Play #4 – M: Mindset
How do you define success for your kids’ youth sporting activities? For many, it is strictly based on performance. If your kid was a champion and had strong statistics, then the season was a success. If not, the season was a failure.
One time, a nine-year-old kid I was coaching shared that if the team won, his dad would buy him a chicken sandwich. The kid seemed so nervous. In another instance, a 12-year-old kid divulged that if he scored over 20 points, his mom would give him $20. I am trying to coach this kid to play team basketball and pass the ball more instead of only looking to shoot. These types of performance-based rewards are counterproductive.
We need to adapt our mindset. I write this as someone who is quite competitive, but also with a clear understanding that youth sports are about the process and that nobody will remember the result of little Johnny’s six-year-old youth soccer score or even the results of Rebekah’s varsity softball game.
Tennis coach Sekou Bangoura Sr., whose son Sekou Bangoura Jr. is playing tennis professionally, said: “Every parent wants to see their kid win right away. Kids who win early don’t last long. Approach any kid’s sporting activities as a marathon. It is not a 100-meter dash.”
John Wooden, who many view as the greatest coach ever, once said: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” 37
I love this. With this mindset, we move away from statistics and the scoreboard as our sole metrics to gauge progress.
Imagine your daughter played in a difficult tennis tournament. The opponents were bigger, older, and more experienced than her. She lost often. But she played strong and competitive matches. She improved tremendously. Her attitude was excellent. Was she a success in this tournament?
Months later, she played in another tournament. This time, she was more talented than the competition. She easily won every match. However, her skills didn’t improve much. Her attitude wasn’t great. In one instance, she taunted one of her opponents. On another occasion, she made a mistake and then threw her racket and damaged it. Was she a success in this tournament?
We as parents need to encourage our kids to adopt a holistic view of success that they can apply throughout their lives and as they grow in their careers. In my book Reframing Career Success, I guide readers through the process of defining success in their professions. Money, power, prestige, and influence are all typical metrics for success. But they can be short-sighted if we don’t incorporate our values. Consider a person who accumulated significant sums of money and power, but took part in unethical behavior and repeatedly harassed colleagues. Is this person a success?
In the book Be All In: Raising Kids for Success in Sports and Life, Christie Pearce Rampone advocates that parents and kids work together to write out a sports mission statement. It keeps everyone grounded both during the highs of victory and the heartbreak of defeat. Speak with your kid before a season and discuss what success entails. Help them focus on the long-term approach. Emphasize character and values. 38
The power of a growth mindset and grit
Michael Jordan famously said the following in a Nike commercial: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Just after being eliminated by the underdog Miami Heat in the 2023 NBA playoffs, Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo was asked if he viewed the season as a failure. Giannis initially threw a question back to the reporter, asking if the years he didn’t get a promotion as a journalist were a failure. When the reporter said no, Giannis said: “You work towards a goal. It’s not a failure. It’s steps to success.”
With great passion he noted that Michael Jordan played 15 years and won six championships. “The other nine years were a failure?” Giannis asked rhetorically. “There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days and bad days. Some days you are able to be successful. Some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn. Some days it’s not your turn, and that’s what sports is about.”
The remarks from Giannis led to a plethora of reactions. Some viewed this opinion as off-base. Giannis earns a fortune (he signed a three-year, $186 million contract in the 2023 offseason) and his job is to lead the team to an NBA championship. Period. Others applauded Giannis’ holistic approach to defining success. I’d be in this latter camp. There may be reason to doubt the merit of such a perspective among professional athletes. At the youth sports level, we should definitely heed Giannis’ wisdom.
These examples connect to a growth mindset, the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication, effort, and learning. Challenges are considered opportunities to grow. Setbacks are learning experiences to be embraced.
A growth mindset can help us reframe how we approach opponents. “As a dad, I always encouraged my son to view defeat as a learning opportunity, with the opponent being a teacher,” Bangoura Sr. said. “When someone else wins, we can learn what the opponents did successfully. We can take note to see where we need to improve.”
Swimmer Susan Goldsworthy, who we introduced in Chapter 3, shared the story of competing in the European Championships and feeling intense pain at the midpoint of the race.
“My thighs were burning and my stomach felt like it was on fire,” she recalled. “I was like, my gosh this hurts. Then my brain went to ‘I must be going fast if it hurts this much.’ Something shifted in my mind and it gave me a burst that got me to the finish line.”
This exemplifies the power of grit, a close sibling to growth mindset. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, noted: “Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” 39
Former NFL head coach Pete Carroll listened to Duckworth speak about grit in a Ted Talk video. Duckworth shared that science hadn’t proved the best ways to nurture grit in kids. This astonished Carroll. He reached out to Duckworth and the two began dialoguing and forming a friendship. They took part in an event dedicated to grit. Carroll made the following comment that shows the opportunities for learning through sport: “You need to have experiences to draw from. I don’t think there’s anything like the real experience of overcoming great adversity to keep you connected to the belief that you can overcome.” 40
Imagine all the countless ways your kids can benefit from a growth mindset and gritty attitude throughout their lives. In academics, they will continue to study and learn, even when the material is challenging. In relationships, they will support and encourage loved ones through the inevitable good and bad times. In a career, they will find a way to persevere and get the job done even when it is difficult.
It is our job as parents to encourage these behaviors in our kids through all their activities, including sports. That means that when there are difficult moments – such as lack of playing time, tough practices, or fierce competition – we need to remind our kids that youth sports are opportunities for having fun, growing in skills, becoming a great team member, exerting full effort, and using setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow.
What if your kid is super talented?
Say your kid is in the extreme minority (top one percent of high school athletes) and is in a position to pursue an athletic scholarship at a top university. This talent assessment comes from objective experts, not yourself as the parent with your inherent bias. Should the definition of success include an outcome like a college scholarship?
It is tough to answer as every kid and family situation has its own unique dynamic with varying factors. It would be important to consider: Is a college scholarship solely your goal as a parent? Is it also something your kid wants? Certainly as a parent, I would love not having the financial burden of paying for college or putting my kids in a position to assume debt. However, what if your kid doesn’t deep down have the same goal? In this case, pursuing the goal seems perilous.
It is hard to achieve anything in life if we don’t really want it. I am passionate about finishing this book. I couldn’t ask my wife to finish this book and then write some sort of sequel. She is a talented writer, but she has no desire to fulfill my goal. So she would not proceed in living out my aspirations. If for some reason she reluctantly did, then the quality would be poor as she didn’t really have her heart in it. The same logic applies if the college scholarship is solely the parents’ goal. It could also strain relationships.
The idea of a college scholarship shouldn’t even be anywhere in our minds when our kids are young – under the age of 15 or so. The majority of young kids have no idea what a college scholarship even is, so how can it be their goal? Too often a kid can dominate a sport as an eight-year-old, but then years later and post-puberty, they don’t even try out or make a high school team. (Even at the peak level of youth baseball – the Little League World Series – very few play professionally. There have been just 64 kids who played in the Little League World Series and then made it to the Major Leagues. The Little League World Series has been around since 1947 and features hundreds of players each year). 41
Even if our kids are elite performers, it would still be wise if our mindsets were fixed on kids’ character development. Consider any sort of Division I scholarship or reaching professional sports as a very unlikely bonus, not the guiding metric for success.
Questions to consider
1. How do you define success in your work?
2. How can you help your kids define success in youth sports that applies John Wooden’s wisdom (knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming)?
3. How can you personally apply a growth mindset and grit to setbacks? How can you help your children nurture a growth mindset and grit in their current youth sports activities?
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37 BrainyQuote, Accessed March 12, 2024. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_wooden_402561#:~:text=John%20Wooden%20Quotes&text=Success%20is%20peace%20of%20mind%20which%20is%20a%20direct%20result,you%20are%20capable%20of%20becoming.
38 Pearce Rampone, Christie; Keane, Kristine and Wambach, Abby. Be All In: Raising Kids for Success in Sports and Life. Grand Central Publishing: New York, 2020, Kindle.
39 Duckworth, Angela, FAQs, Angela Duckworth Personal Website, Accessed March 12, 2024. https://angeladuckworth.com/qa/#faq-125.
40 Boyle, John. "Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll and Dr. Angela Duckworth Discuss Grit in Town Hall Event," Seahawks.com, May 20, 2016. https://www.seahawks.com/news/seahawks-coach-pete-carroll-and-dr-angela-duckworth-discuss-grit-in-town--159216.
41 "Major Leaguers Played in LLBWS," Little League, accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.littleleague.org/who-we-are/alumni/major-leaguers-played-llbws/.