The end of our daughter’s hockey season will mark the end of much more than a game she’s played. Hockey forged her into a strong, confident, dependable, resilient hard worker who knows what it means to stand for something bigger than herself. We both have her dad to […]
“Mom, I’m bored!” “Why don’t you just go outside and _____________?” I know how my parents filled in that blank. If you were raised in the 70’s, 80’s, or early 90’s, your parents probably filled in that blank the same way. The instructions for filling empty spaces of […]
It was 2:00 am last night, or technically this morning, when my latest round of sleeplessness hit. I had fallen asleep hard, probably because standing in ninety minutes of relentless 50-degree rain for an emotional conference loss had worn me out. For whatever reason, I went from soundly […]
In these days of significant divide in ideologies, there is at least one thing people can agree upon: life is not fair. We know this. We witness this. The longer we live, the more we experience this. So, why toil at all toward justice? What if I told […]
The high school team I coach facilitates a free after school soccer club at the area elementary schools. Third, fourth, and fifth graders stay to play. There is nothing riding on these games, but emotional outbursts can still happen. During yesterday’s games there was sadness, happiness, frustration, anger, […]
Fight? Flight? Neither. There is a better way. I’ll get to the strategies for disarming disgruntled parents in a minute, but I want to first lay a backdrop for where pitchfork parents are born. Do you know what age groups seem to have the craziest sports parents? Well, […]
Someone recently reminded me about this piece originally posted in 2016 on a site that has since been removed. I felt compelled to post it again because I want to enable coaches to seek and provide for one another the resources needed to keep good coaches in the […]
Coaches need to stop punishing and start disciplining for accountability. There is a difference. “Keep running, and pick up the pace,” my coach said. Next lap around we tried to get his attention, but he was deep in conversation with the assistant. Our captain managed to ask, “Are […]
I cheated the first time I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. In my late twenties I took the test and the results tagged me as an INFJ. Everything I had observed about myself, or probably more accurately wanted to believe about myself, meant the test results were obviously […]
I adopted the hashtag #closethegap as my focus for last season’s team. There exists a profound skill/commitment gap between our team and the teams in our conference. People have pointed to our high school’s championship football team for some of the gap that exists, and I would be […]
The Team Adult Playbook 