Helping Young Players Thrive: The Psychology of Good Coaching

Trish, how you doing? You're very welcome to the podcast today.

Yeah, I'm doing well.

Thank you, Bruce.

Lovely to be here.

Today, we are going to be talking about this idea of psychologically informed coaching in youth sports.

But I was thinking that maybe we might back away from that just a little bit before we start and think about a bigger picture.

So when you think about good coaching in youth or adolescent sports, what is it that you're trying to achieve? What does that look like?

Yeah, I think it's a really great question.

And, you know, I think you can ask people like me or academic researchers and psychologists.

I think we also need to ask children and young people as well.

I think that's a really important start point.

But, you know, in terms of thinking about great coaching, it's how do we create great environments for people to be able to flourish? And I think, you know, we look at great coaches.

We think about, you know, people who are supportive you know, the personal development of athletes, their well-being.

And of course, you know, competence in a particular sport and ultimately a love for that sport.

So I think, you know, there's so much that can be talked about when it comes to sport around performance and development and all of that.

But I think actually what's really important is that we're ensuring all times that, you know, great coaching is about being focused on every child and recognising that they are children and putting fun and enjoyment at the heart of it like ensuring that every time a young person is leaving after a training session or a game and that they want to come back the next day and I think that's really key that we give them a love to want to come back and ultimately to have a lifelong commitment to being involved in sport and physical activity.

Do you think that maybe sometimes we tend to judge youth coaching and youth sports a little bit too much through a performance lens and not through that holistic approach that you're talking about? I

think, you know, a lot of sports, because we might have some type of talent pathway or performance pathway, sometimes that ends up happening.

And I think...

the focus often on winning and kind of reaching the top of a particular sport can be problematic, especially when that's the sole focus.

And I think another issue is that sometimes we look at holistic development or wellbeing and performance as being a dichotomy that, you know, we can't, we can only have one of those.

And the reality is that in order for people to grow and to develop and realise their sporting potential, And we also need to look after their well-being and their personal development away from the sport and away from the pitch.

So ultimately, it is the balance between those elements that's really key.

And there's a lot of work that points towards the importance of that holistic development.

young people who have identities that are much more than just sport and that we don't just have that athletic identity that actually there's a lot more that goes on in their lives and that we can also consider how that can also influence and shape their involvement in sport as well so I think it's it's always key to think not just about who is the young person but what's the environment and the system that's surrounding them and how does that influence you know how they come to us when when they're involved in sport.