To mark the release of our brand new book The Champion Sports Parent: Practical Wisdom for Raising Confident, Competitive, Mentally Tough Athletes, we wanted to offer our readers a sneak peak of the book introduction. Please enjoy, and if you are inspired, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO GRAB A COPY from Amazon or CLICK HERE FOR A SIGNED AUTHOR COPY

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If you want to help your children to succeed in sports or anything else for that matter, offer support, love, and perhaps more than anything, the space to experience and learn on their own. Maybe by sitting back, enjoying the game, observing your kids in action, you can help them learn
the game faster and enjoy it more. Just a thought.

—Steve Kerr, head coach, Golden State Warriors

A few years back, John was enjoying a game of golf in his hometown of Bend, Oregon, and was paired with a father and son for his round. The boy was about 14, and he could hit a ball really well. Long, nice draw, great iron play, and pretty good around the green.The kid was a solid 14-year-old golfer.

Hole after hole they played, and the boy was scoring much better than his dad and John, despite the coaching his father was constantly giving him.

“Keep your head down,” after an errant drive.

“You were supposed to be right of the flag there—come on, son,” as the boy hit his approach shot to the wrong part of the green.

“Stay focused!” after the boy misread a putt.

“He’s pretty good,” said John after the boy smashed another drive down the middle of the fairway.

“We’re thinking of packing up and moving cross-country to Florida where he can play more golf,” the dad said proudly.“ It’s going to be hard to sell our house, and hopefully I can get a new job; otherwise his mom and I will take turns with him down there while the other one stays here with his siblings. But those are the sacrifices you make when your kid has PGA Tour potential.”

“PGA Tour potential?” said John, his eyes a little wider at this point. “You’re picking up and moving your whole life and family for your son’s golf at age 14?”

“Yeah, I know it sounds nuts,” said the father a little sheepishly. “But everyone says if we don’t do this now and get him more golf and better coaching, he’s going to miss his window.”

There were a million and one thoughts racing through John’s mind at that point—namely that there were a lot of great golf courses and golf teachers in Bend, that children only get one childhood, and that parents spend 90 percent of their lifetime of hours with their children prior to their 18th birthday, so why give that up? As an author and professional speaker who travels the globe speaking about youth sports, coaching and parenting young athletes, John also knows quite a few top golf coaches, and they will all tell you that players with pretty swings and solid ball striking are a dime a dozen—it takes a lot more than that to make it on tour. John also knew that parents living vicariously through their son’s sports often spoil the child’s love of sport. There were a lot of things John wanted to say, but the only words that came out were “I wish him luck. He seems like a nice kid.”

This is youth sports 2024. It’s far too often an over-commercialized, adult-centric enterprise with children and parents trying to keep up with the Joneses, afraid to miss out, many times sacrificing the child’s physical health and mental well-being in pursuit of some far-fetched future goal at the behest of coaches and sports organizations charging thousands of dollars for selling the dream. Author Michael Lewis compared the business of youth sports to the market for addictive drugs: unregulated, fueled by money, and populated by desperate actors. It is often a race to nowhere with both children and parents, in the end, broken-down, beaten, and wondering, Why did we do that?

Youth sports is big business. In 2019, the youth sports industry was valued at $19.2 billion, an increase of more than 90 percent from 2010 and over $4 billion more valuable than the NFL. Local sports have disappeared and been replaced by travel leagues and extensive sports tourism. A 2019 Harris Poll of 1,001 adults with children in private sports clubs found that 27 percent paid more than $500 per month on their children’s sports. Eight percent paid over $12,000 per year. And sadly, 36 percent of these families took less family vacations, and nearly 20 percent added a second job to help pay the expenses. The sports industrial complex is bleeding families dry, and excluding many other kids who cannot afford to even play.2

Perhaps author Linda Flanagan says it best in her wonderful book Take Back The Game. “Thanks to the extravagant investment in kids sports, parents’ Olympian commitment to their children’s recreation, and the exalted role of athletics in higher education,” she writes,“ much of what we love about youth sports – and why we want our children to play –, has been eroded.” We must do better.

We could go on and on about today’s youth sports environment, but that is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is to help you, the reader, be the best possible sports parent you can be. Why did we need to write a book?

Because it’s hard to be the parent of a young athlete in the 21st century. Harder than it has ever been, and certainly harder than it was when we were growing up. You will never get it all right, and you will often screw it up. We know this firsthand.

Jerry’s youngest son, Brennan, was a top distance runner in the state of California. He came within three seconds of being the state cross country champion and received a scholarship to one of the top running schools in the country, the University of Colorado. Being an accomplished runner himself, Jerry saw how his son was living the dream he never got to experience as a collegiate athlete. He started to live his life, unintentionally, through Brennan’s successes and became quite overzealous in the process, much to his embarrassment—and his son’s as well. At the time, Jerry, a practicing sport psychologist with 30 years’ experience, was looking for purpose and meaning in his athletic life, and Brennan’s journey fulfilled what he had hoped to be in college.

One day, as Jerry yelled and screamed instructions from the side of the race course, Brennan stopped running, turned around, and told his dad to zip it. Jerry was mortified as he realized what had been happening—that he had made his son’s journey his own. As Jerry says today, “I’m happy to say I am still a bit embarrassed by this, but I’m thrilled that I woke up and learned my lesson that I needed to find my own purpose and simply support him from a distance.”

John, too, has had numerous instances of far-from-perfect sports parenting. One in particular he shared in his 2014 TEDx Talk, “Changing the Game in Youth Sports.” When his son TJ was only five years old and playing his first soccer game, John was his coach. He was so proud and excited that his son was going to play the sport he loved so much and had made a life out of coaching. Come game time, though, TJ turned to his dad and said, “I don’t want to play.” John was mortified, embarrassed, and a tad angry. TJ, on the other hand, was perfectly happy, for he had found a lizard on the side of the field to play with. As they got into the car post-game, John couldn’t help himself, in spite of all the advice he gave to others through his work. “So TJ . . .” he began, before his wife poked him from the passenger seat.

“Really,” she admonished him, “you are going to give him a lecture on the ride home about not playing today? Didn’t you write a book about this already?”

We all can lose it from time to time with only the best intentions of helping our children. This book is not about perfect parenting. It’s about, as Steve Kerr says in the opening quote, offering them love and support in a fun, joyful environment and the space to learn on their own. Our job is to nudge and encourage forward movement and then get out of the way.

Being a sports parent is an art—a dance—yet it is difficult. Perhaps that’s a massive understatement. It can often be demanding, burden- some, and at times, may seem like a horrendous nightmare. Once your children’s lives become involved with sports, your own life takes a huge turn, one that often approaches chaos. Getting kids to and from practice demands proficiency in a new profession, one of being a full-time, on-demand chauffeur. Then there are the out-of-town travel events that decimate your weekends. There is the enormous cost of the more competitive teams. Arranging for individual coaching sessions, treating injuries, fundraising, and working the snack bar with all the unhealthy food becomes anathema to your sanity.

However, you must not forget that this sacred journey can also be the most rewarding period of your life. Writing this book is our attempt to set the stage for making this time in your life an extraordinary experience. Our deepest intention is to provide a useful, easy-to- read, practical manual that will help you to 1) implement a more aware, conscious level of parenting as well as 2) guiding you to raise true champions capable of being the best version of themselves by learning invaluable lessons—not only about sports but about life as well.

So why are we the right people to write this book? From the high performance and consulting side of things, we are proud to have been intimately connected with building and sustaining more than 100 world, national, and conference championship cultures. These include NCAA programs at Stanford, Ohio State, Harvard, UConn, Georgetown, Iowa, Syracuse, Maryland, Duke, North Carolina, Rutgers, Middlebury, Amherst, Colby, and the US Naval Academy, as well as our professional sports involvement with coaches and athletes in the NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, NLL, and PGA Tour. Fifty-five of our teams have made it to an NCAA Final Four. Numerous teams in Olympic sports and high school and club levels of athletics have experienced the power of our culture, performance, and leadership approach as well.

But perhaps more importantly, we are parents. We have seen our children enjoy the highest of highs and lowest of lows on their sporting journey. Jerry has four kids in their thirties, while John’s oldest is now in college and his youngest is a senior in high school. We have seen the youth sports journey to its conclusion, spending nights in the ER and long days in the car traveling to and from games. We have watched our children get injured, beaten down, humiliated, and more. We have watched them cry after great disappointments and make life- long friends through sports. And while we realize that our children are not your children and our experiences are not your experiences, the principles and ideas in this book are ones we have researched, written about, and used with other people’s children. Through trial and error, we’ve found what worked for our kids and what didn’t. As author Paulo Coelho says, “The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”4 We have certainly done that with our own children.

No doubt that if you found this book, there are certain things you already do very well, while other things can be improved. As lifelong learners, we all seek ways to add to our skill set and expand our levels of effectiveness. Like everyone involved in sports parenting, you probably have times when you feel stagnant or stuck. That’s when this book can be your companion along the way to optimize your chances of being a champion sports parent. Your mistakes serve as your invisible teachers, giving you the gift of wisdom. These setbacks guide you along the path of being a more effective parent helping your children to experience a better relationship with their passion.

We all love our sports kids, yet we also are aware of how we can lose touch with what may be best for our prized athletes. It’s easy to impose our needs upon them rather than listen to what they want in order to better understand their personal struggles. This book will help you to be better listeners and, as a result, be more respectful and sensitive to their needs—which is how we gain their loyalty, cooperation, love, and appreciation. And this is the only way they will reach their full capacity as athletes and human beings.

Additionally, this book presents a plethora of specific behaviors, characteristics, and attributes that contribute to a healthy, beautifully choreographed dance between parent, child, and coach, one that will preserve the dreams and goals of the child while at the same time help them realize validation, self-reliance, confidence, empowerment, respect, caring, love, and self-actualization. Raise your hand if you don’t desire to help your child develop these traits and values. The beauty of athletics is the way it accelerates the process of having our children learn these traits. Athletics provides an opportunity for us as sports parents to learn lessons in a one hour event that normally would take a month, a year, or even a lifetime to absorb without sports.

This book will help you to embellish the faith you have in your child while reducing the unintentional and irrational fears they may experience, fears so common in the world of sports performance. Having faith instead of fear helps them to reduce anxiety in times of crisis. Without fear, your child feels free to step away and risk setbacks because with your help they have learned the value of failure to help them forge ahead.

Following Your Heart

Undoubtedly, you are reading this book because you are a conscious, caring, and loving parent in search of upping your sports parenting game. You want to improve your toolbox so your child can perform their very best. Knowing this, we ask that you have the courage to follow what your heart is telling you and make the changes you need to not only embellish the sports life of your child but also enhance your relationship with them and improve the overall joy in your life. When you do have this courage, magic happens as your children begin to embrace the notion that they can be something other than ordinary.

Know that this sports parenting journey will take some dedication and mindful work. In the words of the iconic Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It’s acquired with much patience and great effort.” Start slowly with small, gradual, incremental steps, and soon you will experience pleasant rewards of progress and exciting positive change over the entire course of your lives. It is a day-to-day process, up and down, forward and back as you continually improve and blossom as sports parents and as good people.

Sports parenting is a delicate balance. It is the art of selflessly serving your children through firm yet kind, gently worded directives that will give your kids a sense of self-worth. Your children will, as a result, be more productive in their sports experience and loyal to you and your service toward them. We know that kindness and service to others creates a spirit of loyalty. It is necessary, however, that you are firm in addition to being selfless and encouraging toward those you guide. There’s no need ever to push, force, coerce, or manipulate your children—or anyone else, for that matter.

How to Use This Book

Much like our last book together, The Champion Teammate, the book in your hands has been compiled through wisdom gathered through extensive research and writing, involvement with more than 100 championship teams, consultancies with Hall of Fame coaches, nearly 400 interviews on our Way of Champions Podcast, and hundreds of clinics and conferences we conduct on the subject of being an exceptional parent, coach, and teammate .The material here has been gathered from numerous authors, sport scientists, psychologists, and coaches with extensive backgrounds working with parents and children in sports. We share stories of world-famous athletes and teams who epitomize each lesson, as well as wisdom garnered from Native American tradition, Eastern wisdom, Christian mysticism, Latin American cultures, and Western psychology.

The book is broken into four parts, and within each part are a series of lessons and ideas that you can use to be a champion sports parent. The four parts are:

PART I: To Be a Better Parent, Be a Better You
PART II: Teaching Your Child the Inner Game
PART III: Coaches Are Your Allies, Not Your Adversaries

PART IV: Modeling Champion Parent Behaviors

At the end of each section, you will find a quote that will be relevant to that chapter’s content. Where relevant and important, we also include an affirmation or two that serve as verbal reinforcers of the message in that section. Every chapter will conclude, finally, with a series of questions and/or activities to promote some thought on your part and discussions with your young athletes. We encourage you to record some of your answers and thoughts so you can return back to this guidebook time and again.

In Part I: To Be a Better Parent, Be a Better You, we look first at ourselves as parents. What is motivating our thoughts and actions? Why do we feel excessive pressure to keep up with the Joneses and allow our actions to be guided by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)?We then discuss how things such as a servant mindset, gratitude, using the RIVER acro- nym, and embracing both the good and bad on this journey will help you provide a more consistent foundation for your athletic children.

In Part II, we take a deep dive into the inner game. While we are always seeking out newer fancy equipment, technical trainers, and someone to help our kids get physically stronger and faster, we rarely go inside and improve those four inches between the ears. This is the area that can provide huge advantages to athletes who treat the brain as a muscle and learn how to make it stronger, faster, and clearer. You will learn about visualization and mindfulness, how to turn failure into fuel, and the importance of courage when confidence may be lacking.

In Part III, we delve into the coach-parent relationship. Coaches must be our allies, not our adversaries, and if we work on building trust and understanding, and follow some specific guidelines, we can have a great relationship with our coaches that is beneficial to us and our athletes. You will learn how to both know and embrace your role, effectively communicate, help your coach understand your child, when to let go during difficult situations, and when to intervene in dangerous ones.

Finally, in Part IV, we get into modeling champion behaviors on competition days. There are specific things we should and should not do pre-competition, during competition, and post-competition. Adhering to these items will give your child the best mindset to perform before and during the game and create a safe place for them to unwind after it. Ignore them, and you potentially set your child up for failure during their event and misery on the ride home.

Being a Champion Sports Parent

With an open heart and mind, we ask that you embrace this “new” approach of BEING a champion sports parent. Know that you do not BECOME a champion sports parent. You choose to BE one by implementing the behaviors, strategies, observations, tools, and time-honored suggestions we propose in this book. There are no outcomes or results to measure your progress. Progress is accrued intuitively in this very moment measured by your intentions, your purpose, and your desire to make a positive difference in the lives of your children and the kids of other parents. Progress is measured by the smile on your child’s face. Progress is measured by the joy experienced before, during, and after the event. Progress is measured by the everyday elevated feelings you and your child experience because sports has now become the way you create family fun, happiness, and value in life. All this is valid, anecdotal data. It’s a way of living that feels extraordinary. This is what it means to BE a champion sports parent.

Your First Question

Now, we encourage you to take your first step. Take a few moments and answer this question:

What is the purpose of sports for my child/children?

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Knowing why you put your children in sports is critical. Is it to win championships and trophies? Is it to build memories? Is it to reinforce the values and lessons you teach at home, as well as learn to experience adversity, do hard things, and become an active and healthy adult? Only you can answer this question, so give it some time. Come back to it. Because for many people, the sports industrial complex and environment of youth sports pushes children away from the original purpose of sport.

Once you have recorded your answer, dive into the book. Begin to read and implement what you have learned immediately. With renewed enthusiasm, celebrate your youngsters and their athletic experience in the spirit of playfulness. Let sports awaken you to the awesome positive exchange between you and your young stars, this soulful dance of conscious sports parenting. The poet Rumi mentions that “when you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” We love sports, but what really fills our hearts is knowing that a positive sports experience can inspire and empower your child more than any other experience in life.