Coach the athlete, coach the parent: Setting your rules for parents in youth sports

Think of all the things we’re hired to teach youth athletes. Beyond the sport specific technical skills, there are the athletic lifestyle aspects like the importance of sleep and eating well, of playing multiple sports, and simply playing. There’s goal setting, and how to set goals on the appropriate time scales: the mark that an athlete wants to hit this season, what they want to accomplish on their varsity team in a few years, or their ambitions to play in college or professionally. Then there are the life-transferable soft skills. Many parents enroll their children in sports in part so their little ones will learn teamwork, discipline, resilience, perseverance, sportsmanship, how to win, and how to fail.

And we have to do all that in the age appropriate contexts. Proper nutrition is proper nutrition, but if you’re getting on a middle schooler about Lucky Charms for breakfast, hi, you’re the problem, it’s you.

That’s what the parents pay us to do.

What we have to do for free is teach the parents all the same lessons. Because if they’re the ones getting on a middle schooler – their middle schooler – about how those Lucky Charms are interfering with that full ride to Duke, they’re the problem, it’s them.

That’s when you understand that the parents need rules and a curriculum, delivered in an age and role appropriate context, just as much as the athletes do.

“Coaching is identifying problems and fixing them, and making people play to their strengths. If the problem is the parent, that’s what you have to address,” says Dan Hill.

Sports cultures shape the coach-parent relationship

Outside of a handful of professional team academies or sports institutes, most coaches working in youth sports aren’t part of a multidisciplinary team.

So they might start to wonder who hired a video analyst when they hear someone say to one of their athletes “…and we can go over the video tonight,” and then realize that Mom wasn’t FaceTiming or getting some Mom-brag content for Facebook. No, she was recording video of her son’s training for kitchen table technical review sessions. Or when an athlete is showing some unusual tightness and fatigue, and responds to your question with “The school coach said I need more upper body if I want to make varsity in two years, so my parents have been taking me to their F45 workouts. It’s OK, though, they make sure I have a protein shake.”

Countries or regions with strong sports and fitness cultures set the conditions for parents who self-appoint to the multidisciplinary team you didn’t know you were a part of. They played sports throughout their youth, and now as adults they continue to do pseudo-competitive activities like CrossFit, Peloton Challenges and triathlons.

They speak with total confidence when they say things like “Oh, I know all about fueling the night before a track meet. I do a couple half marathons every year.” “Ma’am, your son’s a thrower.”

True stories, them all.

And while they may seem oh so perfectly American – more than that, Texan – the MDT parent shows up in many similarly strong sports cultures. Conversely, this is a non-issue in countries still building their sports cultures.

Elisabeth Oehler has worked in both. Oehler is a strength & conditioning coach at the Saudi Olympic Training Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Earlier in her career, she was S&C coach for Germany’s national youth rugby and weightlifting teams, a consultant on long term athlete development for Luxembourg’s Ministry of Sport, and S&C coach for the DHL Stormers, a professional rugby team in South Africa.

“The difference between parents in Europe and parents here in the Middle East or South Africa makes your job as a coach much different. Especially in Germany, I had to deal with so many issues around parents who wanted to have a lot of influence on their kid’s development, bringing things up with the club and constantly communicating with you. Whereas here in Saudi, I never had any discussions with the parents. And it’s not just the language barrier. We work with translators so the parents can come and talk to us.”

Oehler, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on coaching across cultures, identifies two cultural attributes that explain a lot of the difference in the parental approach.

“This is a society and a culture that really emphasizes and enforces hierarchies. The athletes and their parents grew up in a society and culture where you always have to listen to the older person. You always have to follow what they say. You have to respect them.

“The parents communicate with the coaches in the same way. They see me as an authority, even though I’m a woman, which I think is important context here.”

Before moving to the Olympic Training Center, Oehler was at one of Saudi Arabia’s first youth sports development centers. She coached weightlifting and S&C for athletes in the combat sports: jiu-jitsu, tae kwon do, judo and karate.

“We had a belt grading in tae kwon do for the kids, and there was no interference from the parents. We even failed some of the kids, and absolutely no interference. One parent asked what his son needed to do to get better, because the kid was disappointed he didn’t reach green belt.

“If we did that in Europe, there would be 5-6 parents that would come up to us and say ‘Why didn’t you pass my son or daughter? Why doesn’t he have the next belt?’ They’d complain and then ask to speak to someone higher up in the organization. Here, it’s accepted that if the coach says you’re not good enough, then you’re not good enough.”

The second factor is the nascency of Saudi Arabia’s sports culture. Whereas American and European parents may think they know at least as much as the coaches do, Saudi parents know what they don’t know – and treat the coach-athlete relationship accordingly.

“Here they accept that they don’t know any anything. That’s why they sent their kids to a coach.

“In Europe, I had a lot of parents who thought they know better than I do, and at the same time it’s very easy for someone else to influence them that some other coaching method might be better.

“I had many kids leaving my sessions to go to other coaches because the parents thought the development is not fast enough or they are not improving as much as they should. I would say, ‘OK, why do you think that? We didn’t do any testing, so why do you think your kid should develop faster?’  They’d respond, ‘But this other coach’s kids all develop all faster. He gets more results, much faster than you do.’ At which I’d say, ‘Yeah, OK, then you have to leave.'”

Managing parental expectations of youth athlete potential

“Why do you think that?” Or, as I often find myself asking about athletes and parents, “Where did you get the idea that that” – whatever that is – “is a good idea?”

That’s the paradox of these parents from strong sports cultures. If anyone should know about things like the importance of setting personal bests, long term development, and the absolute improbability of any one child – let alone their child – becoming an Olympian or turning pro, it’s the parents who came up in just such an environment.

But they’re the ones fueling and financing the youth sports machine, sometimes to the detriment – athletic and otherwise – of their children; and, quite often, to the detriment of the coaches’ autonomy, authority, job satisfaction and professional integrity.

“I don’t know that there’s a conversation that I could have to really prepare those types of parents for the fact that their child is not going to be an Olympian, not going to a Power Five school. When the parents have their mind made up, it’s about me having these conversations with the kids more than anything,” said Colleen Dotson, director of the University of Toronto Track Club.

“I try my best to make it very clear on our website, and we have a meeting at the beginning of the year that our goal and our model is long term athlete development. We don’t want to have an Olympian at age 16 who’s retired by 20.

“That’s all right there, along with the marks that athletes need to hit to be brought into our high performance group.”

UTTC has ambitious standards for their high performance group, with many athletes competing in national level meets in the US and Canada, and going on to compete at NCAA colleges. But at the day-to-day level around UTTC, the difference between the two groups is one extra practice day a week for the HP athletes and maybe an extra 30 minutes before the full group’s practice on other days.

That’s it. But simply the “high performance” designation is enough to trigger parents into sending Dotson emails like the one that arrived shortly before we talked.

“This athlete has trained with us for less than a year, and not in the high performance group. The parents email me to say that they think they may need to leave the club because their child is not in the high performance group and not achieving their goals.

“This athlete PBs every race. They’re excited to be on any relay team. Shows up every time they step on the track. What an amazing start for an athlete to have in track & field.

“This athlete is absolutely running their best, but that’s just not to the age group standard for the high performance program. They’re doing exactly what they are meant to do, and the parents want to pull them out of the club, because… why? Because they’re doing the best they can with the genes their parents gave them?”

Dotson and UTTC preempt the MDT parent by developing a network of sports performance practitioners, and including parents in the education sessions these outside practitioners deliver to the athletes.

“I try to defer to specialists to come in and talk to the whole club, including the parents. We’ll have a nutritionist come in to talk about optimal performance, and help everyone understand nutrition a bit better. We’ll have doctors come in and talk about volume, loading and injury risk. Then, when we talk to specific parents about how their child’s personal trainer has increased the training volume by 10%, we can point back to the presentation and say ‘If you remember from Dr. So-and-so, we’re now in the red zone for injury. His risk over the next few months is really high, so we should make some changes to pull back on the volume.’

“I have a huge advantage being at the University of Toronto. The people we bring in are extremely knowledgeable and carry the prestige of the university. This empowers the coaches and the parents because they realize they are getting expert information to help their children navigate the sport.”

By being willing to step aside and give the floor to experts and specialists in fields other than yours, coaches model the behavior we want from the parents. Specialists working together, each specializing in their respective domains, is the core idea of the multidisciplinary team. We’re the experts in coaching, and we have to own that role and relationship.

Coaching pedagogy for the parents

Sporting organizations and coaches have to concentrate their values and their messages if they hope to have an impact in the short amount of contact time they have with the athletes and parents. We have a few hours a week to push back on the effects of the sporting culture as a whole, and the individual personalities that can have such mixed effects on young athletes.

There’s not much room for subtlety. Messages and information need to be explicit and repeated.

“All the specialists I bring in, all the resources I tap into are reiterating what I’m saying,” Dotson says. “Sometimes your mom tells you something and you’re like, ‘Whatever, mom.’ Then your friend says the same thing and it’s ‘Oh wow, that’s such a great idea!’ When I see that they’re not listening or we’re not getting through, I ask them: Who else do you need to hear it from? Then I keep bringing people in to support the message, to bombard them with the same message: we’re in this for the long haul.”

Supplementing the parent handbooks, speeches and regular communication, Dan Hill and Albion Hurricanes FC in Houston, Texas, include a bit of a film session into their preseason meeting with the players and parents. It’s a great way to illustrate how not to act on the sidelines of a youth soccer game. It’s also quite effective at outing the parents who might be predisposed to being That Guy. (Disclosure: I was the sports performance coach for Albion Hurricanes FC’s Women’s Premier Soccer League team, the Royals, for the 2023 season.)

Hill: “We’d always show them a couple of YouTube videos from the Respect the Game campaign. You’ve got parents screaming and shouting at the kids and the kids no longer want to play. You’ve got them shouting at the refs. And you watch the parents while they’re watching, and you see some of them see themselves in that video while they’ve got their own kids sitting right next to them.

“If anything early on goes wrong or we feel like they’re doing a little bit too much, we can bring them back to the player-parent expectations, and refer them back to the video in extreme circumstances. When you can home in on a kid’s reaction when their mom or dad is screaming and shouting, just home in on the face and say ‘Just look at that for a second. I just want you to watch your kid’s actions for the next five minutes,’ most of them are taken aback and shocked to the point that they’ll play along from then on.

“You have to center the kid at those conversations because it’s about the kid. We’re not there to talk to the parents or coach the parents, but they’ve got to help us be a coach by allowing us to coach the kid.”

Hill is the Program Director for Albion Hurricanes’ high performance boys’ and girls’ teams. Hill played for Wolverhampton Wanderers as a youth, where he began his coaching career before coming to the US in 1999.

“When we first started there were no expectations. It was a new sport over here and people just did it as a hobby.

“We had 325 players, and we said pretty quickly that we’ve got to get rid of some of these bad apples, even if they’re good players. We went down to 275 players, and in 2004 we put out our first parental expectation sheets. Even so, people wouldn’t follow it because it was still seen as a bit of a hobby. But if a player had a bad attitude or the parent was going to be a problem, it didn’t matter if it was one of the best players. We would remove them from the team early in the season and it would set a precedent for the rest of the team. They realized then that we don’t care who you are or how good you are, these are the standards you’ll conform to.”

The Hurricanes now have several thousand players across seven campuses, with over 30 coaches on staff. At the top of the club’s pyramid are men’s and women’s teams in the United Soccer League 2 and Women’s Premier Soccer League, respectively, whose rosters are mostly players who have been with the club since high school or earlier.

“I think setting out these expectations and teaching parents how to be good sports parents is an aspect of coaching that most clubs overlook. I think part of the reason we’ve had success is because we don’t overlook it and we understand that it is one of the main contributors to success.”

The growth of soccer in the US and of the Albion Hurricanes means the pendulum is at the other side of where Hill started his American coaching career. Instead of working to get players to show up twice a week for either a fall or spring season, Hill and the staff now have to get parents to relent a bit. He once again centers the conversation on the youth athlete, this time by guiding the parents to identify with their kids’ non-sporting needs and interests.

“The parents want to send these kids on a college camp every week. I say to them, ‘When you were growing up, did you like to go to the movies?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did you like to play with your friends?’ ‘Yeah.’ Well, your kid likes to do the same. So please give them their childhood, and we can help you manage that.”

During one particularly explosive incident, a player’s parent admonished Hill “Stop telling me how to be a parent.” Hill replied, “We’re not. We’re telling you how to be a parent of an athlete.”

“We’re a lot more involved than we used to be,” Hill says. This is not just because the coaches have more contact time with the players than in years past. Because they’ve developed relationships with these families over the years they’ve been with the club, the parents will come to the coaches and ask the coaches to talk to the kids about college, where they want to go, the goal setting necessary to get there.

“It’s come so far, and I think for the better.”

Coach-parent relationships post-COVID

Ensuring that the relationship between youth athletes, parents, coaches and clubs continues to develop for the better requires the professionals to set boundaries on those relationships, even as they grow over many years and maybe multiple children in one family.

“As social media evolved, we obviously had to bring in procedures to ensure the coaches wouldn’t get too involved. We don’t ‘friend’ any active players or parents on our social media,” Hill says.

“When the athletes get to high school age, you ask the parents if it’s OK to text the kid, especially the captains, with information about the team or soccer. Parents typically say yes, or ‘put me on it, as well.'”

Team and sport specific information is on one side of the line, and everything else is on the other.

“We’re not meant to be their friends,” Colleen Dotson stated unequivocally. “It’s this weird line, and that’s another of the reasons why I left the sport, when I looked around and said ‘Whoa, slippery slopes here, guys.'”

Dotson and I tried to piece together when we had our one in-person conversation. I knew that it was in the summer of one of two years, that she was still head track & field coach at York University and that she was very close to having a child. Stymieing our efforts, she was at a similar stage of pregnancy in each of those summers. Regardless, within two years of that meeting, we had both decided to leave the coaching profession, with not much in the way of intentions to ever come back. Yet we both did. Within a year of my return, the demands of our profession – like every other, let’s not be snowflakes here – changed in ways we, as a profession, are barely beginning to recognize, let alone understand.

As an independent coach, I was often the only non-parent adult the athletes would have regular interaction with. I was also the source of recreation, activity and competitiveness. And, depending on the athlete’s pre-COVID social life and mid-COVID situation at home, I might have been the only non-family, non-digital interaction, as well. Some parents sought out coaching because they knew that their kid needed more than just sport training, and that sport training could provide those other things.

For other parents, though, this was just one more batch of things that they didn’t know they didn’t know.

One of the big professional development lessons I learned during this time is that the parents are not an externality that we can hope to minimize or keep outside the fence on training and game day. Some can be our teammates on the MDT. Some are constraints that force us to adapt and overcome, and some we can co-opt to suit the athlete’s best interests. But nearly all parents need to be coached, and the extreme stresses on youth in the early 2020s made it clear that for every young athlete in our care, we have to coach 1-2 additional people.

Not to diminish the difficulties or hardships that any of my athletes or their peers faced, but I was in Oklahoma, a state in which life was closer to normal, sooner, than many others. It pales next to what Dotson stepped into when she returned to coaching in October 2021 in Toronto – and to what she still faces every day.

“I had to enroll in psychology courses because I didn’t know how to help these kids,” said Dotson, who was a youth athlete at UTTC herself, a four time conference champion triple jumper at Kent State University (Ohio) and started her full time coaching career in 2009. “We were on the longest and most severe lockdown of any nation in the world. When we came back, these kids did not know how to talk to each other. They wouldn’t speak to each other, nothing, they would just be on their phone. I had to think back to the icebreakers we did in my camp counselor days, things we would never ordinarily do with high school athletes, but I had to.”

“I took courses in positive psychology, psychological development for athletes and psychological management. I am so deeply concerned for these children. They’re so much better than they were last year, but it’s really tough. A lot of them are in sport just to manage anxiety and deal with depression and things like that.

“So when some parents decided to apply pressure, I became even more concerned. ‘Do you understand your child has stopped digging holes into their skin because they’re able to run now? I need you to stop. You need to stop.'”

The parents of the UTTC athletes were relieved to be able to drop their kids off and go be adults for a couple hours a week. If the temperature stayed above -10°C, UTTC had practice and neither the parents nor the kids needed any extra pushes to get the kids out of the car and onto the track.

But their concern over their kids’ screen time and social skills, and subsequent relief when UTTC was able to start practice again, did not temper the pressure some put on their kids to excel in sports. The opposite, in fact.

“Some parents were more extreme. I think it’s because not only were the kids consuming massive amounts of social media, but the parents were, too. Some of the expectations they would then have for their children are kind of outlandish. The performances they expected blew my mind.”

Elisabeth Oehler watched the effects of the lockdowns on youth athletes from a remove, as she left her position with the German weightlifting federation’s youth teams in 2020 to consult and then coach in South Africa through 2022.

“I don’t think parents or coaches quite understand the impact that COVID had on motor development in kids. I feel like a lot of parents are now happy that everything is back to normal, but they are not completely aware of the actual impact it had on their kids from a motor skill perspective and social skills. I don’t think the kids are on the same motor skill level as they were before for a given age, and that level was declining anyway.

“Now we have a generation where for 2-3 years there was no physical education, no youth sports in some countries, so absolutely no development from a motor skill perspective,” Oehler said.

“I think we will not see it immediately, but it’s a conversation I think we will have a lot in the next few years and I hope there will be a lot of research about it.”

Back in Texas, Dan Hill saw a boost in parental (and athlete) motivation post the comparatively minimal restrictions. “Pre-COVID, we’d always get good attendance because it was kind of mandated. But after, we didn’t have to chase players to come to practice. I think for everybody it was just get them out of the house, parents and kids all had enough of staying inside.”

But that surge came atop the foundation of trust that the club had already built up with their athletes’ families. “When they come out, the parents understand that their kids trust the coaches. There’s a saying I’ve adapted from Patch Adams that I’ve handed down to the staff. If you coach the player, you’re going to lose. If you coach the kid, you’re going to win every time.

“We deal with all kinds of stuff, and sometimes we have to get counselors involved. There’s a trust there, because of that. Once the parents see that and see all the work that our coaches put in, it sets them at ease a little bit.”

How to develop productive coach-parent relationships and team cultures

One of the fun parts of coaching youth athletes is seeing how they can take your perfectly honed cue, validated to induce the precise sporting behavior you want them to learn, and produce some movement or tactical pattern that is not at all within your imagined outcome set but does, in fact, meet their standard of “But you said to….!” And you’re left with a baffled look on your face as you try to figure out how they got from there to here.

It’s a lot less charming when the parents put their spin on implementing your advice. “Um, your dad had you eat what before the meet?” “Well, he said you talked about more protein.”

Standards must be explicit and enforced

Your standards, expectations, guidelines and redlines for parents have to be explicit and unambiguous, consistent across the organization and enforced with clarity and objectivity. We can put whatever we want in our handbooks and on the For Parents tab of the club website. It’s what we do in the moment that matters.

One coach, who requested anonymity in order to protect the team involved, recalls the most serious discipline issue they ever faced with teenage athletes. “We found out that the players had a WhatsApp group where they were sharing illegal video material. The worst was video from a mass shooting – the majority of boys thought it was from a video game. They didn’t realize that it was real, and that sharing it was illegal.

“Because this was a WhatsApp group that was connected to the club – it was only players on it – we had to contact the police to find out if we, the coaches, were going to get in trouble. Then the parents started protecting their kids, blaming everyone else and scared that if we went to the police that we would destroy the boys’ future.

“There was a point where I thought, maybe we shouldn’t go through with this, just let the parents focus on their own children. But all the coaches agreed that we would contact the police, explain the situation, hand over everything and have the police do an educational session for everyone: us, parents, players. And then we did a few more seminars on media, media training and the like.”

Once the parents realized their children would not get in trouble with the law or have something on their permanent records, they fell in behind the coaching staff.

But the coaching staff had agreed to one more disciplinary action that challenged their resolve in the face of outraged parents.

“We decided, unanimous among the coaches, that the team would not compete at the national championships that year. The parents tried everything, even going to the president of the club. One of the assistant coaches came close to folding and said that we need to find another punishment. But I said that if we do that, we lose. The players won’t have learned anything, and we’ll have destroyed everything we had built up to that moment. And then the next time the players do some shit, they will run to their parents again and their parents will try to fix it.

“Parents say they expect accountability, fairness, sportsmanship and all these things. But when it came to this off field issue, all of that was forgotten.”

Choose your actual MDT and staff wisely

That situation tested the individual will and the group cohesion of the coaches, and it nearly fractured because of one coach. When interviewing, evaluating and educating coaches on your staff, you need as much confidence in how they will handle scenarios like this as anything to do with their programming and training methods.

When Colleen Dotson took the job at UTTC, “a part of the long term athlete development was already kind of in place. It was just about getting more people on board with the vision, which honestly wasn’t hard for the coaches that want to work in a place like this. A lot of people have the same mindset, so it’s not difficult to get them on board with what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re doing it.

“With a club as big as Albion Hurricanes,” Dan Hill said, “you’re going to have strong coaches and you’re going to have weak coaches. What we try to find is the balance where everybody conforms to the standards we hold the parents to, because it’s a serious topic that can either help or hamper player development.”

Understand players as individuals within a culture

When we train an athlete, we’re training them against the backdrop of their training history, injury history, successes, failures and goals; and their previous coaches’ methods, philosophies, priorities, even their cues. How we use a cue in the gym might mean something completely different than how they’ve heard those exact words used for the last few years.

When training a parent to be a positive sport parent, the culture they come from and that they are raising their children in has a similar effect as all those factors above. What they want out of sport for their kid will be influenced quite strongly by their cultural milieu.

Elisabeth Oehler has seen dramatically different cultures across the stops on her coaching career. Coaching in the most diverse city in America, Dan Hill sees a spread of cultures in a single training session.

“In England, a lot of people our age grew up playing on the streets, so when you say ‘free play,’ they understand it. For a long time, when we would do an hour of futsal for our third session of the week, parents would say ‘I’m not driving an hour for that.’ It’s improving more and more now over here, especially in the busy suburbs. Kids get dropped off at a school, and there’s just a bunch of kids, no bib, a ball, no parents, and they just play.

“But let’s say we have a family from a culture that is built on status. They sometimes expect too much, that their kids are going to grasp something very quickly.

“It’s also very affluent here in many areas. In River Oaks and Memorial (Houston’s wealthiest neighborhoods), most people are just happy the kids are doing something. They’re not worried about an NCAA scholarship. If the kids are good, that’s fine. They’re not fussed, they’ve got the money, they just want their kids to do well.

“And then on the other end of the scale, you have people from the inner cities. We sponsor things for those athletes, and the parents don’t put much pressure on the athletes. They’re just thankful for the work that we’re doing, like sponsoring events or athletes in that area so we can ensure we’re bringing everyone together. If we can help a player from these areas find a pathway to college, the players and families are thankful.

“In between it’s the middle class, and they’re the ones that really cause the problems and put the massive pressure on the kids. They’re the ones living through their kid, looking to the kid to produce the status and money they don’t have. Those are the nightmares, so we sit down and talk to them about the pressure they putting on the kid, because the kids start crying in front of us.

“The two words that I use across those situations are: natural ability. I could never be Cristiano Ronaldo, not even training seven days a week, because I didn’t have the natural ability. That’s huge for them to understand. You can’t just throw money at the problem. You have to sit down with them individually in the office and explain this is how it’s going to work, this is what’s going to be best for your kid.”

Establishing and enforcing codes of conduct and standards of behavior for parents can bring us into conflict with the people who pay us, whether they do so directly or via a club. Parents are our customers, and in both of their capacities as parents and customers, they’re going to think they are always right.

When they’re not, we have to coach. Just like when we’re coaching our athletes, we won’t get anywhere by simply telling the parents that they are wrong. We have to teach them, in a way that will enable them to continue learning independently, developing as a sport parent alongside their athlete child.