Our Youth Development articles are meant to create awareness for all of the incredible ways kids can develop from youth sports. The goal is to expand your lens to see development along with performance and results. If you see development happening, even during poor performance or poor results, it can give you the power to make the most of the experience and align with your personal priorities in youth sports.
The thrill of working hard to earn victory is a central characteristic of sports. It creates a platform to develop positive traits into passions that extend far beyond the playing field. This article explores the success-driven traits and how they can be developed into passions. It goes on to discuss the importance of these traits across different life stages, a process and general approaches to foster this love, and 7 specific tips to advance this development. This article focuses on how to cultivate the passion to do the things that earn victory or success. Other areas of the site discuss how to be great at these things.
What Passions Can Your Kids Develop Through Youth Sports?
According to Psychology Today, the passions that children develop play a primary role in how their life unfolds. Their passions impact who they pick as friends, how they decide to spend their time and how they respond to a variety of situations. Working hard to win through youth sports, whether in victory or defeat, trains the hypothalamus in our brains to develop in a way that instills a myriad of extremely positive passions in kids that have the opportunity to shape their lives, forever.
Passion for Preparation: The process of preparing for youth sports events instills the joy of being well-prepared. They learn that success often begins with things like getting a good night's sleep, maintaining a balanced diet, practicing with intent and staying physically fit.
Love for Strategizing: Victory in youth sports often requires strategy. Strategy involves problem-solving, decision-making and collaboration. Through a love of sport and a desire to win, we can teach kids to have fun working on strategies.
Desire to Give it "Your All": Youth Sports give kids limitless opportunities to give their best. They can run as hard as possible to win the ball. They can focus their eyes on the ball while they bat. They can fight to remain positive in the heat of adversity. They can keep going, even when they feel exhausted. On and on, sports gives the opportunity to give maximum effort.
Excitement for Goal Setting: Success in youth sports hinges on reaching particular objectives. These objectives span individual, team, and even play-specific goals, encompassing those set for both single games and entire seasons. In situations where youngsters strive for various outcomes, there's a wealth of opportunity to foster a passion for goal setting.
Zeal for Resilience: Striving for victory often entails facing setbacks and defeats. In the world of youth athletics, the pursuit of success nurtures a deep-seated resilience. Each setback serves as an opportunity to experience the joy of bouncing back, fostering resilience as a natural and intrinsic passion. This helps kids to not be afraid of failure or making mistakes.
Desire for Leadership: Working hard in sports often involves a great attitude for leading as well as being led. A comfort and love for playing these roles can be developed in numerous ways through youth sports experiences.
Passion for Improvement: Youth sports provides endless opportunities to work on improvement and experience the rewarding feeling of becoming better and ultimately develop the enjoyment of the work that goes into improving.
Why Are These Passions so Valuable Throughout Life?
People tend to be greatest at the things they love to do. The habits that can be instilled through youth sports are ones that drive success. So if kids can become passionate about these habits, they will be more likely to be great at them, translating into greater success in whatever life's work they pursue.
Today, as children, developing the traits that come from pursuing victory, kids can excel in their daily routines. They are more likely to prioritize sleep, nutrition, and physical activity, which can positively impact their school performance, social growth, and overall happiness. They also learn to be responsible and accountable. They will tend to pick friends who share these traits, creating a positive sphere of influence. Kids will be happier, develop better and be easier and more enjoyable to raise.
Near-Term, The passion for the success-drivers that can be developed through youth sports can set young adults up for success as they enter the "real world". These traits are highly valued in both academic and professional settings. Whatever their intrinsic motivations are, become their most powerful tools and predictors of success or failure.
Long-Term, These habits will continue to play a significant role in their success and happiness as they grow their careers, expand their interests and build families of their own. Life becomes more complicated and requires more intrinsic motivation focused on the key success-drivers that can be developed through youth sports.
What is the Process for Instilling Intrinsic Success-Driven Habits?
For those of you that are very process-oriented, here is a logical progression model that illustrates how kids can develop intrinsic habits that are the foundation for maximizing success throughout life.
Winning Creates a Frame of Reference: Whether it's winning a game, a tournament, or aiming for a winning record throughout the season, victory serves as a straightforward benchmark that children readily comprehend and aspire to attain. "Kids, we'll give it our best to win as much as possible. How does that sound?"
Break Winning into Pieces: To maximize success in sports and in life, we must prepare, strategize, exert our best effort, set SMART goals, demonstrate resilience, exhibit strong leadership and followership, and continuously improve. "Kids, by doing XYZ, we'll greatly enhance our odds of winning."
Cultivate these Pieces: This will take time, spanning multiple seasons, but it'll gradually become ingrained if you're deliberate in nurturing it. Concentrate on one aspect at a time. Perhaps each practice can have a specific focus. Encourage kids to assess their preparation, like getting sufficient sleep or eating well, during games. Provide opportunities for kids to take leadership roles and follow teammates. Celebrate their accomplishments in these areas and encourage mutual recognition. Your objective is to prioritize these aspects over winning the game. Work on this with the kids, fellow coaches, and parents.
The Success-Drivers start to Have Impact: The kids start experiencing improved plays, games, and seasons. The objective is for them to distinguish between two factors contributing to victory or defeat: (1) Success-driven habits and (2) Skills. While they can work on skill development, they cannot always control having superior skills in a given moment. What they can control is their use of success-driven habits to give their best effort in the present and foster growth for the future. By enhancing their practice of these habits, they'll notice increased chances of winning and improved results.
The Success-Drivers become Passions: As these drivers take effect, several things unfold. Behaviors tied to these drivers receive rewards, such as hustling leading to winning the ball. This fosters consistent and habitual use of these success-drivers, leading to a growing intrinsic joy. Ultimately, these success-drivers shift from being about their impact to becoming their own reward. It's akin to individuals who love working out not just for how they look but for the effort they invest. To quote John Calipari: "I want people to say, 'Man did those kids work hard and boy did they have fun doing it."
How Can General Approaches Foster Development of a Passion for Success-Driven Habits?
Think of something that you love to do at your core. Do you need someone to tell you to do that thing? Of course not. You do it because you love it. That is the level of innate passion sports can instill. Where did that love come from? It is most likely from a combination of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation that helped you cultivate that love. Let's look at some general ways that extrinsic motivation can play a role in youth sports experiences to instill the intrinsically motivated success-drivers discussed in this article.
Positive Coaching: Coaches who emphasize effort, growth, and sportsmanship help young athletes understand that the thrill of victory comes from hard work and personal improvement. In order to make this thrilling, the approach must always be positive and encouraging. It is also critical to avoid making kids afraid to make mistakes or afraid to fail.
Goal Setting: Goals create a clear path of hard work. Make the goals input and process focused, while tied to an end objective. "Let's run as hard as we can today at every ball and that is going to give us the best chance to score the most goals."
Focus on Effort: Celebrate when athletes run hard, keep focus, find ways to improve, communicate effectively and apply learnings, even if the desired outcome isn’t achieved.
Ask Questions: Help the kids make it their own decision to adopt these traits. When you ask a question and the kid answers, they are making the decision to develop these traits. "Do you guys want to come up with a way to beat the other team in the 2nd half?"
Variety of Roles: Introduce children to a variety of roles. This will give them many different ways to experience and try out the success-driven habits.
Comment on Fun: Ask whether the drill, game or activity was fun. Ask why it was fun. Tell them it was fun watching them work hard, try hard, prepare, or any of the traits listed above that you observed them doing. You will draw a connection between fun and these traits which is a way for the brain to develop intrinsic motivation for these traits.
Top 7 Specific Tips and Tricks to Guide Development of these Success-Driven Habits
Preparation: Ask the kids before a game “Who got a good night sleep last night? Who ate a healthy breakfast this morning?” This reinforces the importance of preparation.
Set SMART Goals: Make goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, "today we are going to sprint as fast as we can to every ball. I'm going to count the number of times we sprint as hard as we can and the number of times that we don't."
Celebrate Effort: Celebrate when athletes run hard, stay focused, look for ways to improve, communicate, apply what they have learned, even if a desired outcome isn’t achieved.
Foster Teamwork: Be clear with everyone about what their responsibilities are. Give them purpose. Give them specific effort goals and show how it accumulates to the team goal.
Celebrate Resilience: After the other team scores, remind the kids to focus on doing the best to win the next play. If they lose the ball or miss a shot, get back and win it back. If they strike out, get ready to field and hit next time. If they fall down, get back up.
Encourage Leadership: When one player tells another player what to do, celebrate that they did that and celebrate to the other teammate for listening to the guidance from their teammate.
Support Continuous Improvement: Ask each kid "what are you working on improving today?" And then focus on that one thing with them. After the activity, ask them whether they got better at it. Ask them whether it was fun to get better at it.
In conclusion, the thrill of working hard to earn victory in youth sports creates the platform for instilling life-long success-driven passions. To achieve these amazing benefits, it is important to approach winning in youth sports with the perspective that you can instill these passions.
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