to win with class and lose with grace, and how to work through problems with tough authoritarians.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we, as parents and coaches, coddle\u00a0and protect our kids too much from crises, they miss out on those invaluable lessons which carry them through life, instead thinking that the answers will always be given to them.\u00a0 We can do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Develop the Whole Person Instead of Creating Prima Donnas This is an epidemic we don’t like to see, but we admit its prevalence — young athletes who, if they\u00a0don’t get their way, or feel they are being treated unfairly, choose to pack up and move on to\u00a0what appears to be the next best thing, or … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsr-inc.com\/scouting-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}