 Good evening, everyone. Can everyone take their seats? Please welcome tonight's moderator, former news anchor for KCRTV, current communications director at UC Davis School of Law, and contributing host for Capital Public Radio, Pamela Wu. Welcome to the Fifth Annual Parent University lecture series. It is always a pleasure to be with you. I've been the moderator of this series for three years now, which seems appropriate, because my son, Eric, is three years as long as I've been a parent. At this point in his young life, it seems that his favorite sports activity is running, usually away from me when I'm trying to put on his pajamas or brush his teeth. But I know that it won't be long before I'm right there with you on the sidelines or in the stands. My husband, who was an excellent competitive athlete in whose youth can hardly wait. So it was with great enthusiasm and a desire to build self-awareness, as well, that we both read John O'Sullivan's excellent book called Changing the Game. In my former career as a daily news reporter, I covered a lot of stories about youth sports that ran the gamut, including stories that were wonderful and inspirational, such as stories of hardworking teens from a tough neighborhood, overcoming odds to win the state football title, and a basketball team that invited a classmate with Down syndrome to suit up and play in a real game. Other stories were considerably less wonderful, like the many headlines that I'm sure a lot of you have seen about out-of-control dads and moms who verbally assault coaches, reps, other parents. Well, John O'Sullivan is here to share ways in which we can raise happy, high-performing athletes and, in his words, give youth sports back to our kids. Before I introduce John, I'd like to recognize the community leaders who are with us this evening. Please stand when I call your name. Let us please recognize the superintendent of DJUSD, Winford Robertson, the superintendent Robertson for being with us tonight. Also president of the Davis School Board, Gina Delated, school board member Susan Lovenberg, and the athletic director of DHS, Dennis Foster. Also many thanks to Davis Media Access for taping tonight's lecture for those who couldn't be here in person. And thank you, of course, to our generous sponsors, Avid Reader, DJUSD Climate Committee, Suzanne Kimmel of First Street Real Estate, Hyatt Place at UC Davis, and Bachelorette Marshall Arts. Please give a round of applause to our generous sponsor. Here's how tonight is going to roll out. Tonight's evening is going to begin with a 50-minute talk with our keynote speaker, followed by a panel discussion where he's going to be joined by four local coaches. All the seats that you see here on the stage will end the evening with a book signing in the foyer, and then we will close the doors at 9 p.m. So if you have a burning question for our keynote speaker, John O'Sullivan, or you have questions for the panelists, and I believe that we have, it says the panelists displayed on the screen. They're not displayed on the screen at this time, but we have some excellent panelists, all prominent local coaches from Marshall Arts to swimming, to football, to soccer. So you can jot down questions for our panelists on the index cards that you got on your way in here, and those cards will be collected immediately following the talk. As a segue to our keynoter, we would like to introduce the Davis High School Athletic Director, who is responsible for 150 coaches and 1,500 student athletes who participated everything from badminton to football, a mentor to his team of coaches and a friend to the community. Please welcome Mr. Dennis Foster. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to first of all thank Jody and Christie for inviting me out this evening to speak to everyone. It is quite an opportunity to be here. I'm Dennis Foster. I'm the 2013-14 Sacroquine Section, excuse me, 2012-13, Sacroquine Section Athletic Director year, and I'm the Athletic Director at the High School since 2012. I'm blessed to be someone who is the son of a man who grew up in the Great Depression. My mother was someone who grew up in the segregated South, and those experiences for them shaped the way in which they raised me. I'm a husband, but most importantly, I stand here before you as a father and a member of this community. I have one adult child named Natasha and one son. He was a senior here at the High School. His name is Andre. What I do in my life is I manage the largest, most successful Athletic Department in the Sacroquine Section. We have 1,400 athletes, 150 coaches, 27 sports, 44 teams, and over 120 section titles. We're very blessed in our Athletic Department here at the High School. I've been fortunate enough to earn letters after my name, M-A-C-A-A. I've been recognized for excellent as a leader in the classroom, as a coach, and as an Athletic Director. But most importantly, I'm a father. What does that mean? It means that I take pride in seeing my children anytime I can. Things as simple as having a brief conversation with my adult daughter, a hello in the morning, or good morning, those things mean a lot. But ultimately, I am a father. Athletics has given me the connection to most important things in my life, my wife, my children, but ultimately, I'm a father. What would be better than for your son to ask you to discuss the game at home after it's over? And you can have a great conversation with him without you initiating it, and he just wants to talk to you. What would be better than having a life discussion with my daughter? Why? Why are these things so great to me? Because I'm a father. To many people, we all gain education and insight, and it's important that we allow our children, and what some of us read in the book, is give the games back to them. There's not one person in this room that's successful that has not faced failure. And one important thing we can do for those children is allow them to face at times adversity and to help them through it. That's part of what we have to do as parents, as part of what I have to do as a father. Athletics can be a wonderful field on which our children can safely learn about the lifestyles and downs, relationships, developing friends, and yes, there are winners and there are losers. And once our children have the experience of being involved in things that are almost practice for real life, later on we can set them free and feel comfortable that they're prepared for the world. Again, I wanna thank everyone for coming out tonight. I want to let you know that I'm looking forward to, and I hope you're looking forward to some, a sense of education tonight and some enrichment on how we can improve things for our children. Thank you very much and welcome. Thank you, Dennis, and now it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's keynote speaker. John O'Sullivan is the founder of the Changing the Game Project. It's an initiative to educate parents, coaches, and athletes about the positive benefits of youth athletics and the need to remove adult priorities and adult values from youth sports. He is the author of the national bestselling book, Changing the Game, and his writing has been featured in The Huffington Post, Soccer America Magazine and The Soccer Wire. He travels and speaks internationally to schools and youth sports organizations about developing more competitive, high achieving athletes by building environments of love and respect, rather than environments of fear and pressure. John spent nearly three decades as a soccer player and coach on the youth high school, college, and professional levels. Two years ago, he concluded his full-time coaching career to concentrate on his work in the Changing the Game Project. Here to tell us how to change the game, please welcome John O'Sullivan. Hi, everyone. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming out tonight. It is so nice out, and I live in Oregon, and if it was this nice out in March, no one would have shown up, so I totally really appreciate you. So what we're gonna talk about tonight is how do we create a player-first environment, something that emphasizes the priorities and the values of our kids and recognize that it's that environment that actually allows us to create athletes that perform their very, very best. So we're gonna talk about a few things tonight, some of the obstacles that you face as parents and as coaches to creating this type of environment. We're gonna talk about the psychology of high performance, so the internal and the external factors that affect how kids play. And then I'm gonna give you a couple of takeaways, a few little action steps that you can leave here with tonight that will help you to help your kids or to help your players. Now the best part about these is if we're involved at all in youth sports, we know that everything costs a lot of money. Parachute is $300, a bat is $400, buy a soccer ball that bends 14 different ways, it costs $200. Well these things don't cost anything. They just start communicating and time with your kids, but they have a far greater effect than anything that you will do, that you will ever buy. So that's what we're gonna do. And then I'm super excited about the panel later on. I've already got to spend some time with Ashley and Corinne. And that is really why I come here. I wanna hear your questions and we all wanna hear your questions because eventually I go back, I go back to Oregon and it is everyone here in this room and the coaches and the teachers and the parents in the Davis community that really have to make the decision to change sports here, change the culture and decide what kind of culture you want. So what I wanna start with tonight is just a quick story of how I ended up on this stage. And I ended up on this stage, it's kind of ironic because I spent 20 years playing soccer as a college player, as a professional player. I coached Division I college. I ran youth clubs all over the U.S. I coached college and my epiphany moment, my aha moment was at a six year old girl's soccer game. Now, how many people have been to one of those? Right, so what happens at a six year old girl's soccer game? There is a giant scrum of players. There's lots of laughing, lots of giggling. Eight kids are fighting over one toy, a.k.a. the ball. And every once in a while, a player breaks out headed in the right trajectory and scores a goal. Everyone gives her a hug, it's great. Every once in a while, a player breaks out heading the wrong direction. She scores a goal and her own goal. It's okay, she's equally as excited, everyone gives her a hug. I love six year old soccer because you have twice the chance of success. But, overall, the parents are encouraging, they're supportive. The coaches are giving high fives, they're supporting everyone. There's no referee to yell at. This is what sports is supposed to be about. Well, on this day, three years ago, I'm watching my daughter's team play. And right next door, there is a, quote, competitive 10 year old boys game. So I put competitive in quotes because the players on each field, they're equally competitive. Who's more competitive? The adults. The parents and the coaches are now all competitive because, oh, we've done tryouts, oh, we've selected the best players, we're paying more money, we're doing more things. So now we have to be more serious. So as I'm watching this game, I see coaches screaming at players on every play, telling them what decisions to make. I see parents on the opposite sidelines screaming instructions, usually indirect contradiction to the coaching instructions. There's a referee in the middle of the field that's about three years older than the players playing, getting yelled at by all the parents. And the kids are working really hard. They're doing their best, but they're 10. So they're making mistakes. And what happens when they make a mistake? They get yelled at by their coach. They get yelled at by their parents. They get yelled at by their friends' parents. So I'm sitting there on the field that day and all I'm thinking to myself is, this is crazy. Is anyone on my field hoping that that's what we are going to have in three years? Are we saying, yeah, I want to pay more money and I want to invest more time so my daughter can have less fun? And the second thought, and this one was the worst one was, and I'm the guy in charge of this. This is my league. This is my organization. I'm the executive director. And I'm not doing anything to help the parents and help the coaches understand that the single greatest factor that affects how kids play is their state of mind. And I'm running a league where the parents and coaches think that they're helping, but they're actually ruining their kid's state of mind in sports. And what was on display that day was what we call the, or what I call the adultification of youth sports. This introduction of adult values and adult priorities into kids' games. Now, when I was a kid, when I was growing up, I would say that sports was, if I had to describe in one sentence, it was children competing against children. And now you go out to almost any field in any community, anywhere, and you see adults competing against other adults through their children. That's a big difference because the coaches are trying to outdo other coaches so they can steal their players and the parents are trying to one-up other parents. Not all of them, but there's enough of it that it's really changed this environment to the negative. And what's happening is 70% of children drop out of youth sports by the age of 13 now. 70%. And that's a crazy number. And so I set out to develop the change in the game project and I set out to research and write this book because I have kids. And I'm just like Dennis said, I'm a dad. And I'm a dad before many things else. And I wanted to change that. And I thought I could have a little bit of effect by sort of spreading some of this good knowledge and the things that I'd learned. Well, this journey was one of the most humbling and life-changing journeys I ever took because when I started doing the research, I started realizing that everything that I thought was right was wrong. And so many of the things that I thought were wrong were the best path forward. I spoke to the best sports psychologist and psychologist and parenting experts. I called coaches all over the country and I just said to them, give me your best stuff. And they started telling me things and I kept turning to my wife being like, why didn't anyone teach me this in coaching school? This is the best stuff I've ever heard. But I've gone to every coaching license you can for soccer in the United States and no one's ever taught me this before. Why didn't anyone hand us this book when we picked up our kids from the hospital? Instead of just like, hey, have at it. Good luck with this one. So it was amazing. But then the next part of it, I started talking to parents and I started talking to parents who had kids in college or had older high school kids. And what I asked them was, what did you learn on this journey? And they kept telling me the same two things. They kept saying, number one, boy, this goes by fast. You blink your eyes, your son is in his first soccer uniform that goes down to his knees. You blink him again, he's in college. So tell people to enjoy the moment. And the second thing they kept saying to me over and over and over was, if I knew 10 years ago, what I know now about what would be important to my son or important to my daughter and what wouldn't be, I would have done a lot of things differently. So what they learned in the journey was that kids don't remember winning some trophy at 11 years old. They remember the kids they played with. They remember the hotel. They remember the funny van ride. They remember the lessons that a great coach taught them. They remember being pushed and having to overcome hardship by a coach who said, that's not good enough. I want you to do it better. That's what their kids took from sports. And they said it took me until they were 14 or 15 to realize that I wasted so many years. So please tell parents, don't waste those years. Pass on this wisdom. Then the best part of my research was I talked to kids. I said, if there was one message that you could give to your parents if you got to start over again, what would it be? And I kept saying something along these lines. I only get to be a kid once, let this belong to me. Let my childhood belong to me. Let this sports experience be mine. And thus the change in the game project was born. Now people sometimes say to me, well, it's just sports. Sports isn't that important. Well, again, as Dennis said, and so many coaches and probably so many of you, sports has played an amazing role in my life. And I think sports is probably more important now than it's ever been before. Our kids are certainly not getting great values from pop culture like they used to. There's been some amazing studies on the most expressed values of pop culture. And for 40 years they got things like benevolence and tradition and family. Now they get fame and wealth and popularity. Kids also get to learn things like character. They get to learn core values. They get to learn to overcome obstacles. Sports is such a great place to do that. But sports also is particularly important because it gets kids active. This is an amazing statistic I just came across. Due to an activity, today's 10 year olds are the first generation in 200 years to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That's an incredible statistic. It'll change because of advances in healthcare, not advances in health. Our kids are barely moving. For nine to 15 year olds in the United States, their activity decreases 50 to 75%. If we want to get them moving again, sports is the way to do it. But if three out of four kids are dropping out, we have to do something about that. Now what I learned watching that 10 year old boys game that day was that for some reason, in sports adults behave completely differently than they do in any other aspect of life. Could you imagine if your kids were taking a math test and the walls were lined with parents screaming, carry the one. Art class color in the lines. There's this old commercial from when I was growing up for Folger's Crystals and they used to say, here we are in this fancy restaurant. We've replaced their gourmet coffee with Folger's Crystals. Well, you imagine if you secretly replaced the parents at a kid's birthday party with soccer parents. Some people have. Go get that donkey. Hey, hey, you're going the wrong way. Come on, we got slaughtered at musical chairs. We've practiced this at home a million times. We are losing. I can't believe I missed Pilates for this. It's your outer eye at home, Missy. Has anyone ever done that? I think about that. Maybe I should have. I could have got out of hosting a lot of play dates at my house if I pulled off that once or twice. No, of course you haven't. It's crazy. These are some ads that Hockey Canada did a couple years ago. And the main message, as you see, is if it's not okay here, why is it okay in the rink? And of course the answer is it's not. It's not okay in the rink. It's not okay in the field. And this is what we have to change. Now what's happened with this adultification of youth sports is that some major myths have arisen and major obstacles have arisen to being a parent or being a coach in this day and age. And basically there's three main myths that I found when I was researching the book. And these myths really affect everything you do. And you're constantly being told by other parents, sometimes you're being told by coaches that this is the way, this is the path forward, this is what you see. The first myth is this myth of early specialization. That if your child is gonna be a high performing athlete, if they're gonna be an elite athlete, if they're gonna play in college, the first time they make a layup or score a goal in soccer, they need to specialize. Who's felt that? Anyone, anyone here? It usually depends on the age of your kids. Here's what the science says on specialization. If your child specializes really early in a sport, do they, are they advanced a little bit right away? Yes, of course, because they're putting in more hours. But there's no correlation between early specialization and long-term success. There's two sports that are considered early specialization sports, gymnastics, female gymnastics and figure skating. Other than those, team sports, most athletes peak in their 20s. And so the need to specialize early is not there. What the science does show about early specialization is that children who specialize early burn out a lot quicker and at a lot higher rate. They get injured a lot more. The last study in 2013 out of Loyola University found that single sport athletes were injured 70 to 90% more than multi-sport athletes. And there's a little bit of science that's come out that shows that kids who specialize early not only burn out and get injured more, but they drop out of sports altogether. So those kids who have done nothing but one sport early on, when they quit, they quit everything. They don't jog, they don't ride bikes, they just give up the ghost. And that might be the scariest thing when we're talking about getting our kids active. Now I understand that we have this world where we have utopia, you have to do lots of sports, and we have reality, we have sports organizations that are demanding year-round commitments that are demanding high dollars and we can only deal with one. But what I'm telling you, and we'll be re-emphasizing over and over tonight, is that we as adults, parents, coaches, we have created this environment. We're the ones who can change it. Organizations exist because there's customers that want that. And if we start asking for the right things, they'll create those type of programs too. I've talked to local coaches here who are telling me about, hey, we make kids take time off and we have parents who leave their program because we make the kids do another sport. Yet they're doing right by the children. So, myth one, early specialization. Myth two, high-performing athletes, the best athletes focus on winning. Gotta get on the right team, very young, we're specialized, and then we have to win all our games at 10 or 11. Again, it's a myth. The best athletes focus on the process. They don't focus on success, they focus on excellence. There's a big, big difference on focus on the process. One part about the process is that failure is a huge part of it. If you're ever gonna be a great athlete, you have to fail. You have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and move on. We can't just focus on winning. I ran soccer clubs in Vermont and Michigan and Oregon and it was amazing to me. I had teams of 10-year-olds who, if they went 11-in-1, I'd have parents who wanted to go to the team that was 12-in-0. Coaches who say, oh yeah, we're 12-in-0, we scored 152 goals and gave up two. Like fire your coach, do something, but you're not helping your kids get better. We can't just focus on winning. So these two feed into myth number three. Specialize early, get on the winning team because this is an investment and a scholarship. Here's what the statistics say from the NCAA. High school athletes, one to 2% of them in the entire United States receive any sort of athletic financial aid, one to 2%. The average award is $11,000. Get outside of basketball and football and almost every scholarship is a partial scholarship. Surveys also show that when they survey high school parents, 30 to 50% of them think their kid is getting a scholarship. That is a big divide. That is causing it. Now that's caused by, again, some of this mythology. It's also caused, I have to say in my personal experience, by dishonest parents who their kid might get a small scholarship. Oh yeah, we got a full ride. I am amazed how often I've sent so many players to play in college and I talked to the coaches for two years in the process. I know exactly what the kid got because I've talked to those coaches about what's the family's financial situation and I know they walked out of there with a 25 or 50% scholarship and then my next meeting someone says, well so-and-so got a full ride to Oregon. No she didn't, no she did not. I am promising you that. So there's not scholarships coming out there. U-Sports can be an investment in so many amazing things. It can be an investment in character and core values and again, learning how to fail and fail graciously but a scholarship just has to be icing on the cake. If you are putting all your money in hoping for a return on that investment, it's probably not gonna work out. So these things are really affecting U-Sports in a bad way. Now, I don't know if you can read the bottom line there. How do we overcome them? Well, what we have to do is we have to understand performance. And this is a great quote. There's a man named Timothy Galway. He wrote a book about three decades ago called The Inner Game of Tennis. His quote is this, performance is potential minus interference. So children perform at their potential. Their genetics, their practice, minus the things that interfere with it allows a state of mind. If we are going to help our kids play better, we have to remove interference. When I was a young coach, I thought my job was to pile as much information as possible on them. As I got older, I realized that it was just to strip it away. And the more I could strip away, come game time, the better they would play and the better my athletes would do and the better my teams would do. I was driving down here, I was listening to Phil Jackson's new book called The Leaven Rings in the car. He was talking about the same thing. How much can you pull away? How much can you clear your athlete's minds before they play is usually a direct correlation of how they're going to play. So we have to ask ourselves as parents and coaches, are we interfering? Now, this is a really interesting statistic as well. In a game like hockey or soccer or basketball, a constant moving game, our athletes are making about two conscious decisions per second. Think about that. Try to do that for a while. Think about two decisions, two decisions, two decisions. And soccer, do I step? Do I drop? Do I go in? Do I go out? Do I cross? Do I dribble? Do I shoot? Do I delay? Do I tackle? Do I listen to my mom? Do I listen to the coach? How much more input are they gonna take? Very little. They're either going to take our input and not make the decisions they're supposed to be making where they're gonna tune us out and make the decisions that the game calls for. But either way, our input has very little effect. Now there's a new book by a man named Daniel Goldman. He wrote, he's famous for a book called Emotional Intelligence. He's got a new one on focus. Now what he talks about is when we train athletes, we train them and they practice so that things become habit. So if anyone here was a soccer player and I said, hey, come up here and have a pass with me on stage, you wouldn't think about, okay, I've got to lock my ankle, I got to bend my knee, I got to do this. That's just a habit. You've done it so many times that it's automatic. And that's what we call bottom-up thinking. And the best athletes have committed so many things to habit that everything happens bottom-up. So when you look at a Wayne Gretzky in hockey or Lionel Messi in soccer, they say, oh, they have eyes in the back of their head. Well, no, they just don't think about any of the things that other athletes are thinking about, it just happens automatically. And then they use what's called their top-down thinking, their creative thinking for things like, ooh, everyone's expecting me to pass here, I'm gonna shoot. Everyone's expecting me to go this way, I'm gonna go the other way. They did some studies on professional athletes to measure this type of thinking and how it affected it. They took some soccer players and they set up traffic cones and they had them dribble through the cones and timed them. Then they had them dribble through the cones but think about what part of my foot am I using to dribble? The bottom, the side, their performance went down. When they made the subconscious conscious, they performed worse. They did the same thing with baseball players and they had them hit balls and then they said, okay, now think about, is your swing on a downward trajectory or an upward trajectory? They hit the ball worse. So when we're yelling and screaming instructions as a coach, as a parent, when we're telling them how to kick a ball or how to cross a ball, we're making the things that we've trained to be subconscious, we're making them conscious and the science shows that they do worse. So that's why it shows that the best thing we can do is talk to them when they're not involved in the playing and just leave them alone while they're playing and moving. Who knows the work of Carol Dweck? Couple people, awesome. I think this is one of those mandatory books that someone should have handed me when I had my kids. Carol Dweck's a Stanford researcher and she's well known for her books called Mindset. And what she's found in 30 years of researching performance and motivation is that people have one of two types of mindset, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Now fixed mindset individuals are all about ability. I either am or I am not. So think about statements like this, if you have kids, a fixed mindset person would say, I failed my math test, I'm not good at math. I got cut from my soccer team, I'm not good at soccer. You either are or you aren't and effort has nothing to do with it because it's all about ability. And what Dweck found is that this is not a high performing mindset at all. The high performing mindset is called a growth mindset and growth mindset individuals are all about the process. Effort is everything. I fail my math test, I need to study harder. I got cut from the soccer team, I need to practice more. Everything is effort and what I am today has nothing to do with what I might be next week or next month or next year with effort and application. This is the high performing mindset. This is the idea that anything can be learned. So what Dweck found is that mindsets can be different in different parts of our lives. We aren't all fixed for all growth. You might be very growth in one aspect and fixed in another. I always say I'm very growth oriented but then my wife comes home and says, why didn't you unload the dishwasher? And I say, well, why do you think I'm a bad husband? She's like, no, you just didn't unload the dishwasher. So that's something I have to work on. But what Dweck found and this is really, really fascinating because we live in the age of effusive praise. She found that the way you praise your athletes, the way you praise your kids instills this fixed or growth mindset. When you praise your children for ability, you instill a fixed mindset. You're so artistic, you're so athletic, you're so smart. When you praise them for effort, you instill a growth mindset. She did, her first study was on a bunch of middle schoolers in New York and she gave 400 kids a puzzle, 200 of them after they took the test, she said to them, you did very well, you must be smart. And their other, she said, you did very well, you must have worked hard. She gave them two more series of tests and as they progressed through harder and harder tests, the kids praised for being smart, didn't work on it as long, so they gave up sooner, they didn't enjoy it, their scores went down. The kids who were praised for working hard, worked harder, worked longer, got more enjoyment out of it and did okay. Then her last test that she gave them, she gave them an easier test than the first one. The children praised for intelligence, scores went down, children praised for working hard, scores went up 30%. Six words of praise, six different words had a 50% swing in performance and she was so blown away and her team was so blown away, they've repeated this over and over and over, all over the country, different ages and the results kept coming back the same, coming back the same. But if you instill a fixed mindset that you either are or you aren't, you take away motivation, you take away desire, you take away enjoyment. Now as a coach, I had words for these players before I read this book, coachable, uncoachable. And what I realized was that it wasn't what I was saying, it was what they were hearing. The fixed mindset player, when I said, hey, instead of dribbling that way, open up your body and play the ball up the line, heard coach doesn't think I'm any good, because if I was good, I wouldn't have to be coached. While the growth mindset player heard, hey, coach's trying to make me better. And so what I realized was, I just had to talk to kids differently and I had to meet with their parents and they'd sit down and say, this is what I think your son's hearing, this is what your daughter's hearing when I say, when I coach them, be careful of how you're praising them. This is a real big game changer here. The next part is we have to look at the environment. That's the internal part, the mindset part, the interference part. But what about the environment? Now I love this picture. I don't know if you can see the kid that they are laying on his back, on the edge of the bench. What do you think he's talking about? I can't wait to get in the game that right back doesn't look very good. No, he's like, did you get that new video game yet? This is what kids do. Why do kids play sports? These studies have been done. There's two huge ones in the US, Notre Dame and Michigan State. Tens of thousands of kids and they asked them, give 20 reasons, why do you play? The number one reason, regardless of age, regardless of gender, because it's fun. Kids play sports because it's fun. They play to be with their friends. They play to learn new things. Because they like wearing the stuff. That's why they play. Notice it doesn't say winning. Winning came in in the Michigan State study for kids 12 and under at number 13. And for teenagers, it jumped all the way to number nine. So I think that's a fascinating thing to think about because I know as a coach, I never showed up at the field thinking that my players had eight to 12 things more on their mind than whether we won the game. I know that I didn't. But that's what the players did. By the same token, why do kids quit? They quit because of criticism and yelling. They quit because of an emphasis on winning. And when you emphasize winning, what happens? Kids don't get to play. Because sorry, Johnny, we gotta win this one. Better luck next time. They quit because they're afraid to make mistakes. So if we have an environment where three out of four kids are quitting sports right now, I think it's pretty clear that we have a lot more of this than this. Now, when I first did this research, the question that kept coming up to me when I was speaking was, well, my son or my daughter is an elite soccer player or they're really good at this. This is recreational. This doesn't count. I talked to a man named Dr. Dan Frygang. Dan is the sports psychologist for US skiing, US soccer, and USA hockey in Park City, Utah. And I asked Dan this question. He said, yeah, I used to think the same thing. So I repeated the study with all the national team athletes and the results were exactly the same. When I asked the best 16-year-old hockey player in the country, why do you play? It's fun because they love it. I don't work hockey. I play hockey. When I start working, it becomes hard, it becomes a grind. I stop having fun. And if I don't turn that around, I don't not only do I not play well, but then I don't want to play anymore. So I think this is incredibly important to understand, to remember that if we want our kids to do well, if we want them to play well, we need to create an environment that focuses on the scientifically studied ways and reasons why they play. And if we do that, we'll keep more kids in sports. Now, before I move on to a couple of little takeaways, I wanna make sure I convinced everybody that this is the path. So if you're still hesitant, I want you to consider two more things. Or really one more thing. What would it look like in our lives if our kids acted in our daily lives like sometimes we act for them in sports? Thankfully, our friends at Hockey Canada have imagined this as well. Mom, are you gonna let her get away with that? It's just a shopping cart. So it's your shopping cart. What's wrong with your chicken? Mom, you're such a wimp. What? What's wrong with you? Stand by for yourself. Go over there and give her a good smack. Ooh. Hey, they do some awesome work, but we're not done yet. Here's one more for you. Would this be helpful to all the golfers out there? Dad, focus. Why don't you stand still a little? Don't slouch. And don't screw up. This is the big one. What are you doing? Keep around the ball. They put those out about six or seven years ago. They were having a rash of parent fights in the rink and that's how they dealt with it. And I think they're great. I think they're awesome because they make you laugh and then they also make you a little bit uncomfortable. Oh man. That's right. I know my golf game could not handle anything like that. So what can we do here? What are a few things that we can take from here? Now a lot of you have read my book and I'm very humbled and honored and thank you so much for that. In my book I talk about sort of the seven C's of high performance, but I wanna talk about sort of three things that we can leave here with tonight that help to make a huge difference with our kids. And the first one is we have to give our athletes control. We have to give them control and ownership over their sports experience because when we do that, they play longer, they play harder and they drive the bus. We're just a passenger, we're just a helper. Now the best way to do this is goal setting. But when I was a young coach, I considered goal setting was I looked at my team and my players and then I set the goals and then I yelled and screamed and pushed and prodded my players to my goals. And it didn't work very well. I would get upset, we didn't ever agree, and then thankfully one year one of my players said, coach, why do you think we can win the league? We're not good. You're the only one who thinks that. I'm like, you're right, you guys are not good. No, and so that was this again, this moment. I was like, oh my God, you're right. I've never asked my players what they want from me as a coach. So at that point I started doing goal setting completely differently. I would sit the players and their parents down before the season and I would hand them a sheet. What are your three personal goals? What are your three goals for the team? Then I would have their parents fill out the same sheet of paper. What are three goals that you have for your son or your daughter? What are three goals for their team? And then I wouldn't collect them. I'd say take them home and sit down tonight at the kitchen table and compare goals with your kids. And here's the hard part for parents. Whatever your kids' goals are, you have to accept them. If you don't accept your kids' goals, that abyss will swallow your relationship. If you want them to play in college and they don't even want to play in high school, there's very little you can do to push them past that. And I would say that of all the athletes I've worked with, most of them quit because of this right here. Their goals and their parents' goals were completely incompatible. And the kids usually realize before the parents that I will have no relationship with my mom or dad if I don't walk away from sports. So you have to set goals. And the best part about doing that is that when you set goals and when you accept your kids' goals, then you get to push them. And I have a friend who's a sports psychologist. His name's Jim Taylor, and he says, kids are creatures of inertia. They tend to stay at rest until they're put in motion and then they tend to stay at motion. And it's our job as parents to sometimes give them a kick and put them in motion. But when we push them towards their goals, what we're actually saying is, if you're going to do this, do it right. We're reminding them that this is what you wanted to do. And this is an amazing thing. When I realized this, my coaching style completely changed because what I was able to then say to my teams was, stop, here's our goals. This is what we've asked for. We're not practicing very well now, but you said you wanted to win the state championship. You said you wanted to make it to regionals. You said you wanted to do these things. Well, do you think our opponents are doing this right now? No coach. And nine times out of 10, that's all I did. I didn't raise my voice. Anything, I just reminded them of their goals. I reminded them of what they asked me to coach them towards and practice would get better. The focus would get better. The effort would get better. Because all I did was say, this is what you said you wanted to do. I'm gonna help you do it right. It's an amazing, amazing thing. The next thing, this is very, very important is we have to allow them to fail. You guys like this picture? I have a bad back and that looks incredibly painful. We have to let our kids fail. The most successful people are the people who fail the most. Think about that for a second. The most successful people are the people who fail the most. I saw the slides scrolling through before the show and there was a quote, I think it was from a baseball player about how many times he struck out. There's a famous quote from Michael Jordan about how many free throws he missed and how many last second shots he missed. We have to let our children fail. We don't let them fail. We'll never learn to succeed. This is so incredibly important. I love sports because it's a great place to teach our kids about failure when we're there to help them out, help them get up, dust themselves off, pick themselves up and move on and learn from the experience. I always tell the coaches to work for me, it's not winning and losing, it's winning and learning. And when we can learn from failure, we're gonna become better. This is a massively important thing. Unfortunately, we see lots of parents who hover over their kids and as soon as they're in a challenging situation, they come in and they swoop them out and they take them away and they say, we're not gonna let you fail. I've worked with so many parents who come to me and say, we need a new coach, our coach is bad. I go watch and I see a great coach working. Well, what's bad about your coach? Well, my son has always played right defender and now he's playing on the left. This is not fair, we need a new coach. No, this is a challenge, learn from it, get better. Teach your kids to deal with these things. They're gonna have a difficult teacher. They're gonna have a difficult boss. It might as well get used to it now. Now, one of the biggest places that we don't let our kids fail is the ride home after games. When they ask children what is your worst sports memory, oftentimes they say it's the ride home after the game. Why? Because they are physically and emotionally exhausted. A lot of times we are emotionally exhausted and yet as parents, we pick this moment as the time to critique our kids, to criticize their performance, to criticize their coach and their teammates and there could not be a less teachable moment than the ride home after a game. It has to belong to your kids. Now, every kid is different, don't get me wrong. I actually didn't mind this talking with my dad. My brother hated it. I met a woman in Minnesota, she had twin daughters. One went home with her so she didn't have to talk about the game. One went home with her dad so they could talk about it. So every kid is different and unless they've done something that is totally against your family rules, they punch someone, they spit on someone. If they did something that would not be acceptable outside of sports, deal with it but then don't use it as a segue to talk about the game unless they bring up the game, let it belong to them. Now, I think this is one of the hardest things to do. As I said, I'm a parent and my son, when he was four or five years old, his first year of soccer, I was his coach. So here I am, this former pro player, top licensed coach, coaching four-year-olds. First game, my son walks out in the field and goes, not playing. And walks off. And so I'm like, oh, I'm okay with this. This is okay, I'm good, we play the game. Next week, he goes to practice, comes to the game, same thing, walks on the field, not playing dead. Walks off. So now I'm embarrassed and in my mind, I'm thinking I'm embarrassed for my son but really I was embarrassed for me. I was wondering what people thought of me, the all-star coach who can't get his four-year-old to play the game. So the game ends and we get in the car afterwards and buckle in, the kids are in the back, my wife's next to me. And so I say, so TJ, and all of a sudden this karate chop comes across my chest from my wife and then she's a black belt, by the way, so it hurt. And I'm like, oh, what was that for? She's like, you're such an idiot, you wrote a book about this, just shut up. So I know how it feels, I know you want to say something and I fight it too, but if you can just let that belong to your kids. The next week, my son came, he's played since. There was nothing I could have said in the car that day that would have made the outcome more positive than that. There was a lot I could have said that would have made the experience bad for him. So if we can let our kids fail in the ride home, that's huge. Third, enjoy the experience, enjoy this time. As those parents told me when I was doing the research, boy, this goes by quickly. Now, about 10 years ago, I met a man named Bruce Brown. Bruce found an organization called Proactive Coaching. I went and saw him speak and he totally changed the way I thought as a coach, and he totally changed sort of the foundation of who I was as a dad. And it was by this, what he says, these are the five most important words you will ever learn as a parent. And if you can convey these as a coach even better. And those five words are very simple. I love watching you play. If you can tell your kids, I love watching you play, you will totally change the way they act. They will smile in a way you've never seen them smile before. Because what you're doing is you're freeing them from the idea that they are responsible for your happiness or that your love for them is dependent upon how they do in sports. It's so amazingly powerful, it just blows the mind. Now, we know this for a couple of reasons. Number one, you know, when they ask kids, who is your favorite person to come watch you play? Guess who do the kids say? Grandma and grandpa. Why? Because they love watching you play, they don't care. I was playing baseball once and my grandparents came and I struck out three times and I was totally embarrassed. And after the game, my grandma's like, oh John, you were wonderful. And I just turned my mom. I was like, grandma's gone. She's losing it. And I said, but grandma, I struck out three times. She's like, oh, but you swung the bat so hard. Just love watching your kids play. When I started researching this book, a great friend of mine who I had coached her son, he was a national team player. She said, John, oh my God, you're writing a book for parents, give me your best advice. And I told Steph, I said, Steph, just start telling your kids you love watching them play. Cause she had three boys in sports. Said, tell them you love watching them play. So Steph looks at me and she's like, really? That's the best you got. She's like, you know, you're my friend and I don't want this to come out wrong, but you're not going to sell any books, John. Fast forward one year and I got a letter from Stephanie. I want to read it to you because it's pretty cool. She said, John, a year ago you told me to simply love watching my kids play and now it's the only thing I say that the kids after a game. I don't say anything about how they played or wins or losses, just that it's such a privilege and an honor to watch them. And it's amazing how each time I say it, it becomes more true and more impactful for even me. It's opened my eyes to a whole other kind of joy and contentment. Five words, I love watching you play. Changed everything for Steph. For her older son, he was very confident, he was a very strong player, but her two younger boys, they weren't living up to their mom's expectations. They weren't as good as their brother. And she went to games and she was under so much pressure because they weren't living up that she would yell and scream at them and give them the 10th degree on the ride home and she'd yell at referees and they didn't want to do sports anymore. And as soon as she started doing it, she said, John, now they do lots of sports and they love it. They go to tryouts and they know they're gonna get cut, but they wanna see if they got better because they finally realized that my happiness doesn't depend on how they do in sports and that I just love it. So this is the most powerful, powerful thing you can do. And if you take nothing from tonight, but you go and start telling your kids, hey, you know what, I just love watching you play and you mean that, I guarantee that you will see change. And it takes a while. And the first couple of times, if that's not what you're like, they'll look at you kind of funny. Then they'll be like, who are you and what'd you do with my parents? And then eventually they'll just smile. I do that with my kids and it's the coolest thing after any game, I tuck them in or we ski a lot together as a family and I say, I just love skiing with you guys and they just smile. It's such an amazing, powerful thing. So try that. So what do we do next? Before we bring the panel up here, I wanna give you guys a couple of ideas of what I think is the path forward from here. Now a lot of organizations are trying to solve what we would say is this youth sports mess from a top down situation. So probably everyone in here has signed a parent code of conduct at one time saying that you won't yell at the coach or yell at the referees or yell at the other parents or anything like that and that you'll bring a snack every third week. That's the parent code of conduct. Everyone does that. The new parent pledges, a lot of leagues that do silent Saturdays where no one's allowed to cheer. And that's all fine and dandy, but it doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is because you cannot compel people to behave a certain way unless you're gonna hold them accountable, right? If you want an example of that, I would have made it to Davis in about five hours instead of eight if I knew someone wasn't gonna pull me over for speeding. I would have rented a different car too. We have accountable. We have to have accountability. And I don't know any organizations that have the time and the manpower to hold people accountable at every game all the time. It's just impossible. What I think we need is a whole different type of thinking. We need a bottom up solution. We need what I call a paradigm shift. And a paradigm shift is when you don't act differently because you have to, you act differently because you want to. You see things differently and you believe them differently and therefore you act differently. If we're gonna change you sports, we need coaches and parents to create environments that put the players first, not because they have to, but because they want to. Now, my guess is that some of you here, because I've talked to a lot of you already and they say, you know, I hope so-and-so comes. Or you're thinking about, you know, I know this parent, everywhere I go and speak, they say, you know, who's this person? You know, Johnny's dad, Jenny's mom, they should be here because they are off the charts. Wacko. Don't bother with them. You're not gonna change their mind. What I found is that start with people who think like you. There are so, there are way more people who are about their kids. There are way more people who are child centered. And if we tell people who think like us and pass on these type of ideas, then they'll make those changes in their family too. And you'll have a much more receptive audience. Now the pastor at my church, he says when you want to spread a good message, think of it as a recipe. And if you go up to your friend Bob and you say, hey Bob, I know you like to cook chicken. And I've had your chicken and your chicken sucks. Try my recipe. Bob's gonna be like, no, get away from me. You're not invited to dinner. But if you say, hey Bob, I know you like chicken. I just got this great recipe. I think you should check it out. Now you're inviting them that maybe there's an alternative. Maybe there's a different way. And if we do that, if we find like-minded people and tell them about a book, tell them about an organization like proactive coaching, share a blog post, do things like that. That's how we'll get the numbers going. And eventually what'll happen to Johnny's crazy dad and Jenny's crazy mom is that they'll be the only one left yelling at the referee and they either assimilate or they leave. But either way, problem solved, your team is better off. Your son and your daughter is better off. And that's how I think we can change the game. And I know if there's one thing that I'm convinced of is that there are far more parents and coaches like us, good people who wanna do right by their kids. And there's a lot of people out there who have a lot to lose if the system changes. We will have obstacles. We will have people who fight against us. But I know that if we don't require the journey to be safe or easy, we can definitely change youth sports. And for me, when I look at that picture, that was taken three years ago at the game I told you about in the beginning. And when I look at those girls and their smiles and their faces and their innocence and I think about how impactful and how important and what a role sports can play in their lives, I know that this is something that I wanna make happen. I know that it's a journey worth pursuing. And I hope that you guys will join me on that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to John O'Sullivan. I think we all learned so much. Our panel discussion with John and our local coaches is coming up. If you have a question written down on an index card for Q&A, just raise your hand so that one of our representatives, Diana, Emily, or Sue, can come by to pick it up from you. You can specify on top of your card too if your question is directed to a particular panelist or if it's to all of the experts. At this time, please allow me to introduce the chair of Parent University, Kristi Freese. Much for being here. I commend you for being here on a Friday evening. I have to tell you I wish more seats were full. But we are here. And that was a wonderful, wonderful talk that John gave us. I felt very happy to be here and lucky. So thank you for being here. This presentation is brought to you by Davis Parent University, which is a committee of volunteers. We have a representative from every school in Davis. We meet once a month and we organize these events and plan them and bring wonderful speakers such as John to our town of Davis and offer these programs for free. So in your envelope, you'll see a blue survey. I would like you to add something to the bottom of that survey. And that is if you could jot down, if you have a feeling about this, when you think the best time for a Parent University lecture is, whether that's a Friday night or a Saturday morning or a Thursday night, if you would like to come again and you care about that, if you could jot that down, that would be great information for us to have in our committee. I hadn't planned to say that, so give me just a second. I would like to take a moment to recognize Pamela Wu, who has been helping us out for three years. She's so wonderful and she makes our lectures so much more professional. So thank you so much, Pamela. We appreciate your talent and expertise. We also have some amazing people in the room. We will have a panel of local coaches, as you know. And you may recognize them from the soccer field or the football field or the martial arts studio in town or the pool deck at Shawl. We're really happy to have these local coaches here so that we can bring this conversation kind of back to Davis and how we can hopefully make good changes in our community relating to youth sports. On that note, I would like to introduce you to Jodi Liederman. She's the Davis Parent University Outreach Coordinator, my colleague and friend, Jodi Liederman. Hi everyone, with Christie's leadership this year as chairwoman for the Parent University, our committee was able to bring John, as Christie mentioned, and it was a great find. So awesome, great work. Do you agree? To move our work forward, it takes your interest, it takes the hard work of our amazing parent ed reps, K through 12. But most importantly, it takes funding. So over half of our funds do come from all of you and you who find value in the Parent University. Yes, this is a pitch. The Parent University lecture series is already exploring topics and speakers for next year. So you can help us tonight to continue our work and to help us to raise funds by giving what you can tonight. We have found that the average donation is $10 per person. You all, as Christie mentioned, have a yellow envelope that had your survey and the index card in there. So if you could include the survey in the envelope with a donation that works for you, we would truly appreciate it. And right now our reps will come around with their little baskets and collect those from you. So thank you again for your awesome support. Back to Pam. Thank you to those of you right now who are turning in your questions, as well as your donations. We very much appreciate your support. At this time, please welcome back to the stage, John O'Sullivan. He is going to be joined by our panel of local coaches. First, Richard Baccherini, who has been training in the martial arts for over 20 years and has personally coached and mentored over 2,000 children during that time. Richard and his wife own and operate Baccherini's Martial Arts in downtown Davis. They have two younger daughters who are involved with several sports, not just the martial arts. The mission statement at Baccherini's Martial Arts is to create respectful and confident leaders in the community through life skills and practical martial arts. Please welcome Richard Baccherini. Oh, that's it. Next, a familiar face to many of you, Ashley Uden has lived in Davis since 1977 when he accepted a position as a research associate at UC Davis. He has spent the last 35 years coaching youth soccer in Davis and is regarded by many as a soccer coaching icon in the Davis community. Ashley has coached both boys and girls teams recreational as well as state teams and high school boys and girls. Please welcome Ashley Uden. Corinne Motakaitis has coached swimmers at both the collegiate and youth levels, including at Sac City College where she trained all Americans and state champions. As an assistant at UC Davis, she works with high achieving student athletes. A competitive swimmer herself, she tallied four individual conference titles at UC Davis as well as school records en route to becoming a Division II national champ. She has been inducted in the UC Davis Hall of Fame. Welcome Corinne Motakaitis. And Steve Smyte was a four sport athlete in high school so he very much believes in the principle of enjoying different sports and the benefit of transference of skills between sports. As head varsity football coach at Davis Senior High School, his focus was on raising the team GPA, emphasizing character development and improving skill development. Before Davis High, he was on the coaching staff at Boise State, UC Davis, and for the Canadian Football League. Please welcome Steve Smyte. There's so much expertise on this panel that I see before me. First of all, let me ask any of our four panelists who've just joined us now. What were your thoughts on John O'Sullivan's talk? I like a lot of what John has to say, making a paradigm shift and bringing sports back and bringing fun and focusing on the process and letting go of the outcome. I think it would be a huge relief for the kids. So I agree with that. Some of us have met, we met before to prep for this. And so this is a question that I'd like to pose to all of you and I'd like to start with John. What are the best reasons for our kids to play sports? What are the worst reasons for our kids to play sports? Well, I definitely think that the best reasons are to become active adults. I think it's so important that they develop an active lifestyle. What neuroscience shows us is that the patterns of whether you're active or not really set in by about 10 years old. So if we can get our kids moving, they have a far better chance of continuing to move throughout their lives. Then like I said in the beginning, just the ability to teach them core values and character and things like that. There's not a better arena than sports, I think, to develop good people and good athletes. Anyone else care to weigh in, Richard, please? Yeah, I couldn't agree more with everything you said. And I really see, is it basically they're learning like lessons as they go through sports. They're gonna have their wins, they're gonna have their losses, they're gonna be knocked down. They gotta get back up and they got great coaches, great mentors like the ones you see up here who provide inspiration in addition to the family and their other teachers. So it's very powerful. And I think everyone needs to have that experience, especially at a young age. I think that sports, whether it's individual or team sports, of course I come from a team sport background, but I grew up as an individual sports person. But team sports allow you to interact and learn to develop relationships and how do you work together. And so many times as you get older and you go through life, it is a team environment. Where you work, it's a team environment. And then there's situations where there's individual. So everyone gets motivated and goes in whatever direction they want, they like if they're individual to take their own responsibility for what they do versus a team that like a collective responsibility. So all these things are key elements to growth when you get out in the real world. And then when you have to work with either a group and or as an individual. I think that sports are really good about developing resilience. And that part's really important. And our kids, they don't have a lot of freedoms or opportunities. And so when we talk about like John was mentioning letting our kids fail, it's in a pretty safe environment. There's a container for it. And that part becomes really important for the kids to develop because when they're in the educational realm, they don't really have that space to fail, right? It's about they need to achieve. They need to get the great grades. Otherwise they're gonna get left behind. And so we have this incredibly safe area that where they can fail, they can make mistakes and they can learn that growth mindset that's so critical. It's a valuable opportunity, like you said in a safe place, Steve. I agree with what they said. No, I thought first of all, John, I thought your book was excellent. I thought it was right on the right focus. One thing in looking at where sports are and what we need to do, I think what is critical is that, and is that there's a mission statement for what you want. What do you wanna get out of sports? What do you want your child to get out of sports? It's a discussion that you really have to take because to me, sports are more than just athletics. It's about development of the holistic individual. One thing, all I can speak of is right at the beginning of the year, we always, in January as a football team, we set our goals and I didn't set the goals. I loved it when you said that. The team set the goals and I've always felt my role as a coach was to make sure that I gave them the best opportunity to achieve the goals that they had. And what's great is a lot of the goals revolved around stuff that wasn't athletic. It was 100% attendance at zero period, which we did at 6 a.m. And they loved it. It was, we're gonna get 100% at summer camp. We're gonna get, we're gonna raise our GPA. We are going to have zero character issues. We are going to have, we're gonna be great teammates. And a lot of these goals, they said, we need to listen to that. And our role is to be the enforcer of it, to be the mentor to help them get along there. And so like one of the things that came out of ours is, you know, we always, and it's something that we would say as we went around is, our goal is to make our players be great sons and daughters. Yes, I had, there was a women's kicker we had on the team. Sons and daughters, great teammates, great citizens and community members, great students and then great athletes. And that was the fifth thing on the list. And we did this through and we had key phrases that we thought were our core values. And nowhere in here was it wins or losses. It was honor, integrity, toughness, togetherness, sacrifice. Those were the five ways that we were gonna achieve the goal of being great citizens, great teammates, great students, great athletes. So it was a vision that had to do with a holistic child and not just, you know, we're gonna win or lose. I love that. It's a process, it's not a product. And you might think, oh, you know, that's different here in data than it is at Boise State. Boise State, we had the same thing. We didn't concentrate on wins and losses. We didn't say that we were gonna win the WAC. We said we were gonna get better every day. And that's what it's about, not wins and losses. I thought that was great that you drove that one. You talk about values and goals and John talks about that in the book. You have in the book some of your more thought-provoking points you refer to as the game-changing questions. And one of them is to ask yourself whether your actions truly reflect your values. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, yeah, you talk about a mission statement and one of the things I talk about in the book is do you have a family mission statement? You have something that says this is the role that sports are gonna play in our kids' lives. And I think it's incredibly important that we think about where we wanna end and then work towards that. It's like my golf game. It goes here, it goes there, it goes there, but eventually it has to go there. I think so many people go to sports and have no idea what their end game is, what they wanna get out of it. But you get so much more out of it if you really sit down and you think about this is what we value. We need a sports organization that reflects those values. And every day we're asking ourselves, is this organization, is this team, is this code reflecting our values? And if they're not, then you really have to think about, it doesn't matter how many games you win, they're giving your kids an inconsistent message. So know where you're going and then it's not gonna be a straight line, but at least you know where you're going. Here's a question from the audience. And so I welcome anybody here to jump in if you feel like you have a contribution to make. The question is, how do we as parents encourage our kids to play multiple sports, like in the fall football or in the spring baseball, when some of our high school coaches penalize kids for not playing travel and club sports in the so-called off season? I'm highly spoken of. I don't think anyway, just in my perspective, I was a high school coach for a lot of while and I don't recall anybody being penalized for playing other sports. Is there a perception of being penalized, maybe? Potentially, I mean, I can't talk for others, but your job is the, and the responsibility you have as a high school coach is to take what you believe is the best 20 that show up. You don't really care what they do or where they came from. Because they're the ones that show up, they're the ones that try it out and perform the best during that week of trials. That's bottom line. I think anyway that I just can't speak for any other sport. I know football is not you around. Swimming, they started three in the morning. Swimming's no cut, so. Well, let's approach the question then from a different way, because I want to try to help to answer the parents' question. Perhaps the athlete is reluctant to diversify. Maybe you can talk about that, Steve, because you were a force-forward athlete. Well, and I think it was easier back then, but in a lot of respects in that we just had season, but back then, when you were in football or whatever, you'd go till six and then you'd have practice at seven in basketball if you were doing playoffs and that. So there's a point of too far. Now, one thing that we did is a football program. We encouraged our athletes to do other sports. I'm all for football players playing other sports. I think as a college recruiter too, one thing I would look at, and you talk about specialization, one thing I was looking at a quarterback when we had our lists, we'd say, is the kid a point guard in basketball? Is he a shortstop in baseball? There's some transference of skills that you can sometimes see within different sports. I recruited a lot of kids when I was at UC Davis by watching them play basketball. I wanted to see, how did they react? What was their foot speed? How did they react to somebody making a move? And one of the best receivers we ever got, we were the only school to offer him and he ended up setting records for us in reception. So I really do believe in that. I believe that coaches can work together on that. I know Dan gets Alice and I had an agreement with our basketball, we had a lot of guys who played basketball on football and Danny, Ola, and I, we spoke about baseball and how it fit in. And since we had a way better weight training program than the other sports, they would give us over to us and they'd get bigger, stronger, and faster, which helped them in the other sports that they played. John, what are your thoughts about encouraging a child to diversify? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the question, because I get to go to so many schools in so many places and I hear that a lot and I think that it's a communication thing. And when I ran a soccer club, I didn't get to pick the season. So we had tons of multi-sport athletes but what I would try to do with my kids who were trying to play a soccer state championship at the same time that track was going on was before the season started, I would sit down with the track coaches and I'd say, okay, here's, we're gonna balance this and I'm gonna back them out of my training or they're gonna not do the fitness part or whatever so we don't burn them out. But then I have two weeks here that doesn't really affect your season where we're gonna play for a state championship, can you back them out? I had some coaches that I worked very well with and some who would pay that lip service and then say, and then not do it. And what would happen at that point was we had adults making kids make a choice. And I think as an adult, you want to find, help your kids do everything that they want to do because they don't get this time back. And if they wanna do both, then I always try to find a way but a lot of times when they're given a choice, they're gonna quit one of those sports. And if you have a kid who wants to play college soccer, well, tracks the one that's gonna go. And I would say to those coaches, hey, they're gonna quit if you make and make a choice and you're not gonna like the choice that they make so let's make it work. At what, we've been talking about diversification. At what age is it appropriate to specialize in a sport? This is a question from the audience. I think it depends on the sport. So, and it depends on some of the long-term goals. I mean, it's told me we are huge proponents of being multi-sport athletes. We actually make kids take breaks. We force them, we won't offer programming at certain times of the year. But if you do have kind of a long-term goal and you want to swim in college, there's kind of a certain amount of yardage you have to put in. So, we, on our team, we look at about 13 where we say, okay, this is about the amount of time that you're gonna need to put in if these are your goals. This is what you want and the direction you wanna go in. Richard, I see you nodding over there. What are your thoughts about specialization? Yeah, I agree with everything I was saying. Coming from a martial art background where I was really treated individually, I worked with two and a half year olds and my three old daughters, one of them, she actually did soccer before she did martial arts. I didn't wanna make her have a path. We talk about the goals when you have communication. Doesn't hurt that my wife's accounts are in health so that communication is lost. You're the professional. We're really good at that, but it's so amazing. I let my daughter choose, she said soccer and I let her do her soccer channel. Blast was just like the game you talked about and I never knew it could be that amazing. So rewarding just to watch your child play and love what they're doing, even though they might not know what they're doing. So I think it's really important to feel the child, every child's gonna be different. Parents are gonna want different things but we really gotta communicate and let them find their way and they'll fall into place. And I did make my daughter do martial arts first. I want her to get that experience. I think it's important, but I let her choose her path and now she's kinda doing both and she loves it. You know what, I would just throw in one thing. I think every athlete, regardless of if you do one sport or multiple, I'm not convinced every athlete should do and would benefit from yoga. When you look at professional athletes who have had long careers, a cream Abdul Jabbar or in soccer, you've got a guy called Ryan Giggs who's still playing in the English Premier League at 40. Got his yoga four days a week, it's not an accident. So I think it's such a great thing for both mental and physical training and I used to take my teams and do hot yoga and it's great to take a bunch of 16-year-old boys and do 110 if you want some guilt. You're brave. This question comes from the audience as well. When do you let them quit if they sign up for the season and then decide three games and that they don't like it? Do you make them finish it out or encourage them to finish it out because they started the process? You mentioned this before. Now I'll speak to that. One of the things that I think is always really important as a family is to know, John calls it a mission statement. I always talk about what are your feeling values? What is your intention? Why are you having your child do this? And so our family, we have this very simple rule and our kids have known this since my kids were five years old. When we start something, we finish out the season. So when they're five, the season hopefully is a few months. It's a shorter-term thing because I want my kids to know that they need to follow through, right? As they get older, there may be some other components that we look at but that is kind of our guiding principle of we're gonna start something, we're gonna finish it out. And knowing, I have an eighth grader, so our third child who was gonna play about, I told her she had to play basketball on the eighth grade basketball team this year. I said, you have to go. You need to get out of the pool and go play. Go try it out. Because you didn't want her like Richard, so you didn't want her to feel like she was trapped. Yeah, well, yeah. Just go do something else and get out of the swimming thing. And go be on a team. And I think a team sport's really important. And she was, she got really nervous and she didn't want to do it. And I just, I looked at her and you have to do this. And that was, there was a little bit different in that. I just said, go for a week, we'll reevaluate. And in that sense was that I just knew that she was more afraid of the unknown, right? And so then once we got through that first practice she was in, that was done. We were gonna finish out the season and then she could reevaluate for ninth grade. And that was what we did, so. And it would seem too that just, you know, a couple of practices in, you don't want to send the message to the child that once something gets tough, then you can quit. And that goes with the family values. What are your family values? Is it when there's struggle that we jump ship? You know, there's a saying that how you do something, one thing is how you do everything. And I think that is really important when we make these decisions. And we're kind of parenting through this maze that we don't really understand, right? We're hoping to get to the other side. So when you go with what are your values and using that as guiding principles is really key. So what would your more specific advice then be to this parent, maybe we'll try, you know, try to finish out the season, or hey, go with three or four more games and see how you feel then. It depends how long you season it. It's a year, that's a big difference versus three months, right? And is that a family value? Because if it's not, I mean, if the parent does not believe that, you're now asking somebody to leave with something that they don't buy, right? That's my family's value. I would not say that somebody else's family value. What do you do? Which has really occurred now as we were just discussing is that more and more of the programs are lengthy programs. So it gets to a point where what is commitment? When it's a 10 month, 12 month commitment to soccer, basketball, baseball, or whatever, these are huge commitments. This is a year, you know? So if you're four months into it and go, I just don't want to do this anymore. I struggle with the idea of a kid backing out at and saying, I don't want to do it anymore. I know everybody keeps saying, well, you made this commitment, but it's hard for a kid to envision what a year is, syndrome, and tell them they have to sit out for three weeks and they get the concept of time better. But until they get older, we don't have time. So when you ask a child, you have to commit to this for a year, they don't have any idea what a year is. And we need to come up with a better way of making kids understand this is long-term. Nowadays, it's no 10 weeks and you're out of it. Because kids can do it. I can make it three more weeks or three more weeks and I can do it. But when you tell them you got to keep going for nine more months, it's a long time for a kid. Yeah, it's a long time. They don't really have the concept of just how long that is. Yeah, it's just done. They freak out when Christmas is more than a week away. Yeah, I'd like that. We talked about goal-setting and making sure the communications are really clear from the beginning. And we're talking about year and some time and everything will be a little different and every scenario will be different, but making sure that there's some realistic, smart goals that are time-driven, specific, measurable, and that's the acronym I use in my field as far as goal-setting with my students. You really got to know what that is. It's got to be defined. It's got to be from them. And I see it with my kids, with my family, and with my martial arts students, which is an extension of my family. I hold them to their goals. That's my job. They may lose sight and be distracted, but whether it's a really small goal or a medium or large goal, my goal is to keep them on course and sometimes that road's going to take you in a different direction. And you're going to be somewhere else you didn't expect, but a great coach, a great mentor, it's almost live, is going to help them get there no matter what and face the problems and be honest with themselves as well as the students. So I think it comes down to a really smart goal-setting and helping the child understand what that means and the consequences of discipline and how you get discipline. You can't quit something just because you had a bad day or you feel sick and you shouldn't be forced into something that seems like long-term or for life, basically, a life sentence to a kid. Such an image. One thing about that, too, is I think you work commitments and the second thing is why is the player quit? That's also a real important discussion to have with the player because it can give you some insight into maybe some things that are going on in his life or her life that you may not even be aware of, you know? And so it's very important to get there and find out what's behind that. And the other thing is one thing I said, you know, after having that discussion, there's some valid reasons for quitting when you're going to do that earlier. And there's a point where you can speak to them and you can try to, one thing I'd always say is, and it didn't happen often, but I'd say, you know, there's never been a football player in all my afterwards and said, you know what, I'm really glad I quit. But I'll tell you what, there's been many that came to, I should listen to you, I don't know why I did it and I regret that decision, you know? And I always give that information to the individual who they're contemplating quitting. I go, you know what, and I tell them that story, I hope the experiences I've had that I've been able to relate, you know? And why is really important, you know? Have you had a bad week of practice or something now like where you were talking about, are you a result-oriented person who is going to quit because, you know, it's hard or can you teach a life lesson to that student about, and you know what, if you put forth the effort, I'll work with you. We can, as a team, do that. We make a commitment to a team we've made, you know, and they have to understand that, you know? And what I've always said, if you wish to quit, I would address the team on it. I know that sounds like that, it'd be extra pressure, but when you set goals, what we do is we write them, like we use the set the goals and the kids sign their names on a big chart. And when you do that, you make commitment to them. Yeah, there's accountability. There's accountability, and as part of that, as being a mature individual, the growth process then. We have a lot of great questions, but just a few minutes left, so we'll try to get through some of these quickly. How much is it okay for parents to coach their own kids if they're not the official coach? Don't. The best, and I coach my kids, and there's people in this audience when I coach my kids, it's one of the hardest things I have to do. And my kids are like the college children who don't have shoes. They, I forget to sign them up for stuff and all kinds of stuff. When I, we have this unique family dynamic where all four of our kids have swam, and that does not usually happen because swimming people are pretty weird and fanatic, and usually the kids are like I'm out of there. And so I look at what we did and we keep swimming separate from home, so that ride home that John was talking about around the dinner table. We're like just like every other family trying to figure out, you know, what's happening. So with my older daughter who I don't coach, I am her parents. And I really stick with that because the other side is, I may disagree with her dad on how he's coaching her, but she only needs one person that's telling her what to do, right? And so too many cooks. And so it actually, if I have a parent that comes down really hard on one of my swimmers, then I can't do my job and say this is how we need to redirect. I wanted to come for the kids. So it gets actually in the way of my coaching ability. So that's my recommendation is, you know, let me coach and then you can love your kids and it'll be a lot more harmonious for a lot of people. I think it depends on the child and the coach too. I coach both my daughters basketball and I don't think they're that smart. You know, maybe Julia, are you still okay? Yeah, okay. She's not answering. Yeah. It was a soccer coach who did it. There you go. Okay, so what do we do when our sideline is doing the things you speak about and acting appropriately, but our opponents are over the top yelling at the referees and yelling at the players? I just say look at them compassionately. Look at them with compassion. John, what do you think? I think that when situations like that arise, it's very hard as a parent and you have to ask yourself, is there atrocious behavior putting my child in danger and coaches can do the same things with opponents? I think in my life twice, I've just pulled the team off a field so out of control. I've just said what we've done here, but when the parents, if they're just incredibly obnoxious, what I can pretty much guarantee is if you don't behave like that and you have a very good sideline, after the game your kids will come and say, parents were nuts. Well, and you've set a good example for them too. And you set that example and you know what, if you go and get in a fight, congratulations on that sports memory you made for your kids. Dad going off in cuffs. This speaks to, we'll do just a couple more quick questions. This speaks to one of the takeaway points that John had which was to let the ride home be theirs. When going home after the game, what is a good way to listen and get support or answers and possibly constructive criticism? Is that to me? Oh, hi. So again, let them bring it up. Ask them questions. There's some great ways to talk to kids, ask them questions that they can't give one word answers to. What are some sample questions? Oh, just instead of saying, how was the game good? What are three things you learned? What were three things that happened in the game? So things like that. But don't criticize teammates, don't criticize coaches. Because what you're telling your kid, sometimes parents say to their kids, oh, Jenny's a ball hog, she took all the shots. And what you're trying to do is make your daughter feel better about not scoring enough points. But what you're doing is criticizing her friend and you're giving her an excuse for not scoring a lot of points. If you say, oh, that coach, why are you guys playing zone? You should be doing something else. If you're undercutting the authority of the authority figures. So making about your kid, making about things that he or she controls. They can control their effort. They can't control a referee. They can't control the weather. Things like that. So things they control, discuss those. What can you do better? And then drop it when they're ready to drop it. This question says, what do you do for the child who doesn't like sports, but should still be active and needs to be active? What's the family value? The family value is that we have movement. So what are, what is the movement? You're saying set the example. Well, part of it, yeah, the parent needs to do it, but what is the family value? And then if our family value is that we move, then, and you may not wanna move, what are you willing to do to create movement, right? How will that be? So what sport are you gonna join? What exercise are you gonna do? I need to touch on that one, because this is really important. Athletic ability is not an innate skill. It's a learned skill. The ABC Agility Balance Coordination is something that kids learn. If your kids didn't know how to read, you wouldn't say act, read. Say forget about reading. You'd say, no, this is an important life skill. Well, I argue that being active and healthy is a life skill. Some kids pick it up very quickly and do it naturally. Some need to learn those things and it's your job as a parent to make sure they're taught and enroll them in good early beginning programs, tumbling, martial arts, soccer, or great games, to wrestling, to teach them those ABCs. But never give up on a kid because they don't get it right away. So what about them for a child who's, say, 11, 12, 13? Well, actually, I was that kid. I tried sports for a young age and I know some people in the panel heard my story and I had an experience that wasn't the best and it kind of held me back and I was told, you know, I'm not athletic, I can't do it, you know, five years old, I'd listen. That was discouraging. And yeah, I believed it. My mom kind of believed it and I kind of stepped back and I turned 11, 12 years old and I really had no direction. I was hanging out with my friends, I was kind of really lazy as in the video games and I decided to try martial arts. My mom kind of pushed me into it and I'm still doing it, so I found a love for it, but if my mom didn't give me that little nudge, I wouldn't have had it and it comes down to communication and my mom knew I needed to do something, need to be active. Swimming was her thing when she was younger and she knew that I wasn't mine and she never gave up on me and she kept trying until I found the right fit. But she didn't just say, oh, you know, he's not that active person, he's not gonna be able to do it, he's not coordinated. You know, if I'd listened to that, I wouldn't be here right now. I don't know what I would be doing. So, you know, I think it's really important to, you know, set some standards and your values in your house and, you know, being active is important. We all understand obesity is then again a, you know, world basically, we don't want that to be our child. I know I don't. So, we gotta kind of be firm about it but let them choose the path and support them through it. So, it's very important. If I can add, you know, if the kid is 11 or 12 and in this town, you're kind of now really late, right? Just be willing to let them essentially suck. And, you know, when we talk about the failure, it's okay, when a kid comes and hasn't been on the team, it's okay, we're gonna teach them and they will get better. That's why you go to practice. But what happens a lot of times is that it's this idea that we as parents feel shame because, oh, our kid, maybe we messed up, we didn't do what we needed to. And that is very corrosive because in the essence, like why I think sports are so important is to be a part of something, to be connected. Shame corrodes connection. So, by letting your kids like, you know what, it's okay. You suck at this. Keep going to practice, you're gonna get better. I mean, that's just what's gonna happen. Go on practice, work through that struggle. And the kids that I know who started swimming at 11 or 12 years old, you know, and I see them now as grown adults and what they're capable of, they're resilient, you know. And so, we don't have to be this entry point of they have to start something at four or five or six. They can go do something else and they can go try something. So, if it's about, if the family value is we need to have movement and we need to have good health, then go try something and go do it and make that commitment towards that. That's that growth mindset that you were referring to as well, but there's joy in the process and in the effort. And maybe there's not joy in the process. Like, when parents say to me, oh, it was so hard to get them to practice from school. I was like, well, are you jumping up for joy to go to the gym and work out? You know, usually most adults are kind of going, oh, I need to go and intellectually understand why, but we really don't want to go, right? So, these are kids saying, I don't really want to go. I'd rather sit and watch TV or play video games. They don't really want to go. But once you never evaluate on the drop off, I always tell parents evaluate on the pickup. This is the last question. I've noticed my child's coach behaving badly on the field. What should I say or do? Nobody appeared, of course. Yeah, man, I don't know who you're doing that for. I've broken clipboards before when I was young. Did anyone can talk to you about it? I was, it was when I was coaching him, he was water polo, so that kind of stuff happens in water polo. Chairs, even. You throw chairs, yeah. You throw a lot of stuff in water polo. The most dangerous part is water polo. Ashley, do you have any thoughts on that? If a parent has concerns about a coach's behavior on the field, what's the appropriate way to approach that? Well, I currently run a club, a soccer club, and we have very strict rules and regulations on coach behavior. So is it always followed? No, it's not, but there are consequences. So it's usually the other team's coach and it's not a behavior that's... Never Davis, no. No, I'm not saying not Davis. But to tell you the truth, I've been around quite a long time in Davis and Vegas sports, and for the much part, I'm just seldom seeing core sportsmanship and behavior to kids or referees. For the much part, it's well-controlled. You know, the reality is coaches are foul, just like teachers, just like administrators, just like anybody else, you know, they're made in the states. Sometimes, you know, in the heat of the moment, there's great coaches that can point to situations where they said, boy, I really wish I didn't say that or I really wish I didn't do that because they're human. That becomes a growing experience for them and a teachable moment for the parent. The thing the parent should do is discuss that from the child because I think when you will, and because it's harmful to the child, because what it does is it allows the child to have an excuse for a blame cycle. And it's very important to keep the locus of control in term for their successes and as opposed to end failures so that they can learn from it. That's how we learn. And instead of saying it's the coaches, oh yeah, that coach is like that, because what it does is it allows the child and to have an excuse, there's a vehicle there to shift the blame and that type of thing, which isn't going to end child growth at a level. This has been a great discussion. Any final thoughts from our panel tonight? Thank you. You guys have been awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I do believe that, as John said, and he says in his book, it's just when you get to a point where you decide that things need to be changed, it is now at rock bottom, now we have to go back in the other direction. It's you people that are gonna change it. And the more we get new to talk to somebody else, to talk to somebody else, then the better off we are. And John has done us all a great service making us aware of the direction that we were going in. And now it's the time to go back in a different direction. I'd like to thank all of our panelists tonight, as well on this Friday night before spring break. You are invited to a book signing with John and the friend Fourier. And if you didn't get a chance to pass in your survey or your donation, you can hand it to one of the reps as you walk up the front or drop it in one of the donation boxes on the table. So until next time, be well, enjoy your children, and have a wonderful spring break. Thank you for coming tonight.