Reply to can you teach a kid to hustle more in travel soccer?

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

Reply to "can you teach a kid to hustle more in travel soccer?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Reading this thread with interest because my 14 year old basketball player is one of the less aggressive players on his teams, or used to be. It's not like he's always the most aggressive kid now, but he's gotten much better in the past two years or so.  He's inconsistent, but the floor of his play is much better than his average games used to be, and the ceiling is really pretty good.

I disagree with the posters who say temperament is what it is.  I think some kids have a frame of reference that makes them think "I'm doing OK.  If I were a different kid (had a different temperament) I'd be better, but this is OK."  If they really confront the fact that they are in fact playing lazily (i.e. it's not OK), then they can change pretty dramatically.  We've seen this with DS twice.  Once after he had just started playing for a better travel team, I watched him jog his way through a practice and scrimmage, not looking to score or to defend, just going with the flow.  After the scrimmage, we had a talk and he said "sometimes I'm tired and I just feel like doing my job."  I asked him what that meant, and he said he felt his job was passing to open players, guarding his man and not making turnovers.  I told him pretty forcefully that if he wanted to do travel, he needed to see his job as scoring and stopping the other team from scoring.  I am not proud of that conversation because I felt like a crazy sports dad, but he really took it to heart.  Before that, he had never even scored with that team in a scrimmage (despite having good skills), after that day he made sure he never failed to score in practice.  Eventually he started to score in games, and to get steals and block shots.

Now he's playing at a higher level, and recently, we've had a similar conversation as he's realized that his new coaches have higher expectations of him than he feels like he's delivering. This time it was all him --- he said after a recent practice that he realized he tends to make excuses for lazy play ("I didn't score today, but I score more than other freshmen", "I'm one of the youngest kids here", "I have played two games already today, I can take it easy") and that he was going to stop doing that.  Now he actually says "no excuses" over and over to himself before games or practices, and it seems to be working --- his aggressiveness is way up and he can contribute even when his jump shot is not falling.

I don't know if a 10 year old is old enough to work this out, but as she gets older she may work it out on her own or you can help her (hopefully in a better way than I did).  Maybe a conversation with her about what she expects / wants to get out of soccer makes sense, but as a parent it's hard to let the kid drive that kind of conversation.  And parents can do a lot of harm with stuff like this.

At the end of the day, if the coach is happy, that's probably your best guide. If it's still an issue closer to high school, then you can talk to her.   [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics