This article is my fourth (and, I think, final) in a series exploring Fear of Failure in ski racing. If you missed the first three articles, you may want to catch up before reading this article (Part I, II, III). In those first three articles, I examined my evolving perspective on fear of failure and [...]
Episode #18: Goal Setting of my Raising Young Athletes podcast is the fifth of six episodes that explores the very direct impact that you have on your children in their athletic lives. Your young athletes can learn more about their commitment to a sport by having you assist them in setting goals for their participation. As [...]
Let me preface my comments with an apology to the owners of Live-Timing. I in no way intend to demonize them for having created Live-Timing. I’m sure they developed Live-Timing in good faith as a means of helping the ski-racing community to share race information. Unfortunately, as with many types of technology and social media, [...]
Episode #7 of my Raising Young Athletes podcast is the first of seven in a series that examines obstacles that can prevent athletes from performing their best and enjoying their sports experiences. Importantly, this series will consider ways in which parents hold these unhealthy attitudes and instill them in their children. Also, importantly, what parents [...]
Episode #6: Perspective of my Raising Young Athletes podcast explores the influence of perspective on how you as sport parents and your young athletes perceive, feel about, and react to their sports experiences. When I talk about perspective, I mean lens through you and your young children look at their sports involvement in terms of [...]
Episode #4: Self-esteem of my Raising Young Athletes podcast explores how self-esteem impacts young athletes' athletic and personal development. Self-esteem involves how children come to perceive and value themselves, in other words, do they see themselves worthwhile people deserving of love and respect. Self-esteem influences happiness, well-being, goals, and success, among many other outcomes. This [...]
In keeping with the times, I will be launching a Podcast page in the next week or so in which I will share my ideas through recorded podcasts of varying lengths. My goal is to offer my ideas through a medium that is most easily accessible in the busy lives that so many of us [...]
I’ve been involved in youth sports for—Yikes!—more than 50 years. As a child, I played Little League baseball and soccer, but my main sport was alpine ski racing (I know, not your typical suburban sport). Since then, I’ve been actively involved in youth sports as a mental coach. In these capacities, it seems as if [...]
Like I said, sports parents, we have a problem. Want to know the problem? Well, look in the mirror. I don’t mean to insult you by indicting you as being the problem as an individual parent. I don’t know you or how you are with your children in their sports lives. I’m talking about the [...]
Winter's coming. You can feel it and smell it in the air. I’m not talking about the crispness of a cold and clear winter morning. I’m the talking about the feel of files digging into edges, scrapers scraping bases, and the smell of hot wax dripping onto skis. Yep, for parents of young ski racers [...]
