How coaching kids sports helps me be better at startup coaching

At the start of 2017 I am a certified coach for house league hockey with Hockey Canada and a certified rep coach with Baseball Canada. I have been an assistant coach and head coach with girls and boys hockey as well as the head coach for the Waterloo Tigers Rookie Tier 2 team.

The volunteer commitment to coaching kids sports is high. Coaching consumed 20–30 hrs of my week in baseball season and about 20 hours a week in hockey season (with some baseball winter practice mixed in).

It is the most challenging volunteer work I have done — and it is the most rewarding. There are a few key things that stand out as lessons that influence me every day.

How I got started

A few years ago my oldest son became old enough to go on the ice and learn to play hockey. This first year of any sport starts off rough but hockey is particularly insane — half the kids are crying on the first day, a few are doing snow angels, and a few can sorta skate. Parents go through a range of emotions as they watch their 4 yr learn to stand on 2 blades of steel, on ice.

It must be the most bizarre thing for a first time Canadian to witness. You have these little kids in full plastic armour and a stick inside an ice floor ‘cage’ with all these adults looking on.

Even though it had been 10 years or more since I was on skates I decided to join the little screamers and help pick the little ones off the ice while encouraging them. That was the start of me coaching.

Coaching requires a team of parents to support the team of players

In coaching the early years of sports you can have kids range in age from 6 to 8 that have all different ability levels when it comes to the sport you are coaching. The different ages have different mixes of skill and cognitive ability to learn the game. By the end of the season, if you have done your job right as coach, there is a tight knit team built around all varying level of skill and ability (that is constantly changing in young kids).

In doing your job right as a coach you need to ensure that:

• Parents are engaged and know what time and where practices and games are.
• Kids are excited to be at practice and feel they something to do during a game.
• Winning does not matter — the kids don’t care as much as the parents do— effort does.

This requires practice plans that are fun and target skill develop for a broad range of early stage athletes. That is followed by a game plan that needs to flexible as kids are emotional. You need to find a way to take advantage of that.

Teams are made up of people from the community

A community sport team is composed of kids from the community along with their parents from different professions and backgrounds. In some communities like Waterloo, Ontario or Bedford, Nova Scotia kids are not just from many different schools but different localities in the larger region.

It is an opportunity to get to know people that you wouldn’t meet through work or other social events. The common interest is the sport you are coaching.

What is new to me and what is being re-enforced by the coaching experience

What have I learned and what does that have to do with startups? Through all the time spent in hockey rinks, baseball diamonds, and hotels on tournaments as both a parent and a coach there is lots to be learned so far.

Teams are hard. A diverse group of early stage humans (kids) don’t hold a lot back and a coach can only be effective if they learn how to be a team. Sure winning isn’t everything but the only way an individual can put in their best effort is when a team is working together. As later stage humans (adults), people seem to forget about teams or still haven’t learned the value of a team effort. Having the opportunity for kids to remind and re-enforce how important a team is has been invaluable.

Learning how to win and loose is important. Individual effort makes great plays but teams win or lose games. A lot of competition has been removed from team sports at an early age which may be a mistake. I have coached a season where we did not win a game followed by a season where we ended up with some hardware. The kids weren’t turned off of the sport because they kept loosing. We learned how to be competitive and went from being blown out in games to being competitive in the provincial tournament. The following season that team learned how to win games. Learning how to loose first made everything else feel that much better.

Humans have a built-in ability to perform at the level you expect from them. Placing someone outside of the role or position assumed for them given some perceived limitation can create new opportunities for both the person and the team. This is not about performing “better” than someone else in a given role or position but finding out how well an individual can perform. It speaks a lot to A-players are only A-players in certain situations. The important thing to do is provide as many situations as you can so that a person can find their A-game. With any stage humans you do that by trying them out in different positions and encouraging them while helping them develop the skills to be a major contribute to the team.

Creating value for coaches, kids, and the community

It isn’t good times all the time when coaching kids sports. There are a lot of negative things that happen when you coach a team. I don’t want to dwell on those other than to say all parents are guilty of being a bit too intense over something in sport. Some worse than others.

The positives far outweigh the negative. It is important to the community that people take on these roles. It is important to the individuals that they gain something from the experience — new friendships with fellow coaches, parents, and helping a kid achieve something they didn’t know they could is pretty awesome. I wouldn’t trade the time served coaching (so far) for anything.

I think it is important for everyone involved to ensure that everyone gets the most of the experience of participating in sport. It should not be seen as a zero sum environment where individual kids excel at the expense of everyone else but instead be a place where the larger community is improved by developing future leaders and having more people connect in a positive way.