Access to qualified coaches who take pride in the fundamentals of development and understand the mental/emotional side of life & sport performance.
“The best thing you can do as a parent of young athletes is find them qualified coaches who take pride in the fundamentals of development and the mental/emotional side of life & sport performance.
It’s the biggest cheat code you can ever give them.
2nd place isn’t close.”
-Ray Zingler on X
There is work involved.
Most people in this game have sold out to the premature advancement ideology as they strive to line their pockets and/or win the social media imagery Olympics (with mostly paid for followers), but the good guys are still out there.
Yes, more times than not you will have to hunt them down because most of their time is spent actually coaching and making a real impact vs. trying to sell you on lies and coordinate with their videographers to build their egos, but trust the real ones are still out there.
The parallels & consistencies in life from domain to domain have no end.
Our youth sport performance world is no different than Amazon.
“Give me what I want right now. We’ll worry about the quality later.”
I understand doing this with a replaceable vacuum cleaner, but your son?
That’s fu*kin’ wild.
Would you trust a $5,000,000 piece of artwork to an amazon delivery driver?
No?
But you’ll outsource your kids potential to a smooth talking dude encouraging what is completely counter to his actual development?
Again, plum wild.
But we do it every day because you heard that in order to get a scholarship (heavily partial discount) you have to give all your money to this “youth sports organization”, that costs 5x the price of a bachelor’s degree to watch the deterioration of your kid mentally & physically, go to college, and decide to hang it up after 1 year because he’s burnt out.
These youth sport organizations will put all “their” college commits on their website, but you know what they don’t put?
The percentage of kids who go on to thrive and play their respective sports all 4-5 years.
Did you know just as many kids go for a year or 2 and then realize it’s not for them anymore (which is fine) as there are kids who stay with it for the length of their college careers.
And with the transfer portal, the percentage of people playing for 4 years, or more is plummeting even further.
What’s the point of all this?
Look for people who want to see Ben & Sarah win the long game.
Not the people who are focused on making money off them while they wear jerseys.
