This article was originally written back on 1/21/2022 by TDC and his Substack newsletter:
I recently was out of town on a tournament with the youth team I coach.
During some downtime between our 3rd and 4th game, I was chatting with a friend of mine who no longer is involved with hockey. He asked me a few questions about the team and how we had been doing, and since we just had come off of what I thought was a very winnable game only to lose by a single goal (which happened the day before as well), I let some of my typical non-filtered mental thoughts go via texts to him. Let’s just say it wasn’t very positive, if at all.
His response back?
“Remember, their kids. Are they having fun?”.
My first thought was, “I’ll be damned if they are having fun after these types of performances…”. But he was right.
They signed up to play travel hockey for a reason and while I’m sure winning is high on their list, it’s definitely below “having fun”.
No matter that they are a 12U AA team, at the end of the day they are still 11 and 12 years old, and they are doing this because it’s supposed to be fun.
So if I wasn’t having fun, why would they be?
I’ll be honest, I’ve written and said a lot of things that I too struggle with doing as a coach. I don’t feel that makes me a hypocrite, but someone who is self-aware enough that they have areas they can grow in as a coach or leader and need to get better at and are actually doing those things.
One area I’ve been really struggling with lately is “over-coaching” players.
I think in general as a society within youth sports we try and bombard young athletes with so much knowledge that they are not ready for and expect them to suddenly understand it.
I won’t try and pretend to know why this happens, but I think why I specifically do it is a reason some others do as well.
It’s FOMO; the Fear Of Missing Out.
Now, my FOMO isn’t about me missing out on anything but more of making sure I’m not letting the players I coach down and miss out on anything that I could do or teach them to help get them better.
I realize I don’t need to comment after every shift on things that I would change (I don’t do this all the time, but it does happen) or what they should do. Instead, I need to let them go out and play and if the same mistake keeps happening and they can’t adjust on their own, then step in and try and help change their approach to the problem.
I’ve scaled back the team video/chalk talk we do because 45+ minutes is way too much for the age I’m with (what used to be 10-12 clips of our past game plus some NHL clips on how the pros do it or of skills we will be doing in practice) and now aim for 5-6 clips within a 20-minute span.
My FOMO is this:
I don’t want to forget something, and I don’t want these kids to fall behind because of me. So my over-coaching isn’t so much a reflection of the team, but a reflection of my belief in myself as a coach on whether I’m doing an above-average job or not (because average to me is boring). So I over-coach because I’m hoping that throwing numerous things at the wall will increase my odds of getting something to stick when in reality I should focus on a couple of things and work on those until they’re ready to move on to the next.
I barely said much in the pregame chat the next game after that text exchange. I think it was essentially “Let’s work hard and go have some fun”. The boys came out and scored a goal in the 1st minute which they were ecstatic over, followed by 5 straight goals against which dampened the mood.
I could have yelled (they weren’t really working hard and the focus wasn’t the best, clearly) but instead I kept my mouth shut and told them they needed to figure this problem out. I gave some support, a few ideas, and positive encouragement where I saw fit, and slowly they battled back and finished the game with a tie, 5-5.
After the game, they had smiles on their faces, knowing they dug themselves a hole but were able together to patch things up and get back into it with hard work.
I think afterward it was safe to say that they had fun. And if they’re having fun and learning however much it is, am I really missing out?
