|
Home
Feedback
Why 'talented' kids
sometimes fail
©2007 oldschoolsportsparenting.com
The best player on a junior high football team I coached barely earned a
varsity football letter his senior year of high school. This was a kid who, at
age 14, had all the signs of a potential college player: size, speed, intensity,
explosiveness, athletic maturity. He dominated games, both offensively and
defensively.
Yet by the time he was 18, he sat on the bench behind an underclassman.
We all know youngsters who’ve followed the same path -- youth league terrors
who faded to black when they reached high school, and varsity superstars who
played a year or two of college ball and then quit the team "to focus on their
grades" (as if no college student-athlete ever achieved success in both sports
and studies).
What causes these "can’t-miss" phenoms to … well … to
miss, as they
get older?
More often than not, it’s people’s desire to turn the kid into a star as soon
as he proves he can walk and read newspaper clippings at the same time.
Parents typically drive the process. But other well-meaning adults help, too
– especially in small communities that are passionate about their sports and
love to have a local hero or heroine to worship.
The good news is, it’s a fairly easy problem to solve, if we quit thinking
like protective, publicity-seeking parents – and start thinking like coaches.
I see it as a two-step process. The
first step is understanding the difference between talent
and ability. And the second is
constantly reminding the talented
kid that he has plenty of competition.
Step One:
Talent is potential, ability is results
The minute we let ourselves – and any young athlete -- confuse talent with
ability, his athletic progress is in trouble. And yet, we do it all the time. We
see a young, inexperienced athlete perform at a much higher level than his
peers, and we instantly project that same level of success into his future.
Instead of insisting that the youngster never take his talent for
granted, and that he always continue working to improve it … we anoint
him. We treat him like he’s already the star athlete that he has the potential
to be.
We treat his failures as though they belong to someone else – teammates,
coaches, refs, the weather … We hold him above his team. We let him get away with
mistakes and a bad attitude. We talk about his college scholarship offers and
pro contracts like they’re foregone conclusions.
Meantime, the youngster gets more and more lazy and temperamental. He thinks
he can skip practice, or come late and go half speed when he does decide to
attend. And the adults around him coddle him as though he had just invented the
wheel and discovered fire on the same day.
Then he gets into high school, where
his coaches don't care care about his exploits in the community youth leagues, and
his future fizzles.
The same pattern often plays out with high school greats when they get to
college and have to compete for playing time against kids who have just as many
awards and newspaper clippings as they do. (I could name names, but … so could
you.)
In both cases, the root cause is our tendency to confuse talent with
ability.
They are not the same thing.
Talent is the
potential or capacity to develop ability. It’s the athletic equivalent of a high
IQ. A high IQ doesn’t guarantee intelligence. It just means you have a high
capacity to absorb, retain and process information. If you don’t continually
pursue knowledge, you’ll just be a normal person who could have been very smart
if he’d used his brains.
Ability, on the other hand, is what
happens when you develop and make the most of your talent.
Our challenge as parents and coaches is to make sure that talented athletes
translate their talent into ability … into results.
Step Two: Keep him humble, keep him real
The Old School approach to handling young athletic talent involves balancing
bite-size portions of praise and encouragement with generous doses of humility
and reality. Don’t be afraid to compliment the youngster on his advanced skill.
But always remind him of two things: First, that he has an obligation to develop
his talent not to flaunt it. And second, that the older he gets, the more
athletes he’ll encounter with equal or greater talent, and the harder he’ll have
to work to maintain his standing as an elite competitor.
A good place to start is with the words you use when you acknowledge a young
athlete’s gifts.
Bad: "Wow. You’re awesome. You’re so much better than the other kids,
it’s not even funny."
Good: "You played well today. You have the potential to be very good if
you keep working hard."
Those two statements send entirely different messages to a young athlete –
especially when repeated hundreds of times early in his career. The first
statement tells the kid that he has arrived. The second tells him he’s headed in
the right direction, but he has a long way to go. The minute you convince him
he’s arrived, you remove his incentive to continue the journey.
A second important tactic is keeping competition in the kid’s life. Make him
compete every day for his position. Sure, you can build him up with an
occasional compliment. But be sure to expose and challenge his shortcomings on a
regular basis, too – always following up with constructive advice on how to
eliminate them, of course.
Likewise, expose him to better competition every chance you get. Take him to
out-of-state tournaments and camps. Involve him in recreational games or leagues
with older or bigger kids. (Women can accomplish the same thing by practicing
against men, the way some women’s college basketball teams do.)
In short, do whatever you can to take the young athlete out of his comfort
zone and force him to prove – on a daily basis, against tougher and tougher
competition – that he deserves all those compliments.
When he proves he deserves compliments, by all means give them! But follow up
quickly with a new series of challenges and reality checks.
Repeated challenges teach a kid to respond and compete. And unless he learns
to do those two things, his talent – his potential – will go unfulfilled.
Home Feedback
|