When something goes wrong, do you tend to bounce back or fall apart? When you have resilience, you harness inner strengths and rebound rapidly from a setback or challenge.
Coaching youth football requires strong resilience. As a youth football coach you must be able to handle adversity and keep your team focused through any kind of troubles or negative plays. Youth football coaches must preach resilience and how to handle sudden change. Sudden change is a turning point in the game in which the game goes from positive to negative for your team. For example, your offense throws an interception and the defense returns it for a touchdown. How your team responds after sudden change will show the level of resiliency your team and coaching staff have.
Youth football coaches must make sure their kids have a so called “short memory” when sudden change transpires. Coaches need to be an example for their kids. So always have a positive attitude in any kind of adversity or sudden change occurrences. Coaches need to preach to their players from day one-have resilience and handle sudden change. What I do with my team is anytime in practice or in a game something happens negatively (like giving up a touchdown, dropped pass or a bad penalty ) the word we use is “reload”. This means will we get over the negatives and move on to the next play, short memory. In sudden change situations youth coaches need to coach even harder to keep their team focused and positive. It is imperative as a coach that you do not let the negatives linger and influence the rest of the game. The play is over, you cannot change it, focus on what you can control and that is the next play!
Resilience is not just needed to be successful in youth sports, it’s needed to thrive in life. Resilience is a trait needed in our social society, work places, sports, and all levels of education. You must be able to fight through any kind of struggles or adversity that life will throw at you. Youth coaches need to lead by positive example- handle sudden change situations and preach having resilience, not just in football but in life! Never let your kids or coaches quit. Always keep fighting regardless what happens in the game. If a negative play gets your team down “reload” and get back after it again! Everyday preach that to your kids.
“I’ve never known anybody to achieve anything without overcoming adversity.” -Lou Holtz
