Summer Youth Training Camp: Focusing on building the fundamentals of athleticism and injury prevention. This is the training that will aide each athlete to reaching their full athletic potential!

Elevate your game and spend your summer conditioning whiles the others are at the beach!

For those who train with us this summer, you will soon understand the power of training with a purpose.

Mental Toughness, Boot Camps, Navy Seal Training and Other Nonsense

I have said many times in this blog that mental toughness is in many ways is a myth. In my experience as a coach and athlete the athletes who produce in the competition are the ones who are there everyday physically and mentally in training doing what they are supposed to do with concentration, intensity and effort. They are focused and make each drill and each rep count. So called boot camp workouts made up of mindless repetitions of drills designed to make the athlete tired do exactly that, they make the athlete tired. But training without a purpose will not make an athlete better or mentally tough. What you find that the athletes do in those workouts is that they tune out; they do what they have to do to get through the workout. That is not what you want them to do in competition, you want them to do more than get through it, you want them to excel. As far as Navy Seal training I have the utmost respect for the Navy Seals and their mission, but their mission is to fight and kill if necessary. Sport is not a life or death proposition. What they do has little or no transfer to athletic competition so to imitate or adopt their training is fallacious. I understand that training at times must be hard and sometimes harder than what the athlete will face in competition, but everything has a place and a purpose in a well-designed training program. I want training to be a mindful experience that grows adaptable athletes who are ready to thrive in the competitive arena. Getting tired is easy training is difficult.

Road to Success Basketball Clinic

Youth Sports and Winning

At a young age, sport is about participating and creating the desire in each kid to return for the next season. Having fun and learning to compete at a young age are of primary importance. Winning should not be the goal, but for those individuals and teams who do win their efforts should be supported.

Unfortunately, for kids the simple act having fun can be interfered with and even eliminated altogether by otherwise well meaning adults. For example, there are leagues that, instead of letting kids play and either win or lose create special rules which advance every team into the playoffs. The idea, presumably to create more opportunity for fun or perhaps to make the young participants feel better about themselves.

Ironically, this message not only over emphasizes winning, but it also supports the concept of unearned rewards. Adults who create such rules are really saying to the kids that post season play and therefore winning are so important that we are going to let all of you finish the season winners - earned or not. In addition to over emphasizing winning, giving young kids an unearned reward can only be counterproductive. 

Unearned rewards of this nature value results over effort. Giving unearned rewards say to each kid that you can fall short of the base qualifying standards and skill levels and still get the prize. Perhaps this is one reason why the young adults of today are sometimes accused of being entitled and unwilling to work their way from the bottom up to the top positions in corporate America? 

For the young kids, the goal is to make sport so enjoyable that they want to return for the next season - playoffs or not. This sets the ground work for a strong athletic future.

Offering unearned rewards and eliminating the values earned through struggle and effort over emphasize winning and do not teach the inherent values and life lessons that can be gleaned from sport. Further, the everyone is a winner approach to sport does not develop future champions. In life this approach does not develop strong workers and employees. Nor, I could argue does it develop balanced and ethical leaders.

References
The Champion's Way, by Steve Victorson