4 BIG MISTAKES IN YOUTH SPORTS

We are doing it wrong. That´s right. I´m talking about all of us, coaches and parents. This post is not about science, but about things that, in my opinion, we could improve in youth sports.

Having worked with a very broad range of people, from children to adults and from general population to elite athletes, I have come to realize that there are numerous myths surrounding sports and exercise.

Youth sports, of course, are no exception. Coaches and parents decide about how children should train, how much or how little and what is good or what is not. But, do we really always make the right call? Are we making mistakes based on common misconceptions?

Regardless if we are right or not, I am very concerned with the word PROGRESS. If we don’t question what is being done, how will we get to do things better?

Not everything needs to be changed, and I am a proponent of “If it works, don’t touch it”. But, what happens when sports science evolves and we have sufficient evidence to do things better?
Isn’t scientific evidence more valuable than subjective opinions? Why are we so reluctant to change?
Change requires effort to learn something new: It´s a lot easier to stay the same. When I hear coaches or people that make decisions in sports clubs say they do something in a certain way “because it’s the way it’s always been done”, I feel pain.

Not for them or for me, but for the children and young athletes that are part of their organization.
We find coaches with little to no formal sports education working with children and teenagers and then we complain that the kids are getting injured. I can promise you one thing:

I can promise you one thing: Obesity, stress fractures and spinal injuries in teenagers are not “normal”, neither should we accept them.

Here are some things we are doing wrong about youth sports, and most important, what can we do about them:
Wanting cheap coaching and expecting great results.

You can have cheap or you can have good, but not both. Maybe it’s time to evaluate if paying 2 or 3 euros per hour of coaching goes along our expectations.

Do we expect outstanding quality from cheap supermarket products? Do we hope for great commodities when we book a flight with a low-cost company? It seems like the same reasoning doesn’t apply when it comes to sports and exercise training.

You can pay more for professional coaching, maximize all the elements that go along with youth sports (having fun, relationships, discipline, creating healthy habits) and minimize injury risk (with coaches that understand anatomy, physiology, movement, conditioning) or you can spend dozens of times that amount on physiotherapy and doctors, treating injuries that could have been easily avoided with proper training practice in the first place.

Traumatic injuries are part of sports, no doubt, but when half of the kids are hurt or in pain, something is very wrong.

Having uneducated coaches work with the youngest children.

I can’t stop but wonder why children are trained by uneducated and inexperienced coaches.

The first years of sports practice for children are the most important of their whole lives: Physically, they will be acquiring basic movement skills, neural motor patterns as well as establishing a foundation of strength that will prevent injuries later in life.

Psychologically, they will be learning how to identify and manage emotions like happiness or frustration and how to interact with other children.

The influence of the sports coach will have as much impact as family figures, so letting the lesser educated trainers work with the youngest people is probably not a very smart choice.

Stay away from coaches without formal education and solid experience. A 3-weekend course on “How to be a coach” is not enough.

If it takes four years of college to become a childhood education teacher, why are uneducated sports trainers coaching the very same children?

Volunteering parents coaching their child to play a sport at which they were mediocre themselves doesn’t qualify either.

What to do? Let´s look abroad. One of my favorite models is Icelandic football. Here are words from the director of education for the Icelandic Football Association, Arnar Bill Gunnarsson [1]:
“Icelandic football follows a similar method Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands have employed regarding coaching education and qualification. For young players, the exposure to highly-qualified coaches produces players with a strong mentality.

The approach is simple: to coach, one must be highly proficient and licensed. The key is when the players start training at four or five years of age, they get a qualified, paid coach. Almost every coach in Iceland has a qualification.

They have a UEFA B or UEFA A license. So when you are a four or five, or even three years old, you get a qualified and experienced coach. And, if kids get an experienced and qualified coach who is fun and entertaining the kids love the game.

What happens when you learn to love the game, you go out on the training pitch and do something extra. You play football outside of organized training sessions.

That is the mentality in Iceland. If you look at the other Scandinavian countries, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, in most cases there are parents coaching the kids until they are 12-years-old as volunteers”.
Claiming that small children shouldn’t compete.

The main goal when it comes to children and sports is to provide a solid base of physical, emotional, social and psychological development, but that doesn’t mean that competition has to be left out.
It teaches discipline, behavior in a non-familiar setting out of the training, and, in general, a positive experience that adds motivation to the weekly sports practice.

Why would competing not be compatible with having fun? Being born in Barcelona, it’s no casualty that the first sport that I got interested in was football.

But to me, the most exciting day was the day of the competition, often not being able to sleep the night before just thinking of the big day.

It was exciting and fun, and it taught me how to behave and put effort into something other than school. Obviously, children that don’t enjoy the experience of competing shouldn’t do it, but why would we not have that option?

One of the arguments against children competing is playing time. For the youngest children, playing time in competitions should be similar for everyone in the team.
But what happens with teenagers?

One thing that both children and parents learn in youth sports is that things are not the same for everyone. Playing time is different.

Your child may not be in the team that he/she wants. The coach may choose who should participate more or less. The referees or judges will make mistakes.
But I see it as a part of the developing process of a child while still having fun. Unless you live in very specific eastern countries, the chances of your child being exposed to sports early specialization or burnout are slim to none.

Changing teams and even sports is something normal at early ages and even positive:  Not all sports will appeal to the same kids and it will take good and bad experiences to find the sport or type of exercise that they enjoy the most as well as finding the right teammates and friends.
A young athlete should experience different sport and environments in order to find what he or she is passionate about.

As an endnote, competition should still be ranked lower in order of importance to things like unstructured play. Like with most things in life, any extreme is bad and the best approach is usually somewhere in the middle.

There is a place both for play and for competition in all ages and all of them provide positive things.
Letting children gain too much weight.

Being overweight is the new normal. According to Official Statistics of Finland, in 2012 60% of men and 44% of women in working age population were overweight [2]. As you can imagine, it doesn’t get much better with children.

Parents and coaches are overly worried about the dangers of anorexia, when the biggest problem is obesity.

There are many types of eating disorders and certainly chronic undereating is one of them, but reality shows that it just isn’t that common. Last summer I coached around 30 young gymnastics teams during 3 weeks of camps in Lohja.

In most teams there were 1 to 4 kids with evident overweight and in some cases obesity.
If gymnasts are overweight, how are kids that don’t exercise often? This is a huge contrast with some parents and coaches perception: We hear comments about being skinny and unhealthy, but obesity is ignored.

This comes, in part, from our own insecurity: If we are becoming more out of shape every year, how are we going to give advice on that matter to others?

What to do? Education is only one part of the puzzle. In my opinion, we can talk all day long about eating healthy and exercising, but if we are not giving example then it’s not going to work.

Everyone has busy lives, but eating a bit less and exercising a bit more will have more impact on children than preaching about healthy habits: Actions speak louder than words.

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