Positive Coaching Alliance

These are things you can actually do

... there's a ton of resources at the Positive Coaching Alliance.

PC...

It's positivecoachingalliance.org-

Uh, and-

Proudly

... and, uh, there are some things we can do to change culture as parents, even in the stands and the way it goes, but definitely check out Positive Coaching Alliance.

Yeah, check it out and donate.

Oof.

And behavior towards each other, behavior towards the players, behavior towards the referees, and, you know, my, my wife and I spend time with the Positive Coaching Alliance as an example of an organization that's invested in, in this.

But there are, and you both see it on the sidelines, there is, there is way too much inconsistency in what behavior is tolerated relative to the trying to create a positive environment for the welfare and development of the players.

And we as a country need to raise our accountability for those environments.

It was probably in 2020, I think was pre the world changing in 2020.

We signed up in 2019 with an organization called Positive Coaching Alliance.

So a big piece of it, like we need to remember our core and remember the experience and what we're trying to do.

But how we project that out to the community is really important because our, like for instance, our coaches are volunteers, right? We want to make sure that we're creating a culture that we stand by.

You know, if we say we have a positive culture, we need to live it, right? So we lean into the Positive Coaching Alliance and trainers that they have.

We do coach training almost every season.

We have offered parent training.

All AAU coaches were now taking an educational course.

The organization had repurposed training it had used since before the Dodd scandal, an online seminar called Double Goal Coach from the nonprofit Positive Coaching Alliance.

The course was focused on sports psychology and coaching techniques, not sexual abuse prevention training.

the AAU claimed that all registered non-athletes were taking the course, even though no one verified whether they did, according to officials, stakeholders, and a person directly familiar with the training.

On One Swimming website's list of reasons for clubs to switch to the easier AAU, the top of the list was a lack of mandatory training hoops.

By 2023, five years after the Safe Sport Act's passage, the AAU was publicly acknowledging that the law required all organizations to offer some form of child sex abuse prevention training, even if it isn't created by Safe Sport.

Its new Youth Protection Handbook cited the law and said that the AAU's mandatory course offered through the Positive Coaching Alliance now included child abuse prevention training.

Jason Sachs, the CEO of the Positive Coaching Alliance, told ProPublica and The Post in a statement that the material was not an official training by any stretch.

She is a journalist, researcher, and a former cross country and track coach.

She's also a founding board member of the Positive Coaching Alliance and an advisory group member for the Aspen Institute's Reimagining Sports Initiative.

Linda is a mother of three and a lifelong athlete.

She lives with her family in New Jersey, and her new book is Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports and Why It Matters.