By David Jacobson
Positive Coaching Alliance
Let’s face it, most youth and high school athletes do not really enjoy training and conditioning. For many, conditioning is the necessary price of admission to participate in their favorite sports, so they can have fun, enjoy the excitement of game-time, bask in the camaraderie of teammates and pursue their sporting goals.
However, conditioning and training are critical to success on the field. They also contribute to the discipline, persistence and other positive character attributes that Responsible Coaches strive to instill through sports so that players also can succeed beyond sports.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon Responsible Coaches to ensure their players are well conditioned. You can make that happen by conducting conditioning in a way that Fill’s “Emotional Tanks.”
Remember, the Responsible Sports principle of Filling Emotional Tanks is similar to a car’s gas tank: when it’s empty, we go nowhere; when it’s full we can go anywhere. One way to make sure your athletes’ tanks are full is to use the “Buddy System.” To put the “Buddy System” in play, you pair teammates off to train together, push each other and encourage each other whenever one of the partners starts dragging. Instead of just generally asking your players to support their teammates, specifically assigning one player to encourage another means it is more likely to happen, and both players are more likely to benefit from the conditioning.
There are advantages to assigning players to each other, rather than just letting them choose a Buddy:
- You can pair players of similar physical capabilities so that they naturally compete and push each other. Otherwise, mismatched pairs may result in the better-conditioned athlete taking it easy and the lesser-conditioned athlete not even trying to keep up with his or her partner.
- When you put matched pairs of players together and ask them to do as many repetitions of a certain skill or drill as possible, you are providing a “Just-Right Challenge.” This draws upon a piece of educational psychology research from Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning by Deborah Stipek and Kathy Seal, which provides some of the underpinning for Positive Coaching Alliance workshops and the Responsible Coaching and Responsible Sports Parenting online courses.
- In Stipek and Seal’s research, children were given the choice of 13 puzzles to try to solve, covering a wide range of difficulty. Every child chose whichever puzzle was "one step ahead" of their current skill level…not too easy, not too hard, but just right.
- If your players are appropriately challenged in their conditioning, then conditioning becomes fun and games. Your players are more likely to become engaged sooner, balk less at the actual conditioning drills and stay engaged long enough to improve their conditioning. Of course, as their conditioning abilities improve, the more they are likely to enjoy the conditioning and the higher you can all raise the bar on the “Just-Right Challenge.”
- You can help forge bonds between players that might not gravitate toward each other, which helps break up cliques and can create positive new interpersonal dynamics that help your team.
- You can present the occasional opportunity for players to pick their own Buddies as a special treat…one that may actually have your players looking forward to conditioning.
For Responsible Coaches, coming up with exciting and interesting training tools for their team cans sometime be a difficult task. In addition to “Buddy System”, there are several other suggestions for helping with practice ideas and how to Fill “Emotional Tanks”, like Positive Charting and Winners Circle.
