2 Roadblocks to Success in Youth Sports

If your child is struggling in youth sports, what are the roadblocks to success that are holding them back? It’s easy to blame the team, the coach, the league, their teammates–placing blame on everyone or everything but where your focus actually needs to be: on your child.

I know you don’t like hearing that. I surely didn’t. It was much easier to blame external factors than to take a deeper look at the athlete and seek to understand how they actually might be standing in the way of their own success.

If you really want to help your child succeed, you may want to examine these two things that just might be at the root of the problem.

Your child is focusing on the what, and not on the how.

Focusing on the what means that you and/or your child are caught up in wins, statistics and results, more than the habits or practices that are going to bring those wins, great stats and amazing results.

Focusing on the what may at first appear to be the answer, but when you or your child don’t see progress fast enough, the natural response is to get discouraged, and even quit.

Your child neglects the small things.

The second factor that can hinder your child’s success is the understanding that every single human success has been accomplished little by little. Those “overnight” successes were preceded by lots of hard work, and probably lots of failures.

It is wrong to conclude that small decisions don’t matter very much–good or bad. Life is actually a sum total of every small decision and so when it comes to your child’s success, the small decisions really do matter–staying after practice a couple of times a week to hone a skill, getting proper rest, drinking lots of water, eating healthy, paying attention to what the coach really wants–day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Each decision to do those things adds up to success.

I’ve seen this in my own journey of doing crossfit. I started a year ago and for months, really wondered if I was making any progress. But now, a year later, I can see small improvements – leg strength, endurance, arm strength-very encouraging for a woman my age. It was the little decisions to keep at it week after week that added up.

And it’s the little bad decisions day after day, week after week, month after month, that add up to a very large roadblock to success.

Here’s the truth that your child needs to believe: It’s the things no one sees that bring the results everyone wants.

Don’t let your child take the easy route and put the blame for struggles on everyone else. And don’t YOU, as parents get sucked into the blame game. It will stop your child from having the success that they can achieve when they tap into their full potential.