At the post-season party for my son's Little League team last year, one of the dads got up to express his appreciation for the volunteer coaches. "You guys don't know how important you are," he said. "Looking back, I don't remember all my teachers, but I remember every coach I ever had."
Quite a thought. And true for many of us, in ways both good and bad. I can still see the red face of my high school baseball coach, a hidebound disciplinarian who knew the game inside and out but was in need of anger management before anyone knew what that was. Disappointed in our performance in the last regular season game my senior year, he got into an argument with the umpire, was booted from the game, made a theatrical, dirt-kicking exit from the diamond and tore up the locker room. We never saw him again.
The image of the seething, tough-talking coach is deeply ingrained in a nation whose sports fans still pay homage to the memory of Vince Lombardi, who said, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." That's a dumb enough idea even when applied to pro teams, but in youth sports it has led to such lamentable and outrageous behavior as that of the Pennsylvania T-ball coach who allegedly paid one of his players $25 to disable a less talented teammate to keep him off the field, and the Pony League player in Palmdale who struck and killed another player with a baseball bat after being taunted over a loss.
But the truth is, coaching and parenting in youth sports is harder than it looks. I know. I've done it. I never would have thought the score of a soccer game between 6-year-old boys could possibly matter until I learned that it did matter, at least to me when I was the coach, against all reason. When my son was in the second grade, playing in a coach-pitch playoff game in the L.A. city parks league, the tension between the opposing coaches was so palpable, a fight nearly broke out--between grown men in charge of 8-year-olds! Scenes like that made me question whether organized sports are such a good thing for kids at all.
Then one day I discovered that a small backlash had formed on the sidelines. It was being led by a man in Northern California who wanted to reclaim youth sports from the high-stakes, win-at-all-costs attitudes seeping down from Division I colleges and the pros to grade schools. The man's name was Jim Thompson. I went to find him.
"People are psychologically frozen," Thompson tells me after we meet in the Palo Alto industrial park offices of the Positive Coaching Alliance, the nonprofit organization he started at Stanford University seven years ago. He was talking about the narrow models most youth coaches rely on when they start out. "It's based on the way you were coached and the coaches you see on TV. We unfreeze them. And we don't think you get unfrozen by watching a video or reading a book."
Thompson is dressed in workout clothes and still sweating, having just returned to his desk from his morning three-mile run in the nearby Baylands Nature Preserve. A former athlete and coach, he is 56, of medium build, with thick, round glasses, sandy red hair and a disarmingly soft-timbred Midwestern voice. He grew up in West Fargo, N.D. His modest, cluttered office is decorated--if that's the word--with a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover of two boys in football knickers and leather helmets, from a time well before the advent of sports talk radio. There are framed awards from foundations and a metal bookcase full of titles pointing to his past as a lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, including "How Great Decisions Get Made" and "How to Change the World."
Strictly speaking, that is what Thompson has become: a social entrepreneur, tackling a societal problem with the tools used by the corporate world. He developed a product, the two-hour PCA coaches workshop, which he offers to leagues and schools that can afford it (the fee is about $800) and some that can't, subsidized by corporate grants. Led by Thompson or former athletes he recruited and designated as "trainers," the workshops are built on the principles laid out in two books he wrote, "Positive Coaching" and "The Double-Goal Coach"--that coaches, parents and players should "honor the game" above all else, while respecting their teammates, the rules and officials instead of thinking only of scoring more runs, points or goals.
The title "The Double-Goal Coach" means simply that winning can be the first goal of a youth coach as long as the coach recognizes the more important second goal of teaching life lessons through sports. Phil Jackson was so taken with Thompson's ideas that he wrote the forward to "The Double-Goal Coach" and became the PCA's national spokesman.
