We talk with Dr. Jennifer Harris about the critical role that parents play in junior athlete development, and why that role is too often ignored or left undefined.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:05
hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Coach grant holocky, youth sports have become incredibly popular. Some argue they have also become over professionalized. Children as young as 10 now have private coaches, and often it’s the parents, not the coach who drives their kids to make big sacrifices and practice for countless hours with the hope that they can secure a college scholarship years down the road. We’ve all heard stories of parents running out on the field to yell at a ref, or worse, to yell at a child on the opposite team. Many coaches have simply tried to remove parents from the equation, but the truth is, there is a very important relationship between athlete, coach and parent, and when any of that triangle doesn’t function optimally, it’s the child who suffers. Undoubtedly, parents want what’s best for their kids, and while the role of athlete and coach are very well defined, often the parent doesn’t have any idea what their role should be. That can lead to bad behavior that makes coaches cringe, or worse, kids will start avoiding their parents. Fortunately, this is starting to change. Coaches are trained in how to be coaches, and now programs are popping up to teach parents how to be more effective in their role. One such program is super P developed by Dr Jennifer Harris. It took her over five years, while getting her PhD in Sports Parent psychology to craft the program. Dr Harris will talk with us about her own journey as a sport parent to a daughter who reached the natural level as a gymnast. She’ll also discuss what motivated her to study parents of athletes and the sport parent role in the athlete, coach, parent triangle. Dr Harris will show us what happens when the triangle doesn’t function. But more importantly, she’ll offer guidance on how parents, coaches and athletes can improve the lines of communication and ensure that the athlete is getting the best support they can joining Dr Harris, we’ll also hear from elite cyclocross coach and founder of cycle smart, Adam Meyerson, who will talk about what’s most important for junior cyclists, as well as professional gravel racer Alexei vermilion, who will share how his parents supported his career with a mix of empathy and rules. And finally, we’ll hear how training peak CEO Lee Gracchus found a good balance with his son’s coach. But before we get started, for over a year now, we have been looking for a ketone company to work with, and we’ve talked with a few looking for the right one. And so we’re excited to finally announce our new sponsor, kinetic. If you go back to Episode 285, we did a whole conversation about exogenous ketones and their benefits and whether they help performance or not. And certainly we saw signs that they can help performance. They seem to improve efficiency, increase oxygen saturation and even increase NAD plus availability. But what gets me excited about them, and the reason I’m having one of these drinks every day is because they help with recovery, and most importantly, they help with your health. They reduce inflammation, they help protect your body from the oxidative stress, particularly in your neurons, which is really important because there’s a lot of evidence that ketones are a very important fuel for your brain, and they can help protect against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, and also help protect against cancer. What we talked about in that episode, though, is the issue with going on a keto diet is that most people, when they try a keto diet, aren’t able to get their blood ketone levels high enough, and if you don’t get them above a certain threshold, you don’t see most of these benefits. More importantly, as a nutritionist myself, I really do believe that a long term keto diet leads to deficiencies, and it’s not something that we should experiment with in the long term. The reason we’re excited to partner with kinetic is because they use actual ketones, and yet they figured out how to create a really good taste to their product. They use a patented mix of d beta hydroxybutyrate, or D, B H B, which is an actual ketone, along with r1 three BDO, which is a precursor. And what this means is that B H B is available to you right away, but over time, your body is going to convert that r1 three BDO to B H B, so you’re going to get a slow release of continued ketones to your body. Kinetic sent us a whole case of their drinks, and I told our team to enjoy it. And I got to admit, I kind of selfishly drank most of it. I’ve been having one almost every day. So if you want to give it a try, go to kinetic at drink kinetic.com and we have a 20% discount. Use the code fast talk. That’s F, A, S, T, T, a, l, K. And with that, let’s put our parenting caps on and let’s make you fast. Dr Harris, welcome to the show. You’re a first time guest on the show, and I think we planned this out three months ago, so I have been excited for this episode to come along. Oh
Dr. Jennifer Harris 04:39
well, it’s wonderful to be here, and I still can’t quite get used to being called Dr Harris, I have to say, brand new PhD. Only been a doctor since May. So thank you. Thank you for introducing me like that. It’s very exciting.
Trevor Connor 04:53
That has to feel good. I mean, I know it was a ton of work for you, and really important work that’s led to what we’re talking. About today?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 05:00
Yeah, absolutely. Five years it took me to get there. I started in 2019, so of course, covid kind of messed things up a little bit for me, but yeah, it was a lot of work, and as we’ll talk about, not something that I was expecting to do. So yeah, I still can’t quite get over it. I’m excited to get my new credit card that says Dr Harris on it.
Trevor Connor 05:22
There’s a neat story here, because you yourself are a parent, and if I understand this correctly, it was you’re trying to understand how to be a parent of an athlete that led you to this whole journey, that led you to take your PhD and now the business you own. So please tell us the whole backstory behind this? Yeah,
Dr. Jennifer Harris 05:41
absolutely. So I feel like a little bit of an imposter on your podcast, because I’m not a sports person myself. My husband is, and he is an avid listener, so we have to just do a little bit of a shout out to John, because He loves you guys and listens to you regularly, and he’s very star struck that I’m on this, I have to say. But no, my introduction to sport came through my four year old daughter, who is now 17. She started gymnastics when she was two, and at the age of four, she was entered into a little gymnastics competition, and she won gold, and she was invited to join our local gymnasium squad, and her journey snowballed from there. And of course, she was my eldest child, so this was my first experience of being a parent, and suddenly she was four years old, training six hours a week. By seven, she did her first national competition, and there she also won gold. By nine. She was competing internationally, traveling overseas by herself, with her squad, without me, and by 11, she was on the British team. So it was a very sort of unusual experience of sport for me, because I wasn’t into sport myself. But when she was about nine years old, this was back in 2017 and I was sitting at a competition. It was a big international competition, there were gymnasts who’d flown in from all over the world. They’d come in from Brazil, from China, and they were all competing at this competition. And another parent and I, we were sitting in the stands, and we were just having a chat about how we support our children. And she turned to me and she said, Oh, I really wish you could help me, Jen, because I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing. And for me, it was a real light bulb moment. And I just looked around this competition, and all the children were there. They were all competing on an international level. And I thought to myself, it’s so true, like none of us have a clue what we’re doing. And I started to think about my journey as a parent in all the other fields of parenting, where I’ve been given sort of so much support, if you think about as a brand new mum, you get all sorts of advice and support, whether it’s on potty training or weaning, and as they start through school again, you’ll attend workshops on growth mindsets or how to support them through exams. And I was sitting there thinking, my daughter is nine years old. She competes on an international level. She’s training 18 hours a week, and I haven’t even been given a pamphlet on how best to support her. So I came home and I started to do some research, and I decided I wanted to change that, and I quit my job, and I signed up for a master’s degree in Sport and Exercise psychology, because I was really adamant that this wasn’t about my journey. I didn’t feel that I was qualified just because I’d raised one child in one sport. I didn’t want to start talking about sort of anecdotes on what you should or shouldn’t be doing as a sport parent. It was really important that this was an evidence based approach. I completed my master’s, and then this snowballed, and I went on to do this five year PhD. And a project of the PhD was to create this education program. I created it and tested it, and yeah, so that finished in May. So I suppose this is the beginning of my journey. I’ve done the work of creating the program, and now it’s really about sort of getting the message out there, I suppose. But yes, it’s been a whirlwind. It’s been very hard. I’m not particularly an academic. I wouldn’t say that was something I would ever have put as myself at all, but this is my story and where I’ve ended up. And
Trevor Connor 09:14
so we’re going to go into your company raising happy champs in a minute. But I think you touched on something really important, which is this wasn’t a case where you just said, we as parents don’t know what to do. And as you pointed out, just kind of went on anecdotal evidence and said, I’m a sports parent, so here’s what I think needs to be done. You literally went through a 567, year journey of studying this, studying the psychology behind this, to better understand the role of a parent of athletes and your company came out of that research. So it is very evidence based.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 09:45
Yes, absolutely. And I think that I like to think and other academics might argue this, but I like to think that I brought perhaps a unique perspective, because most researchers within the field of sports psychology have come from. Some sort of sport background. So either they were sports people themselves, and they liked sports, so they went into sports psychology, or perhaps they were coaches, or perhaps they just really enjoyed watching sport, whereas, because my background wasn’t really anything to do with sport, when I was doing the research, I was holding up my hands, so I was looking at it from the perspective of a parent. And I think that what a lot of researchers and coaches and sporting bodies forget is that particularly with youth sport, you might be dealing with people like myself who don’t have a sport background. And I felt that with the research, sometimes assumptions were made about what parents know and what they don’t know. And so when I put together my program, I was very much taking it as a blank slate. I’m not making any assumptions that anybody knows anything about this. So sometimes something that I might tell somebody might seem obvious to them, but it might not necessarily be obvious to somebody else. And so I wanted to create a comprehensive program that was really suitable for the mother like myself who had no experience of sport, as well as somebody who, perhaps, like yourselves, very experienced in sport.
Grant Holicky 11:07
Well, one of the things that I think is really interesting about this journey is this is very similar to how I got my master’s degree in sports psychology too. I entered into coaching on the heels of being a teacher, and I was an athlete myself, but there’s no formal education for coaches on how to coach, no and it’s shockingly devoid of that. And so over time, as I went through the profession and through my career as a swim coach, first I started realizing that I was trying to train their minds and help them with the rest of their lives and all these things, I didn’t really know what I was doing, other than anecdotal myself, though, this worked with this athlete. This worked with this athlete. And going to school and getting my Master’s at 47 or 48 years old. When I got it, it was very eye opening, because again, coming from the perspective, not as an academic, going backward to sport, but coming from sport, or, in your case, as a parent, now, backward to the academics is a really interesting way to gain perspective. Yeah,
Dr. Jennifer Harris 12:09
I think it’s really interesting when you bring a different perspective to research. I mean, you coming from a teaching background would be really valuable in terms of coaching as well, because you’ve had that experience, I think it’s a great way to bolster research.
Trevor Connor 12:24
So let’s talk a little bit about the landscape here. You sent me notes A while ago, some of the things that you wanted to touch on, and you pointed out the fact that we are seeing youth sport be highly professionalized lately, and along with that, you’re seeing a higher and higher dropout rate in youth sports. So talk a little bit about what’s been changing.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 12:45
Well, it’s an interesting point. So when you start a PhD, you always set out limitations as well as D limitations. So the limitations are where the challenges might lie in your research, and the delimitations are what you will not be including in the research. And I very specifically noted in my PhD that one of the delimitations of my research was that I would not be commenting or making recommendations for the youth sport landscape, because that is very complicated. And as we’ve seen in the media, there are an awful lot of challenges surrounding youth sport. We know that youth sport is becoming more and more specialized, as well as over professionalized. I think sort of is the term that’s being used. And I know particularly in America, I have to admit, I haven’t seen the rates in the UK, but I know that in America, your dropout rate is really disappointing. As people who are really involved in sport, you must find it really disheartening to see these dropout rates of children who are dropping out, sort of age 12 or 13. But what we want to do is basically try and arm parents with the tools so that they can successfully navigate the landscape, sort of as it is today, with this influx of specialization, and I suppose what is being termed professionalization, it can be worrying, and the research is quite torn on it, which I found quite interesting. And of course, I come from the experience of watching a child who grew up in very intense training programs in what could only be described as sort of a specialized training program. And so I had my perspective on that. And there’s a lot of research that talks about the negative side of high level Sport and Sport specialization, but one of the grumblings, I suppose, is the way to put it, is that there’s the wording that perhaps assumptions are being made about the children and their views of their training. And I certainly kind of felt that myself. And so when I started my research, one of the things that I looked at was actually the children’s views of their sport and whether assumptions were being made about them and how much they enjoyed being involved in high level sport. And it was a really eye opening piece of research. I did it right at the beginning of my PhD, and it was published back in 2023 and. And one of the really interesting outcomes of the research was I interviewed about over 100 children, and I asked them whether they saw any downsides to their training. And the children were really open about it. They talked about long hours. They talked about it stopping them from doing other things. They talked about it being boring and repetitive, and they talked about pain and injury and all the standard sort of negative side that is talked about with youth sport. But my next question was, do you accept those downsides? Would you want them to change? And that things got really interesting, because in terms of acceptance levels, the children would report like it was over 80% acceptance levels of things like pain or injuries, boring, repetitive training, as well as stopping them from doing something else, you had huge levels of acceptance rates. But the two things that the children weren’t so keen on, the first of all, was not feeling good enough, and the second one was bad coaching and bullying that they did indicate that they would prefer those things to change, and I found that encouraging, I suppose, from my perspective, because I thought to myself, you know, often a child may not feel good enough because of their experience with their parents. And secondly, bad coaching and bullying can certainly be something that sport parent education will be able to sort of bolster the parents to be able to manage that situation a little bit better. So it’s really interesting. And as I say, I did set it as a delimitation. I’m not one to comment on how the world of youth sports should go. I do think it’s brilliant, and I think it’s wonderful, and I’m sure that you guys would agree with that. I think it has its challenges, though.
Trevor Connor 16:36
Yeah, well, I remember a while ago reading, actually, some research on that, because obviously, decades ago, there was a belief that the coach has to be hard and yell at the athletes and basically bully, and that’s how you get the best. And what I had read in the research was the athletes who excelled in spite of that bullying, not because of it. I would agree with that 100%
Grant Holicky 16:58
yes, I think that’s a really interesting point, that if we put it up to the athlete, and we put it up to them and their peers, they’re all for it. They’re all for almost everything that comes along with it. It’s the adults that can end up getting in the way. And what we’re projecting upon to those kids, or what we’re placing on them as coaches or as parents, that’s what changes the perspective. That’s what changes the joy, that’s what shades some of the color on these things. And one of the My Favorite Things that I came through in my master’s was the idea of the great sport myth, this great sport myth that sport creates hard work and dedication and resilience and is all these things that’s just sport. But in the end, it’s not just sport. It’s the right sport environment that can create those things, that allows an athlete to feel comfortable, to be challenged, to be in those places, that they can be challenged as an athlete, but they’re not challenged personally. It’s not a conversation about their success or failure as an individual. We can fail at sport. That’s what we learned to overcome, right? And that’s what the kids are writing back to you in that survey. I can deal with the pain, I can deal with the repetitive I can deal with the struggle. The struggle is great. I love it. I love over achieving that struggle. But when somebody comes to me and tells me I’m not good enough, or makes me feel like I’m not good enough, that’s when I’m on. Be out
Trevor Connor 18:19
absolutely so this kind of gets to something that you actually introduced me to in the notes that you sent to me. And I looked this up in the research. And there is a ton of research on this, but there’s something called the coach, athlete, parent triangle, and we’re going to focus really the rest of this conversation about the parent side of that triangle. But before we get there, can you explain this triangle and why it’s so important?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 18:42
Yeah, absolutely. So. The triangle was originally suggested back in 1987 by this chap, John helsted. Now I just want to say that lots of research has been done now that has been published that makes the triangle a lot more complicated, involving like sporting bodies and other players. It’s a whole tangled thing that has been extended now. But personally, I really like the simplicity of the idea of the triangle between the athlete, coach and the parent. And I quite like the story behind this article that was published if I can just share it, because essentially, as far as I can work out from reading this article, John Halsted was friends with a coach who was coaching a ski Academy in Maine, and he was having some trouble with his parents. And essentially, he reached out to Halsted and sort of asked him for some support with his parents. And this article was written which introduced the idea of the athlete, coach, parent triangle, and it was very much the suggestion of the Goldilocks approach. So with each connection of the triangle, you need to have not too much, not too little, just right in terms of the relationship. So you need the parents to be a little bit engaged, not too engaged. Just got to be just right. So this article is published, and there are all sorts of recommendations made to coaches of how they can manage the parents, what they should do if they’ve got a parent who’s overly involved, what they should do if a parent is under involved. And I read this whole article, and of course, I’m reading it for my PhD, and I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, not once has he said, let’s tell the parents this. There’s no mention of, like sport parent education. And this is what I find really interesting about this world of youth sport. I’ll probably get onto it later. But one of the things that I asked as part of my PhD research, when I asked the parents, have you considered that you needed sport parent education, and like 75% of them said, no, never thought about it, as I said at the beginning. As parents, I don’t know about you, but you have your kids. If you want to learn how to do something, you’d buy a book on it, you’d go on a workshop, like we do so much to educate ourselves. And anyway, so this was another indication of where sort of the idea of, yeah, we’ll suggest this triangle, but we’re not going to tell the parents about it, even though the parents are like, fundamental in this triangle, as you say, it’s just this lovely sort of basis of solid support for the athletes is a good relationship between the coach, the parent, and the child. So
Trevor Connor 21:21
you had mentioned, I believe this was on your website, that when this triangle is functioning well and you have a supportive system, what you have is empowered parents, liberated coaches and focused athletes. But let’s flip that around when the triangle isn’t working well, when you have maybe that bullying coach or the overbearing parent, what are the dangers of that? What happens when you have a dysfunctional triangle?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 21:44
Well, I think that always the casualty is the child, and we touched on it earlier, that children fall out of love of sport, and in some ways that’s almost the best outcome that you hope for, that they will just walk away from sport, because the really sad and sinister side is that they stick with it and they end up a little bit broken, and whether they have success in sport. I mean, I think Andre Agassi is possibly the most famous sports person who’s spoken out so openly about the challenges in his childhood involving his sport, and you hear these really saddening tales about how misplaced coaching or bad parenting can really break somebody and leave them with some real challenges later on in their life. So I think it’s really important that both the coaches and the parents are getting it right, and I think we want to start right from the start by giving parents these sort of guidelines and basic understanding of what their role is, because I think it’s really important for parents and coaches to realize that although their roles can overlap, of course, you mentioned grant about you might be a coach, parent person, which is always quite a challenging role, but you need to be very aware that it is two separate hats that you wear as the coach and as the parent. And I think that we see all too many occasions where there’s blurring of the lines between both of those roles. But you know, if no one’s educated, if no one is given any kind of guidelines on what they should or shouldn’t be doing, then everybody’s running amok. I think you could put it in layman’s terms.
Grant Holicky 23:15
Yeah, that’s a fair way to put it. And in my observation, one thing I’d like to throw in this. I mean, your daughter was in gymnastics. My sons are now in swimming, and I coach swimming for a really long time, and I think both of those sports have this reputation as burnout sports. But as you noted earlier, the repetition, the training, those aren’t the things that get to the athletes. What gets to the athletes is the pressure, what gets to the athlete, which triggers them off to burnout and gets them to this place where they’re I don’t enjoy this doesn’t have anything to do with the sport. It has everything to do with maybe the expectations and some of the external pressures that are placed upon that sport by the people that are around the athlete. And let’s be honest, man, high level athletes, for the most part, the ones I’ve coached, they didn’t need a whole heck of a lot of extra motivation from me, and they didn’t need a heck of a lot of extra motivation from their parents. But I do think it’s a really interesting, important point when we talk about this triangle that we bring up burnout. Burnout is one of the main reasons for drop out of sport. And as you noted, the worst case scenario, which I saw a ton of in swimming, was they were miserable, stayed in it for an extra two or three years, then burned out, then dropped out and came out with all those same repercussions that we’re worried about. So I’ve said this a lot on this program. Sport doesn’t create burnout. The training doesn’t create burnout. So those external pressures and that how unequilateral that triangle gets when we’re talking about parents and coaches and athletes, and in a lot of cases, with the high level performing athletes, the coaches and the parents are the ones going, Whoa, whoa. Let’s take a step back. Let’s slow. Down. Let’s make some good choices here. Maybe it is time to go to prom, or maybe it is time to go out with your friends here, because we need some of these other pieces of the puzzle in play. Yeah, absolutely.
Trevor Connor 25:12
Before we continue, let’s hear from Coach Adam Meyerson, what’s important in this triangle and what we’re ultimately trying to accomplish with the young athlete.
Adam Meyerson 25:21
I became a cycling coach as a result of just volunteering to coach juniors as a way to sort of give back and and then it turned into people wanting to pay me, which was strange. And now, 25 years in, probably the work that I’m most proud of are the juniors that I coach on The New England Devo team locally here, and the success that they’ve had. And I think for those athletes, you know you’re going to get athletes of all different ability levels, and it’s important to remember that it doesn’t matter how good they are. It doesn’t matter if they’re going to be professionals or not. What matters is that they love bike racing and that they become better people as a result of the process of training and preparing for bike racing, using the bike racing as a metaphor for everything else they do. If they turn out to be talented and passionate and committed and maybe can have a career, that’s great, and I’m happy to help them with that too. But some of the athletes I’m most proud of are the ones who went to college or went on to careers and are still riding their bikes and in love with bike racing and appreciate the time that we got to spend working together. So you want to communicate that to the parents as well. Cycling and coaching juniors is increasingly turning into youth sports. It has more in common with other youth sports than it ever has before, and that means coaching parents is part of the process of coaching juniors. And so I think it’s important to help parents understand that we’re not trying to make professionals when we’re coaching juniors. We’re trying to create Well, balanced, responsible young men and women who love the sport and have balance in their lives and take the sport as far as they’re excited, to take it and find out what they’re capable of and find satisfaction in that.
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Trevor Connor 28:09
I read a couple studies leading up to this, and this one I found really interesting. It’s called association of parent coach and pure motivational climate with high school athlete burnout and engagement. And the gist of the study is they’re saying that there’s two ways to try to motivate an athlete. One is focus on performance, so it’s results. The other way is to focus on mastery, where it’s perfect in your sport, and we’re going to be less concerned about the results. The results will come as kind of a side effect. And the overall message was that performance focus tends to push athletes towards burnout, where that mastery focus tends to push them towards engagement. And they talked about early on, parents seem to have the biggest influence. Well, later on in high school, it’s the coach has the biggest influence. But if you have both the parent and the coach really pushing that performance focus, that’s when you see a high degree of burnout in the athletes.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 29:04
Yes, and again, that’s where the triangle can be really powerful, because your child has got that sort of should have that additional layer of support where, let’s say, for example, perhaps you’ve got a really motivated coach, and they might be driving the athlete, and this isn’t any form of criticism, because the coach doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on behind closed doors. So you can have the coach driving, and the coach should be able to drive the child as hard as they can, and it should be the parents who are picking them up from training who are saying, Whoa, we’ve got a problem here. So you should have that lovely level of support where the parents will speak up and say, Okay, no, this isn’t perhaps working quite right. Let’s rein it in. Let’s do a few less hours. Let’s take a break. Whereas, if you have both the parent and the coach pushing and pushing and pushing, not listening to the needs of the child, not looking out for the child, not watching for their physical welfare, what’s happening with them from a psychological perspective? If not looking out for those sort of the red flags of how they’re feeling, that’s when things can go really wrong. And I think that’s why we should have a better relationship between coaches and parents, because then they can look out for each other. Or equally, the parents should be able to, with all due respect, like, go to the coach and go, my kid’s got more they’re really passionate about this, as long as long as the kid actually does, and it’s not the parent. But you know what I mean? Like, they should be able to have a nice sort of back and forth about what the child’s needs are and what they’re saying and what they’re feeding back to their parent or to their coach. And I think that’s the strength of the triangle. If it’s working well, and when it doesn’t, then things start to go wrong.
Grant Holicky 30:39
And the key to this triangle, and I think we’ve watched it. I mean, at least I have in sport, watched this backlash, where there’s so many programs and so many organizations that are cutting the parents completely out of the equation, and they’re saying, we don’t want to talk to the parents and in some way, or like, they’re not allowed to watch practice and they’re not allowed to do these things. All that creates is this unknown, which is just going to enhance the concern and the stress and the anxiety that a parent is experiencing, and is going to cause more around the sport. And it’s so crucial that we have a line of communication between the coach and the athlete’s parents, because there’s so many things also that the parent is going to see at home that the coach has no opportunity, no chance to ever see, and if they’re not told by the parent, the kid’s not going to tell them. I mean, sure, I’ve had athletes that tell me a lot, right, and that are very open, and I have said for years that an emotional athlete that wears their heart on their sleeve is so much easier to coach than the one that’s closed off. And I’ve had athletes get out of the pool and get off the bike and, yeah, that was terrible. I was awful. And they make a scene, and people are like, isn’t that a hard athlete to coach? I’m like, No, I know everything that I need to know about that athlete. Yeah, it’s the one that gets a bad performance and comes off the bike or comes out of the pool. And I say, How do you feel about that? Now? Like it’s fine, I can’t do anything with that, and so that line of communication from the parent to the coach is absolutely crucial, and there has to be a way to communicate that information. And I think you made a brilliant point about even the parent being able to say, this is a learning style for my kid. I’ve reached out to my kids coaches recently and went, Hey, listen, it’s kind of awkward to say about a 10 year old, but he likes a little bit more of an authoritarian style, if you can be in a place that says not authoritarian, but very clear cut. These are the rules here, the expectations. This is what we expect in terms of type of play type of effort, he’ll be great with that, but if we don’t have any of that structure, he struggles a little bit. He’ll go off into Neverland. But just that little bit of communication can go a long way.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 32:50
It takes a good coach to work with the parents and be open to speaking to the parents. So yeah, I’ve got two points. So I think that, on that note, I don’t always share stories about my daughter. I don’t think she’ll mind this, but she was very little. Always her biggest fear was letting her coach down. And she had this particular skill that she always had to execute right at the beginning of her routine, and she was so anxious about it. And I remember like texting her coach. Her coach was in the warm up room before a big championship, and I said to her coach, I was like, You need to tell Lily that if she doesn’t hit the skill it’s okay that you won’t be mad at her. And her coach was so good, she was always open to that kind of like, that sort of, that last minute. I need you to say this to her right now, please, because that was what it didn’t matter what I said. I could say all sorts of nothing mattered. What I said, she needed to hear it from her coach. And I mean, her coach has trained her since she was five years old, so she and I have a good relationship. I’m very aware she spends more time with my daughter in the week than I do. So she knows her very well, and we’ve always worked hard to have a good relationship, a back and forth of what is needed, and particularly when she was little. You know, now she’s older, she can advocate for herself, but it’s lovely to hear that you’ve managed to create that with your coach, because I think it’s really important. And this practice of cutting parents out, I start to lose my words when I speak about it, because it is so crazy. And in the research, they spoke to children about bad sideline behavior. I think they were soccer, football kids. And the children were talking about the things that their parents were saying on the sidelines. And they’re not just the things that they were saying, but their behavior, their actions, rolling their eyes or making gestures. So it’s not just it’s not just the words, it’s also the body language. And then the sort of the final question is, do you want your parents there? And the kids still want their parents there. They want them there. Absolutely. They don’t want them cut out. They just want them to behave, right? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And as we’ve seen, what came out with American gymnastics back in 2018 Seen the abuse that was happening within that sport, and it was all happening in the ranch where the parents weren’t even allowed to be it is not right, from a welfare perspective, to cut the parents out when you haven’t even educated them. And as I said, I can’t speak for all sports. All I know is that the parents that I’ve interviewed have not had sport parent education. I know that I as a parent with a child involved in very high level sport. I’ve not been offered any sport parent education. Why are sporting bodies going straight to Oh yeah, let’s just cut them out rather than, okay, let’s include them. Let’s get them more involved. It doesn’t make sense to me at
Trevor Connor 35:37
all. This is a good place to hear from Lee Gracchus and how he stayed involved with his son while not trying to overshadow his son’s coaches.
Lee Gerakos 35:46
Interestingly, my older son, when he was younger, he participated in BJC, and it was a fantastic experience. And the coaches there, I think, are so wonderful and great because they’re really focused on helping kids develop the skills, but keeping it fun, and so us as parents, we would go and watch towards the end, especially during pickup. I think me as a parent, one of the biggest things that I always needed to remind myself of is that this is my son’s experience, not mine, and to make sure that it is his own and that He’s enjoying it, right. Like, I think sometimes we as parents can vicariously live through our kids and take away some of the joy in that experience, so let the coaches do their thing, honestly, is the way I would say that. And I think that parents and the relationship with the coach is really just keeping in touch, like, with how things are going. What is the mood, right? Like, a lot of the sessions were focused, again, on fun, and how do you keep it fun, and how do you make that an experience that they build, that lifelong joy of versus, how am I thinking about how my kid is going to perform in this race, and again, putting too much emphasis on results at a point in time when that may not be the thing that they want to do over the long term. Anyways, right? Like, what I wanted to make sure of is, do my kids love riding bikes? That was the extent of it.
Trevor Connor 37:15
So that’s something that I love, that you and I had some back and forth on leading up to this episode, because I admit, I have been one of those coaches that has had frustrating parents to deal with and just been like, I want them out of here. I don’t want to deal with them. I want to get them away from their kid. It’s the best thing that can happen. And what you said to me, that was a real eye opener, is that most parents have really good intentions. They obviously want the best for their kids. It’s just they’re not certain about their role. They get no support, they get no education, and without knowing what to do, sometimes with the best of intentions, they can be the dysfunction in that triangle because they don’t know how to be supportive. And I thought that was a really important point to make. So maybe let’s dive into that. We’ll get into your super P approach. But let’s start with when you have that well intentioned parent that doesn’t know what to do, and they become the dysfunction, what are some of the negative effects that they can have?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 38:15
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s my favorite quote from I think I might have sent it over to you is from gold et al, 2008 and they say at least 70% of parents are golden, and the rest range from temperamental to raging maniacs. When I started my research and my PhD, I really thought that I would be working with the raging maniacs. They would be the people that I would be mostly helping. And of course, it’s the raging maniacs that are mostly portrayed in the media. I saw recently. It was an ice hockey dad, and he ran onto the ice and pushed over a volunteer teenage referee because he didn’t agree with a call that the referee had made. And you see this sort of thing time and time again, these raging maniacs. And I sort of thought to myself that, yeah, that’s who I’m working to help. And it quickly became apparent that it’s not just the raging maniacs who need help. It is, as we said, the 70% as well. I did lots of in depth interviews with parents just to make sure that I was on the right track with my research. And these are really well meaning parents who are saying things to me like I just feel so helpless. I really don’t know what to say. I don’t know what best to do for her. I don’t know how to support her. He needed this from me, and I just didn’t know how to give it. I feel all the time like I’m at sea, and I’m trying to do this, and I’m trying to that, you know? And we all get tarred with the raging maniac brush, because that’s the one that’s portrayed in the media. I mean, I’ve had a lot of criticism over the years, sort of laid at my feet over my daughter’s training, and there’s always that sort of slightly snide remark that, you know, oh, did you used to be a gymnast, as if the reason that my daughter is in gymnastics because I have some unfulfilled desire to be a gymnast, completely not true. It’s just that the gym. Like two minutes drive down the road, and it was convenient, and she was a really active baby, so I just chucked her in there at two, and it all snowballed from there. There was no crazy ulterior motive from my perspective, but I quickly realized, and of course, I was all the time conducting my little personal pilot study of one, which was me. And as I was going through the research, and I was watching what I was saying, and of course, my daughter and I were having really open communication as well. I’d say to her, you know, oh, if I said the wrong thing to you here, and, you know, you must always tell me if I say something wrong, there’s a moment which I’ll share with you, if it’s okay, that I do actually share in the workshop, but I’ll share it, which is when I really started to realize, and I was actually, this was at the end of my masters, and I was writing up my dissertation. I was at my daughter’s major championship of the year, and she’d had a really successful year. And at these championships is when they do the selections for the British team. She was 10 years old at this point, and we were really hoping that she’d be selected for the British team, and she had meddled at every single other competition that she’d been at this year. So as I say, we had high expectations, and she performs her routine, and she missed one of her skills, and she came seventh. And of course, I was writing my dissertation. I had sport pair and research in my head all this time. So you know, I I was thinking all the time. I know what to say. I must say it. I was being as supportive as I could to her. And we were about five hours drive away. And on the drive home, I made it all the way home being really positive, proud mum. And we went, we stopped for dinner, and we were having dinner, and I said to her, Oh, honey, do you realize that if you’d scored your press, which was the skill that she missed, they said, if you’d scored your press, you would have come second. And her big eyes looked up at me, and she said, Oh, Mummy, do you think I didn’t do very well then? And I was like, no, no, no, sweetie. No. You just brilliantly. You’re great. It’s awesome. Don’t worry about it. And about two weeks later, I picked her up from training, and she said to me, bearing in mind, she’s 10 years old at this point, she said to me, oh, Mum, do you remember you said to me that I should tell you if ever I say something wrong, if ever you say anything wrong about my training? I was like, Yeah. And she said, Do you remember what you said when we were coming back from the British and I was like, yeah, and she said, You really hurt my feelings when you said that to me. And that for me, was a real eye opener, that I was someone who was so ensconced in the research. I class myself as an expert in sport parenting, and I just got it cataclysmically wrong, and really hurt her feelings. She didn’t need me to deconstruct her performance. She just needed me to cheer her up and take it to McDonald’s and make her feel better about it, you know. And I think that that was when I really started to understand that the 70% are still getting it wrong as well. And yes, I do believe that with the introduction of guidelines, I think that it will slowly change the whole sort of landscape of the parenting in sport, which hopefully will change the more temperamental parents, and perhaps will make the raging maniac behavior less acceptable. But I think that the real support goes for you know, those parents who are really doing their best, and it makes a huge difference to their children. And this
Grant Holicky 43:02
is to your point earlier. This is 100% to your point earlier that. I mean, the raging maniacs steal all the oxygen from the coaches. These are the ones that we just assume everybody is because the anomalous one stands out in our minds. This is what we have to deal with, that parent. Oh, my God, this one’s calling. Oh, it’s gonna be the same thing. So we’re almost winding ourselves up as if this is what we’re going to expect. But you’re absolutely right. This goes exactly to your point. You said that because you love your daughter and you were trying to help to an extent, and it’s so easy to say the wrong thing, trying to help. You’re a well meaning, well intentioned parent, and I would say that’s what 95% of the parents are, well intentioned parents. Now some of them go off the deep end on how they’re trying to do that, but we can’t have a kid that is successful in sport without a heavily involved parent. They can’t get themselves to practice, they can’t get their own equipment, they can’t do these things. So without parents heavily involved, they don’t have a chance. So giving those parents that guidance, it’s crucial.
Trevor Connor 44:05
So something I really appreciated there, Dr Harris, was your humility to admit that story, that you were researching this and you still made those mistakes. I’ve only read a couple studies, but I will say something that was a clear message in the few studies I read is, if you want your child to quit sports, go up to them after every single tournament or match or race or whatever, and go, did you win? That just doesn’t work. And something I want to point out, because we’ve had a couple recent episodes. We just had Jesse Diggins, potentially the greatest cost country skier of all time, on our show, and we asked her, What were your parents like? She was like, they just wanted me. They just wanted me to have fun. We talked about Norway, one of the greatest sports countries in the world, and they actually have a law that kids can’t compete until I think they’re 13 or 14. So surprisingly, that focus on Did you win? Did you not win? Doesn’t seem to be the formula.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 44:57
Sometimes I think that the. Idea of not putting the child up for competition when they’re little. I mean, I don’t believe that everybody should get a medal, but there is, I can see there’s some value in it. And I do remember my daughter, maybe eight or nine years old, melting down before a big competition, and I remember just thinking, honey, you were under more pressure than some adults experience in a lifetime, and it just it was really hard for me to watch as her mum, and I think that’s something else that people forget the emotions that parents experience when they watch their children compete and when they watch their children go through things, because it is the one minute and 30 seconds that my daughter performs is horrifying for me, like the experience, the physical experience, like I have all the endorphins. It’s as if I am going to war. And of course, it’s like I’m the athlete, but I don’t actually get to physically compete, so all of these sort of endorphins are still rushing through my body and again, like I’m not excusing bad parent behavior, but if you try and understand it, you can see because we’re going through this very emotional experience, and if you’re somebody that, like the chap who pushed over the child, I mean, obviously that’s completely inexcusable behavior, but I’m guessing that he was experiencing This terrible anxiety that you experience as a sport parent, and I just feel like we just we need to give sport parents a bit of grace, a bit of understanding and just a bit of support, so that they can learn how to manage their emotions, how to keep them in check, to be aware of the importance of their behavior. I mean, as an aside, like if you’re having to tell somebody not to push over a teenage referee. Like, to me, they just need anger management classes. Like, believe me, like my workshop isn’t going to help that kind of behavior, but generally everybody else, it’s helpful for
Trevor Connor 46:55
so you just said your workshop, you’ve created this approach called the Super P approach, which I’m assuming stands for Super parent. Can you tell us without giving everything away? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 47:09
Yes, absolutely. So yes, super p is an acronym. P doesn’t stand well, I suppose it could be super parent, yes, but it’s a very practical guide for parents. And essentially, what I did, as we said over the five years, was very important for me, again, to not make any assumptions about what sport parents knew and what they didn’t know. So I worked to categorize what the sport parent role was, and I used a model from Fredericks and Eccles 2004 which is they categorize the sport parent role in terms of the provider, the interpreter, and the role model. So specifically, your provider, obviously is financial, logistical and emotional support. You’ve got the interpreter who is shaping the values and beliefs and attitudes towards the sport, and then you’ve got the role model, who’s obviously demonstrating behaviors and attitudes, influencing like motivation, as well as their behaviors around sport. I actually extended that model myself and added in the additional category of protector, which I felt needed to be added in given the landscape of youth sport today and the challenges that have come out in the media recently. So I wanted to add in that additional category. And then essentially what I did with provider, interpreter, role model and protector, was I started to end identify all the negative behaviors that were outlined in the research associated with those categories, and then I looked at what positive you know, what do we want them to be doing? And this was very much like a behavior change piece of research. And so what I was looking to do is set out very simply, what is the negative, what is the positive, and what recommendations do we make in order to get from X to Y, essentially, and so super P is really practical, and I worked really hard to make sure that it’s put across to parents in way that they can understand. It’s not things like offer an autonomy, supportive environment. It’s not a lot of sports psychology speak. It is very much. You know, Do this, do this, do this. I’m quite a black and white person. I quite like rules, and so to me, it just made complete sense to have this role really clearly categorized, and the feedback from parents was really lovely. Beginning of this year, I just happened to be sitting around with a group of parents who had taken my workshop right at the beginning of my PhD. They’d actually taken like the original Super P workshop, and bless them, so it was five years ago, and they’d literally just attended my two hour workshop. They hadn’t had any kind of follow up support, no wrap around support, no social media, nothing. It was just a two hour workshop, and they were all saying to me, You know what? We still remember it. One lady said, Only reason that my daughter is still in sport is because of CPP, and it was so lovely to hear that kind of feedback, given that they really hadn’t had. Had the full experience of what they could have had, or any kind of additional reminders of their behavior and of super p, but yeah, so super P, I wanted it to be able to be delivered very simply. So what I tested as part of my PhD was actually a pre recorded, it’s about 90 minutes workshop that the parents could just access online. So that’s what I tested as part of my PhD. Because I thought, well, that’s your baseline. And then obviously I love delivering it as a workshop. So it’s about a two hour workshop, and that’s the end of it. There are sort of other sport parent workshops around, but they’re often like, over six weeks delivered six different sessions. And I was very aware that I know how busy sport parents are like. I think that there are busier people on the planet than sport parents, essentially. And so it was really important to me that it had to be very non judgmental. It’s a very positive workshop. I don’t like to focus too much on negativity. I’m very empathetic towards sport parents, because, as I say, I know myself how much criticism we get, so we try and take it from a positive perspective. We touch a little bit on negative, but it’s very much like do this rather than don’t do this, if you see what I’m saying, and in the research, I got 95% of the parents were positive about the workshop. One lady said, I found it very useful, as it made me realize that my daughter may sometimes misunderstand my words. I’m now more confident about my approach to her worries and concerns. And even more sort of encouraging was the feedback from the children. One of them said, No more shouting, which I thought was really lovely. One boy said, I don’t know, but Mum seems happier at swimming, which I thought was really nice. One of them said it’s good because dad asks less questions now, and mum doesn’t say, you’ll be fine anymore. And from an even more scientific perspective, one of the things that I did was I tested their children’s anxiety levels before and after their parents taking the workshop, and I actually achieved a significant reduction in worry levels. Just six weeks after taking the workshop, these children retook their anxiety test, and we got lowered worry levels.
Suzy Sanchez 52:16
Hi listeners. This is Susie Sanchez from USA Cycling for over a decade, fast talk podcast has brought the most interesting experts from the world of endurance sports into a conversation about your training, if you like, what you hear on fast Talk what about becoming a certified coach? USA Cycling offers courses for new coaches produced with expert help from fast talk labs. Learn about becoming a certified coach at USA cycling.org backslash coaches,
Trevor Connor 52:42
so without giving everything away, what are some of the things that you teach parents to help them be an effective and beneficial part of this triangle?
Dr. Jennifer Harris 52:51
The biggest message is letting the child kind of lead the conversation about their sport. There’s a great article about the car ride home from training, and how children are reported to almost be suffering in the car ride home from training. And so it’s really important to teach parents how to step back and allow the child to lead the conversation about sport. We talk about how they can support them things like what to say when it goes wrong, which is something that many parents said to me, I just don’t know what to say. So that’s something that we speak about in the workshop.
Trevor Connor 53:27
That’s a tough one. When the child is struggling, they feel really bad about their performance. They’re beating up on themselves. How should you as a parent handle that? Yeah.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 53:36
So that was really interesting, because part of my research, I actually interviewed. I did in depth interviews with the children, with children and parents, as well as doing sort of more large scale questionnaire research. And one of the things that I said to the children was, sort of without throwing mum or dad under the bus. Can you tell me something that they say wrong? And these were children involved in very high level sport. And one of the things that they said, they always say to me, Oh, it doesn’t matter, or you should just have fun. And of course, actually, if you’re really passionate about your sport, that’s the last thing you want to hear. And so something that we really sort of drilled down was this message to sport parents that what the children need is they need you to navigate that really fine balance between showing them that you appreciate that it matters to them, but it doesn’t matter to you, and it’s not easy. It’s not easy to get that balance right. So if something has gone wrong and your child is really disappointed, the last thing you should be saying is, don’t worry. It’s only a game. It’s fine. You can do it again at the next competition, or just like trying to be upbeat and positive, I think that you need to let them feel their disappointment. But one of the things that I talk about is keeping your own emotions under control, because a child shouldn’t have to deal with your emotions as well as their own. And I. Have to admit, as a woman, I really struggle with that. If my daughter has a disappointment, I struggle not to cry, and I try really hard. I’ll often sort of go and hide in the toilet, get my tears out of the way, and then I’ll go and find her so that she doesn’t see that I’m upset because she doesn’t need to be worrying about me. It’s about her. At that point, she’s dealing with her disappointment. She doesn’t need to see that. And of course, it’s not I’m not crying because she didn’t do well. I’m crying for her because it’s I know how disappointed she is, but she doesn’t need to see that. And as I say, it’s something that I like to extend sort of empathy to support parents, because they need to hear that we’re sort of all going through this. And when I sometimes, I do, like, one to one workshops with parents, and the number of times that I will have tears in those workshops, because it’s the first time that someone’s like, listened to them and acknowledged their challenge, and that it’s hard on sport parents when you’ve got a child who’s very passionate and very highly involved in sport, walking
Grant Holicky 55:58
that line between those two pieces of the puzzle is incredibly hard, right? Because coming in, you see your kid, or as a coach, you see your athlete suffering, emotionally, suffering because it didn’t go the way they wanted to go. Okay. You want to make it better by saying it’s okay. We can do it next time, all that. But then if you’re leaning in too hard, the other way, they’re just going to feel worse. And it’s very difficult to learn how to model that calming, reassuring, empathetic mentality that says, Well, we did a couple things wrong here. I mean, as a coach, I’m talking not as a parent, but there’s a couple things we can do better here, and you can do them better next time it does matter, right? And it’s okay that it matters. This is how we learn resilience. This is why we love sport. This is what we hope that kids can learn from sport and improve on is knowing that
Dr. Jennifer Harris 56:47
it’s gonna hurt. I think, though, what helps, and usually this has already happened with the coach, is that nothing is going to change, kind of like instantly, overnight. So if you’re a sport parent who is really pressurizing their child all the time, then when things go wrong, the child is going to look to you for disappointment. They’re going to see that in your face. They’re going to see that in your behavior. It’s going to be really hard for you to kind of undo what you’ve said previously. But this is why I sort of say, I really feel like sport parents should be getting guidelines right from the beginning of their sport parent journey. Because if you have set the tone right from the start, as I say, it’s always the Goldilocks approach, it’s not too much and not too little all the way along. And if you’ve set the tone like that. And also, one of the really nice sort of side effects was it seemed to improve the athlete parent communication as well. And certainly, as I mentioned before, my daughter and I have a lot of open communication, of course, because of my PhD. But you know, I think it’s not just that. It’s because I’ve set the tone that she is allowed to talk to me about how she feels about her sport. She’s allowed to make requests for how I behave as her mum and that sort of thing. And I think that if you’ve set that tone right from the start, then you won’t have those same challenges when things go wrong, because they will be just coming to you for support, and if you cry, or if you’re upset with them, or if you say slightly the wrong thing, it won’t go so much to their heart, because in all other occasions, you’re saying the right thing
Grant Holicky 58:15
well. And they can also feel like they can come to you and say as that exactly as your daughter did, that one wasn’t great mom. And going back to something we said earlier in the conversation, if you have an expectation of an effort, if you have an expectation of how hard they’re going to try, rather than an expectation over the performance, then I’ll share this. I got on my son earlier this year because he came out of a performance, and I was like, that wasn’t very good because your effort wasn’t very good. That’s not why you come to do this. You come to do this to try your best, and you didn’t try your best, which led to an incredibly wonderful open conversation about his fears and his concerns and all of these things that go along with why maybe that effort wasn’t there on that day. And then I come out as a parent, going, Oh, wow, I know all this that I didn’t know before. I have all this ability to help where, literally, 10 minutes ago, I had half of this ability to help as a parent. Yeah, and it was interesting watching the conversation. As soon as I went, Whoa, nobody. I don’t care if you didn’t score, that’s not what it’s about. It was about the standing out there, looking up in the stars, twirling your stick around in your hand, while everybody else is running like crazy. And that distinction opened the doors to so many great conversations. And as you noted, he’s got that in his head now, going, Oh well, this is what dad cares about. This is what it’s about. So I can go to him when something went wrong and, oh, my God, that line of communication. It’s everything.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 59:49
Yeah, definitely. I’ll tell you, like, we could get my daughter and she could tell you loads of things that I do wrong, and she’ll always say to me, like, Well, that wasn’t very super P Now was it mumbles. Yeah, just what you want to hear
Grant Holicky 1:00:02
from, like, a 10 year old, amazing. That’s fantastic. It’s great
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:00:06
to keep the conversation open. I love going to competitions with her. It’s like our time together. It’s really special for us. And she said to me the other day, I was doing like, a final kind of deconstructive of my sport parenting. And I said, Oh, do you think about me on competition day or whatever? And she went, the thing is, Mum, I just don’t really think about you at all. And I was like, Oh, thanks, mate. And she was like, to me, you like, when I’m packing my competition bag and I put in my special shoes and my competition leotards, you’re just like, something that I pack in my bag and I just bring with me to a competition. And I thought that’s so great, like she doesn’t give me a second thought. She just brings me along. And I felt like I’d graduated from Super P school when she told me that,
Grant Holicky 1:00:49
yeah, that’s an ultimate compliment. As a sport parent, let’s
Trevor Connor 1:00:52
hear from professional cyclist Alexei Vermeulen and the good communication that he had with his parents when he was young.
Alexey Vermeulen 1:00:58
My parents were great. In my opinion. My dad was a little more strict. My mom was a little less strict. I think it’s pretty typical, and it more was along the lines of, if you want to go to hockey practice, you got to get us up. We’re not setting the alarm. They were very helpful, but always reminded us that it was a sacrifice for them to go and take time out of their day, wake up early, drive to a race, and when we forgot things or did things, it was hopefully a learning experience, not just something that happened. I’ll never forget driving to Fitchburg and getting all the way there and remembering my race bag was at my home. I had to call my neighbor and ask no overnight it, and I paid that bill off for a lot of snow shoveling. So yeah, my parents were great. And I think the biggest thing I remember was the lessons I learned throughout bike racing, which is pretty awesome.
Trevor Connor 1:01:40
I like your idea of when you have a coach who coaches a team to just set up the session and bring all parents in, because then you’re not targeting parent. But let’s take a sport, for example, like cycling, where it’s very much a one on one relationship between the coach and the athlete, if they have a dysfunctional parent, how does the coach go to the parent and help the parent without basically saying, Hey, you’re a problem and you don’t know what you’re doing, like without insulting the parent.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:02:09
Well, I think, and this is just sort of anecdotal, in just my own thoughts, but I think that probably the best approach to do this is to take the approach I am offering this to all my parents. I would like all my parents, to take this workshop, you don’t need to focus on the negatives, because I assume that they’d be coaching more than one child and dealing with more than one parent. So if you put it across as a mass communication, I would like everybody to do this workshop. Let’s all get on the same page. It will be beneficial for your child, rather than kind of singling somebody out, you’re doing X wrong, therefore you need to take this workshop. It’s just about, Hey, I heard this podcast. It talked about strengthening the sport, parent, athlete triangle. I’ve heard about this workshop. Let’s get on board with it.
Grant Holicky 1:02:51
So I think one of the really crucial pieces is just when we can get everybody on the same page, and when, from a coach’s perspective, we’re eliminate some of these for lack of a better way to put it, bad actors. We’re lowering the tension in the room for the coach and he or she is not in this place where they’re going and assuming that the sport parent is the battle. I certainly know when I started coaching swimming, I was walking into so many of these situations expecting the parent to be a battle, and then I would, as a young coach, even created these situations where I had parents that were never going to be a battle, that I created a battle with, because I was making that assumption right out of the gate by cutting them off, or just I got this, no, you don’t need to have a part of this, any of those things. So for me, anything that we can do that’s opening lines of communication is incredibly valuable, and I know how difficult that can be in terms of cycling, when you get presented with a one off client, right? I’ve got a parent calling me with a 15 year old saying, I want coaching for a 15 year old, and I’m kind of standing there and in my own way with cycling now and make this struggle all the time with cycling versus swimming, right? Because this former swim coach, I’m like, course, 15 year old needs coaching, but as a cycling coach, a lot of times I’m standing there going, I don’t know if a 15 year old needs true coaching, like, go ride your bike and have fun, but being a coach in and of itself creates some of that structure and can facilitate the parent being a really productive sport parent, right? Because we’re giving a framework to that parent that says, No, this is an hour and a half is plenty. This is a long base ride for a 15 year old. No, this is the direction we want to take that 15 year old. So just those ways that we can open communication, I can’t tell you how much it’s going to help a coach. And as I noted earlier, as a parent myself now knowing I can call my kids coaches at any time and go, Hey, this was concerning to me, or this was said at the dinner table, I thought you might want to know. Or, as I did last week, my kid did. This in their game. I know you’re not coaching them this season, but I can’t tell you what a huge difference you made on my child’s life just last year. When I get those messages, my heart melts and it makes me go the next day and just try to be a better coach. It doesn’t make me go, almost. It makes me go, I’m going to try to get even better at what I do. So I can’t express enough what the positive line of communication between coach to parent and parent to coach does for the kids and things that help that I’m all
Trevor Connor 1:05:30
for. And so let’s finish out here with that final question of the athlete. So when you have the athlete who is being demotivated by their parent, what can they do? And I imagine it’s really hard, particularly for a youth athlete, to go to the parents and go, you’re not helping me.
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:05:45
Yeah. I think that is really difficult. Yeah, when you put that question out there, I’m thinking that is tough. It is really tough because if no guidelines have been set, no baseline of behavior has been set. And if you’ve got a sport parent who is really running wild, really hitting that raging, maniac behavior. I think it is incredibly hard, and I don’t think that I have a magic answer for that. One of the things that John Halstead talked about in his article about the strength of the triangle is because you’ve got three people involved, you’ve got someone else to go to. It’s like having a mum and a dad. If dad’s doing something wrong, then you can speak to mom and you can pull him up for it, and and vice versa. Sometimes parents can play good cop and bad cop. I suppose in this situation, what children need to remember is that they are part of a triangle, that their coach is part of their support, and now that sport parent education, hopefully is going to become more and more talked about. It could be something that the child should be able to speak to the coach and say, I’m feeling a little bit too much pressure from home. Is there anything that you can offer my parents in terms of sport parent education? Because I feel that’s the only way to go forward well.
Grant Holicky 1:06:56
And what’s really interesting is we kind of noted this before. It’s so hard to erase what a parent said even a year ago, six months ago, five years ago, any of those things, that behavior, what the athlete is very used to, that behavior, they’re going to shade so much of what’s being said towards what they remember. So even if the parent is trying to change something, if it’s not, kind of a noted break, right and almost to the point where the parent has to be able to say to the kid, listen, I’m trying something here. I’m working at this. But I can’t tell you how many kids came to me as a coach and said, I need help. I need help with my parents, and if I don’t have an open line of communication with those parents to begin with, now I can’t go to them and say, Hey, your kid needs you to back off a little bit, because they’re gonna go, Oh, you’re just trying to cut me out more. If that double line of communication isn’t already open, they’re gonna assume the worst out of me as a coach as well. So all of those pieces of the triangle as equal as we can make them are so crucially important. I do love that analogy, and I do love that framework, because without it, I mean, I went through with athletes, still do constantly trying to remember, Hey, your parents love you. They are heavily involved because they need to be, because that’s the only way we can do these sports. And it’s out of love. Here’s the bottom line, the kid’s gonna leave, right? They have the power. They can stand up at any point and go, I’m done. And that’s making nobody in this triangle happy, including the athlete, to stand up and lead. And it’s so important to make sure that, again, as we said at the very, very beginning, that’s the whole key. Is that athlete, this is who it’s
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:08:35
about. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that parents understanding the power that they hold over their child’s sport experience, sporting outcomes. I don’t really feel that message is put across enough say, for example, if a child is struggling with sport, then Parents will do anything to help them improve. They will buy the more expensive gear. They’ll get them one to one coaching they might like change clubs. I’ve seen parents who have moved house so that their children can attend a different club. Nowhere are they going. Okay? I need to attend a sport parent education workshop, and the research says that if your child is struggling, you need to be looking at the parents as well. And as I say, I say that with all the love in the world, I don’t believe in banging sport parents, but I just don’t think that they have been ever educated on the importance of their role. But isn’t it interesting that, Trevor, when I first contacted you, when I first approached you about coming on the podcast, you were saying that you haven’t really done a sport parent podcast before, right? And we’ve just been saying how integral parents are, and yet, how many episodes is this that you’ve done hundreds and hundreds right?
Trevor Connor 1:09:49
We’ve touched on parents, but we’ve never done a dedicated episode on that. You’re absolutely right, and I think that, in itself, is such an important message. And probably. A really good place to leave this conversation, not because the conversation’s over, but because we should be continuing this conversation, and hopefully we will do more episodes on the parent role is with the athlete. So with that, we have gone way over time, so we’re going to jump into our take homes. So you said you’ve listened to the show, you’re familiar with this before we do the take homes, though, I do have a question for the forum, because I’m really interested in hearing what our listeners, what all of you, think about this conversation. So our question for the forum is, Are you a parent of an athlete, or are you a child who’s had their parents highly involved in your sport? If so, what have you found that works well and works poorly in that parent, athlete relationship? So please go to the forum and give us your thoughts. And with that, I know you’ve listened to the show before. We finish with our one minute. Take homes. This is the opportunity to give that one really big message that you want everybody to take from this and Dr Harris, I’ll leave it to you. Do you want to go first, or do you want to go last? I’ll go first. Please do
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:11:07
so yes, I think that, as I say, it’s been a good hour of discussion about sport parenting. It isn’t an area that is particularly talked about. And I think that many sport parents listening, or coaches or athletes will find it a surprise to realize and understand the importance of the role of the sport parent. And we do have education now available. So raising happy champs, our website is raising happy champs.com and we have workshops that can be delivered to individual parents or to what I’m really hoping to do, as we said, is deliver them to clubs across all sports
Grant Holicky 1:11:44
grant. What’s your message? I think I’m just going to reiterate what I was saying before is, I think that the line of communication between parents and coaches and athletes, the more we’re talking, the more we’re learning about each other’s expectations and goals and what we’re trying to get out of sport. And the more we know, not to sound like the TV thing that we all grew up with in the States, but the more we know, the more success we’re going to have, and those line of communications open between coaches and parents, and that the equalness of the triangle, so to speak, really goes a long way in providing the environment that we all hope to provide that allows an athlete to step into it and step forward. That’s so important.
Trevor Connor 1:12:29
So my takeaway is based on something that you sent in an email to me, which I think is a really important message, which is what we’re talking about here isn’t just about sport. This is teaching kids general life skills that’s really important. And I’ll give you an example. I’m not a sport parent, but I coached my nephew, so I felt like I was kind of in that role. And he once came up to me and said, I want to go pro in cycling. And the moment he said that to me, I know he wasn’t going pro, not because he didn’t have the talent, because I knew what the lifestyle was like, and he would never enjoy the lifestyle, but I said, Let’s make a plan. Let’s go for it. And it was because my calculus is he’s going to learn skills and attitudes that are going to help him in everything he does in life. So it isn’t important that he goes Pro. And I think this is really important, particularly for parents to think about. Sometimes kids quit sports just because they don’t like the sport, so find a sport they enjoy. But if you have a kid that’s getting demotivated and wanting to quit, and you’re seeing all these issues, it’s really important remember this is where they’re learning life skills, and you don’t want them to learn helplessness. You don’t want them to learn a lack of enjoyment. So this is where you really need to say, this is a triangle. I need to talk with the coach. How do we change the dynamic to help the child be motivated, have fun and find that power in themselves that they’re going to take to everything they do in life. Yeah, and I
Dr. Jennifer Harris 1:14:02
think that my daughter, as I say, probably going to university next year, so coming to the end of her gymnastics time, and she has wall of medals. She has seen so much success since she won that first medal when she was four years old. And I can say, as her mum, that I am far more proud of all of the times that she has survived the disappointments than I am of any of the medals that she has won, and watching her rise after failing has been the greatest experience of being a sport parent. It’s been an honor and a privilege as a sport parent to watch her survive the moments of desolation that no one should ever experience, and there’s terrible feelings, but when you watch them survive them and come back, is such a great feeling of pride. And I know that she won’t go on to do gymnastics as an adult, but it will set her up for every college application, every job interview she. Will be able to say those moments of what she has survived in her very short life. And I think that’s a really important message to give to parents, to remember that it’s not just about money and medals, and in fact, their children will learn so much from their failures. Just don’t make their failures even worse by bringing your own personal emotions into it.
Trevor Connor 1:15:21
Well said, and great place to leave this. Dr Harris, real pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much. It’s been wonderful. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. As always, be sure to leave us a radiant or review to learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us at fast talk labs.com and to join the conversation on our forum, go to forums dot fast talk labs.com for Dr Jennifer Harris, Adam Meyerson, Lee garakos, Alexie Vermeulen and grant holocky. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
