-- Walter Matthau as Coach Morris Buttermaker in The Bad News Bears
On a cloudless Sunday afternoon in Golden Gate Park's Polo Field, the final matches of the Golden Gate Invitational youth soccer tournament are under way, showcasing the most competitive club teams from around the Bay Area. And on Field 6, the Santa Cruz County Bobcats, playing in the boys-under-15 division, are in trouble. The Bobcats don't have five of their best starters -- they either were injured or couldn't make the trip -- and SF Inter, the team Santa Cruz defeated for the state championship last year, relentlessly attacks deep into Bobcat territory. For the third time in as many minutes, SF Inter's best striker leaks behind his defender, receiving a beautiful pass in perfect position for a goal, but just as he's about to kick, the referee blows his whistle: The striker is called offside.
The kid throws his arms wide in frustration and screams at the referee, the game grinding to a halt. On the sideline, parents and coaches, draped in the all-black colors of SF Inter, match their player, yell for yell. When the game resumes, the SF Inter forward quickly finds another golden opportunity: The ball bounces high in front of Santa Cruz's net, and the striker lightly punts it over the goalie's head for an easy score. The SF Inter parent section erupts again, this time with joyous blasts of air horns and thunderous applause, while the striker pounds the chest of his No. 10 jersey, basking in the adulation of his teammates and strutting, just like the pros, before the stands.
Bob Poser, the Bobcats coach, has missed the whole thing. For the past five minutes, during the tumult on the field and the scoring of the game's first goal, Poser has been huddling quietly on the sideline with his only unused player, his back turned to the pitch. Even as his players retreat to midfield, their heads bowed, Poser never looks up from the doubt-ridden face of his reserve. "I miss a lot of goals because I'm trying to teach the game," Poser says later. "I want the players to know, even in those moments, that they're the most important thing."
Poser, who just turned 50, lives and breathes soccer, and he insists he's no softie. "Let me be clear on that," he says. "I hate to lose." After 25 years of playing competitive soccer in the United States and Europe, Poser -- a veterinary surgeon by day -- now dedicates himself to coaching the Bobcats and serving as president of their league. (He's also an assistant coach on the men's soccer team at UC Santa Cruz.) "Our players are good, hardworking, talented, but it's the summation of them as people that's made the difference," says Poser.
But the waning moments of the match sorely test the Bobcats' character. With his team losing 2-0, the Bobcats goalie makes a nice save of an SF Inter shot. But as the players are heading downfield, one of the San Francisco forwards appears to knock the ball out of the goalie's hands; when the ball hits the ground, SF Inter knocks home the shot from point-blank range. The referees confer, but apparently didn't see the play well enough to wipe the goal off the board. SF Inter, naturally, celebrates right in front of the Bobcat bench. And although every bone in his body must be quivering with the urge to scream, Poser does not so much as whisper at the refs about the obvious injustice.
A few minutes later, when a Bobcat shot sails high over the goal and the charming SF Inter parent section begins a mocking chant of "Olé, Olé, Olé," Poser calmly approaches one of the opponents' coaches and asks him to subdue the crowd. The damage, however, is done: When the final whistle blows, the Bobcats trudge to the sideline, disheartened, beaten. Poser tells them they gave a great effort, congratulates them on fighting hard and restraining their tempers, and resists noting the obvious contrast between the tone of the two teams, their coaches, and their cheering sections. But as he's packing gear into duffel bags, watching his players depart across the field, Poser sags wearily against a chain-link fence. "This could be the worst weekend of soccer we've ever had," he says.
And he smiles.
When he's talking about athletic coaching, Jim Thompson, the founder of and creative force behind the Positive Coaching Alliance, can't help but slip into the role of business professor. Sitting in a bare conference room, the soft-spoken Thompson pauses less than 10 minutes into describing the evolution of his organization to say, "Let me draw on the board for you."
At the whiteboard, wearing khakis and a polo shirt emblazoned with the golden whistle logo of his organization, the bespectacled, 54-year-old Thompson scrawls the keywords of his lecture. "We work on three levels: The first we call the mind of the coach," he says, underlining the last word. "We want to get coaches to be thinking, 'My job isn't just to win. It's maybe 49 percent of my job, but most of my job is using sports to teach life lessons.'" The second level, Thompson continues, is organizational culture, which he defines, on the whiteboard, as the way we do things here. "We started out training coaches, but we realized very quickly that there was too much turnover, and we needed to start working with the organizations -- that means the leaders, the coaches, and the parents. If you can get all the adults on the same page, using the same vocabulary, keeping each other honest, reinforcing positive behavior, then the kids have a great experience."
And the third level, Thompson concludes, is society as a whole. "We want to be more than just a successful, modest organization," he says, putting the cap back on his pen. "We want to transform a culture."
To that end, Thompson, the former director of the Stanford Business School's Public and Global Management programs, started the Positive Coaching Alliance five years ago this month. It was Thompson's idea to apply the language and lessons of leadership and business-school models to youth sports, in an effort to "redefine winner," as he puts it, and emphasize the self-esteem of young athletes. More than 300 organizations across the country have embraced Thompson's message, and this summer, the PCA secured a national contract with the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), 650,000 kids strong. "It's an idea whose time was ready," Thompson says. "I get a lot of people who tell me, 'I can't believe this didn't exist before.'"
Proponents of positive coaching, who speak of these tenets with near-religious devotion, are quick to point out they aren't against winning -- they simply don't agree with the famous pronouncement, generally attributed to legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." The positive-coaching approach seeks to change youth athletics in fundamental ways, largely through the repetition of language more befitting the boardroom than the baseball diamond. Thompson hopes the emphasis on positive reinforcement and basic management strategies eventually subdues the overcompetitive, militaristic coaches who find pleasure in humiliating 8-year-old soccer players. But he's adamant in the belief that his approach does not rob the games of spirit or competition.
"We've got the system we've got," says Thompson, who fondly recalls the winter afternoons in his North Dakota childhood when the school janitor would hand over the keys to the gymnasium so the neighborhood kids could play baseball indoors. "I think it would be great to go back to those days, but we can't roll back the clock. I don't know if society was safer then, but it certainly seems more dangerous now. And it can be a lot better for kids with these principles."
The culture of youth sports has indeed become more dangerous since Thompson's adolescence. In July 2000 at a hockey scrimmage in Massachusetts, Thomas Junta, the father of a child engaged in some rough play on the ice, quarreled with another father and beat him to death. Junta received six to 10 years for involuntary manslaughter, bringing national attention to a new, and serious, social problem. But that was hardly the first such incident: In 1996, a dentist in Albuquerque, N.M., sharpened the face guard of his son's football helmet so he could slash opponents. Five players and a referee were hurt, and the father was eventually sentenced to jail and community service. In 2001, a referee working a youth basketball game in Atlanta was heckled so mercilessly throughout the game that he cut a coach with a knife; the previous year, an umpire in Jackson, Miss., stabbed a fan who had been berating him. The impacts of bad sporting environments can be subtle, as well: Studies show that 70 percent of kids quit their favorite sport by the time they're 13, at least partly because they no longer enjoy playing.
Thompson -- who is, as one might suspect, a very nice guy -- first became aware of the negativism and bad behavior surrounding youth sports when he helped coach his son's junior high basketball team while earning his MBA at Stanford. "I'm not against intensity, and I'm not against winning. But what I saw was coaches and parents, well-meaning though they may be, doing the exact wrong things to get the best out of kids," Thompson says. "Next thing you know, I'm writing a book."
The book, Positive Coaching, took five years to write and drew heavily on information Thompson collected while serving on a national task force studying the problems facing youth sports. "I realized most of the books out there were about the skills -- how to kick a soccer ball, how to hit a baseball -- and not much about the psychological, motivational part of coaching," Thompson says. "Every time I was in a bookstore I'd go to the sports section and see if anyone had written my book. Nobody had."
Positive Coaching is based around three essential ideas: the importance of Honoring the Game (a less cloying phrase than "good sportsmanship"); the value of filling kids' emotional tanks (a more cloying phrase than "building self-esteem"); and the need to redefine what it means to be a winner, which is where the ELM Tree of Mastery comes in (E for Effort, L for Learning, and M for how we respond to Mistakes). Positive Coaching and Thompson's subsequent two books -- the latest, The Double-Goal Coach, was released in August -- tend to read like self-help manuals for youth organizations, heavy on leadership models and jargon that can seem incongruous with T-ball. But that contrast, Thompson says, is the point. "You're taking business ideas, business frameworks, and applying them -- where they apply, sometimes they don't -- to social problems," he says. "I don't know if I've ever done a workshop on sports when there hasn't been at least one business guy in the room."
To persuade soccer moms and dads to actually implement the ideas he was writing about, Thompson approached the Stanford athletic department for funding, and the Positive Coaching Alliance was born. At first, the group consisted of Thompson and another trainer leading workshops in and around the Bay Area; five years later, the nonprofit employs 60 trainers nationwide, with offices in four cities and plans for several more. The group found a national spokesman in L.A. Lakers coach Phil Jackson (whose commitment to positive coaching, despite his reputation as a Zen master, is sometimes hard to discern on the sideline), and its advisory committee now includes former NBA star and presidential candidate Bill Bradley, New York Jets coach Herm Edwards, Detroit Pistons coach Larry Brown, and renowned gymnast Nadia Comaneci.
Youth sports organizations that partner with the Positive Coaching Alliance can sign up for a variety of workshops -- leadership, coaching, parenting -- aimed at all levels of experience and competitiveness. (The groups that enlist the PCA's help range from ultra-serious Little League and high school traveling club teams to peewee football squads.) "Often the organizations have to require or coerce or bribe coaches to attend a workshop," Thompson says. "And the coaches often start out with their arms crossed, looking skeptical. But what they find is that we're not preaching to them -- OK, it's a little bit of preaching -- but we're really just giving them the tools to help kids have a better experience and win more."
The tools include videos, Honor the Game buttons and banners, and workbooks that serve as guides through the positive-coaching mind-set. The workbooks are fill-in-the-blank, and Thompson admits they rub some the wrong way. "We get one out of a hundred coaches who says, 'Get rid of the kindergarten stuff,'" he says. "But I call it interactive software -- the mind sees the blank and wants to fill it." Besides, Thompson says, the goal of the organization is simply to present information and ideas in a way most coaches haven't considered.
"Coaches tend to coach the way they were coached, or how they see coaches on TV," Thompson says. "Part of what we've done, what value we're adding, is that we're presenting the research from sports psychology. This stuff is out there -- it just hasn't been popularized, or packaged, in the way youth sports coaches can see."
And one of the more intriguing pieces of sports psychology in recent years comes from a study by Joan Duda, a British academic who has joined the PCA advisory committee. She and her colleagues studied 62 athletes from Norway and Denmark at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. They discovered a statistically significant difference in the number of medals won by athletes who were coached according to a win-at-all-costs method as opposed to a positive, task-mastery approach. In short, the athletes who won more medals were not focused on the scoreboard. Thompson and his organization point to Duda's study as something of a smoking gun, confirming what they've long believed, although Thompson's careful not to promise similar results to every coach who tries a relentlessly positive approach.
"We're not just spreading a happy message of 'Be positive,'" he insists. "We're saying, 'Here's how you can get the most out of your players.'"
With the faint sounds of a weeknight soccer scrimmage seeping through the walls of the Redwood City Community Center, two dozen youth coaches settle into folding chairs, introduce themselves, and open their workbooks to Page 2. At the front of the room, Bob Heckmann, boys' varsity basketball coach at Mountain View High School and the leader of this evening's workshop, puts a slide on the overhead projector:
A Positive Coach is a 'Double-Goal' coach.
Winning (important)
Teaching life lessons (more important)
"You can fill in the blanks in your workbooks, if you want to," Heckmann says, and a few of the coaches do. "A lot of what we'll talk about tonight, you'll probably think it's pretty intuitive, common-sense stuff. It seems intuitive, but you'd be amazed at how many people lose sight of it."
The amiable Heckmann, who stands 6-foot-6, asks the coaches to share a vivid memory -- good or bad -- from their sports-playing childhoods. One coach raises his hand and talks about the pure joy he felt when playing soccer as a child in Mexico, lamenting that he doesn't see the same enthusiasm and spirit in American kids. The next guy speaks of the tirades he endured, at age 12, from an overbearing tennis coach. "I still can't pick up a racket," he says.
Heckmann, who's wearing a "Hi, I'm Bob" name tag, then outlines a hypothetical scenario wherein a referee's call costs your team the game, the parents are incensed, and the kids feel cheated. He asks the assembled coaches to turn to someone they haven't met and discuss how they would respond in such a situation. And wouldn't you know it? Each coach who speaks paints the picture of calm rationality, suggesting he would talk gently to the referee, warn the parents against tumult, and remind the kids that life is often unfair.
This is a frequent, and not unexpected, phenomenon: The Positive Coaching Alliance preaches mainly to the converted. There are no Bobby Knight wannabes in attendance this evening -- even the coach in the back row wearing a T-shirt that says "I make all the rules around here" nods along to Heckmann's very palatable presentation -- and only the first mention of "emotional tanks" draws the slightest bit of snickering. The PCA is well aware that, at first, only those coaches with an established interest in positive coaching are likely to give up two hours to hear about it, but the organization believes it's these same converts who will best spread the message to the uninitiated or antagonistic.
And sometimes, it's the hard-core devotees of positive coaching who need a reminder of its value. Bobcats coach Bob Poser, winner of the Positive Coaching Alliance's "Connector of the Year" award in 2002 for spreading the message to so many other leagues and teams, received a dreaded red card -- soccer's version of the technical foul and automatic ejection -- during a game a few seasons ago. "Bob Poser, Mr. PCA, got thrown out of a game," he says ruefully. "People love that."
But the important thing, he adds, is that they noticed, that the impact of so many Positive Coaching Alliance workshops is tangible in even casual conversations. "The league had a game where one team scored 10 goals, and the ref said, 'That's not very PCA-like,'" Poser says. Other leagues around the Bay Area have also noticed a change since signing up with the PCA. The Pleasant Hill Baseball Association, for instance, reported a 90 percent decrease in ejections and a 20 percent increase in enrollment during its second year of workshops. And the real impact, Poser argues, can be found in the new vocabulary being used.
"Do parents still go off? Are there red cards? Do referees get harassed? Of course," Poser says. "But the culture has changed such that, when people act inappropriately, there's a community pressure against it. The Positive Coaching Alliance is part of the lexicon of Santa Cruz County now, and that's the beginning."
A few days after leading the Redwood City workshop, Bob Heckmann sits on a bench in the gorgeous central quad of Mountain View High School, the glass-walled library in front of him, the large Spartan gymnasium to his left; he speaks of the challenges facing a competitive coach who embraces the positive-coaching model. This will be the 43-year-old Heckmann's fourth season as coach of the varsity boys' basketball team, and he has a long history of high-level hoops. Heckmann, thin and lanky with glasses and patches of gray hair, attended tiny Concordia University in Texas on a basketball scholarship when the school was ranked in the Top 20 nationally among junior colleges, and he has been coached by all kinds, from passive enablers to fiery dictators. "I can sit here 25 years later and tell you all about them, I can rip off detail after detail about these guys," says Heckmann, warm and likable with an obvious passion for coaching. "But one of the most profound things I think about is the opportunities these guys missed to be better leaders -- which, in fairness to them, is typical. But it's those kinds of thoughts that drove me to being a coach."
He has overseen a fairly remarkable turnaround at Mountain View: The year before he arrived, the team had seven players and won two games. "The program was completely in the tank," he says, shaking his head and lowering his voice so it won't echo across the quad. "My first year we were terrible. There wasn't a player on this team that could have made my high school team, let alone play on it. There had to be something besides winning that we focused on. I just tried to bring back some interest and passion in the sport, and hopefully not lose quite as badly as they had in the past."
Although his first season saw as many victories (two) as 11-game losing streaks, last year, with talent that does not exactly make Mountain View the powerhouse of the Peninsula, the team played .500 ball and made the league playoffs for the first time in Heckmann's tenure. And Heckmann, who signed up to be a PCA trainer after attending his first workshop, attributes the team's resurgence to the principles Jim Thompson espouses.
"There's no question in my mind that this is applicable to competitive high school sports," Heckmann says. "To me, Jim's genius is taking otherwise self-evident things and kinda putting them all together in this really understandable way that you can use. A lot of coaches might think it's a youth sports thing, not a high school thing. They're totally wrong."
Heckmann admits his approach occasionally riles his assistant coaches, some of whom hail from ultra-competitive basketball backgrounds and don't always appreciate his use of the Magic Ratio (which calls for five pieces of praise for every one bit of disparagement) or the Criticism Sandwich (a method of disguising criticism within two slices of positive reinforcement). "I know how they feel, that I'm too soft sometimes," Heckmann says. "They think, 'If I were the coach right now, I'd bring out the cannons and let 'em have it,' but I just won't do it." Parents, however, have been supportive, which is rare in high school sports, and Heckmann's players say they notice how hard he tries to accentuate the positive.
"Before I came here, I wasn't used to playing organized basketball," says Jonathan Banados, 16, a shooting guard with a few tufts of black hair clinging to his chin. "He's worked with me really hard the past two years to make me an organized player. Other coaches, if you do something bad, they'll run us to death until we get it right. But he doesn't really get mad. You think he's going to yell, but in the end, he's very positive, he's always encouraging."
And although the coaching fraternity has long embraced a certain militaristic tradition, Heckmann says it's the precepts of positive coaching that keep him churning through the long winter basketball seasons.
"I care about giving these guys something more than x's and o's," Heckmann says softly. A bell rings, and within minutes the quad is flooded with students passing from one class to the next; many of the kids stop by to banter briefly with their coach. When the stampede dies down and the kids are out of earshot, Heckmann speaks humbly of the impact he's had on individual players. "A parent pulled me aside after a game late in the season last year -- I didn't know him very well, he was kind of a rough-and-tumble guy. And he said, 'I wanted to tell you what a huge impact you've had on my son's life and how grateful I am he came through this program.' I was completely caught by surprise. It wasn't like I had any special relationship with his son; he was a quiet kid who was only here as a senior. But you talk about feeling validated ....
"Every time you talk to one person, and they buy into positive coaching, you've made an impact," he continues. "The much bigger challenge is stamping this footprint culturally, and that's going to take a long, long time. I just enjoy being part of the process."
Kimberly Guillen, a coach in the Jack London Youth Soccer League, has played "the beautiful game" for 30 years, in the United States and Europe, and even started her own high school's team by applying for Title IX funding. When friends told her about the Positive Coaching Alliance a few years ago, she refused to attend a workshop.
"I had an attitude of, 'Look, anything even close to wussification is pretty much despicable,'" Guillen says. "I had to be tricked into going. Some friends invited me to a meeting in San Francisco, and I showed up thinking it was going to be a social outing. It turned out to be a PCA workshop, and my friends had ditched me. I wasn't in a good mood; I sat there with my arms folded." She sighs. "Look, I'm from a huge Mexican-Filipino family -- liking kids is mandatory where I'm from."
But Guillen was struck, despite herself, by one of the ideas presented at the workshop: Keep a positive chart of all the things the kids do well, then use that at the end of practices and games to find good things to say about even less-than-spectacular players. Positive charting made Guillen realize she'd rather focus on the non-stars, and that her true enjoyment came from interacting with the so-called ordinary girl. "The natural athletes are going to excel no matter what," she says. "It's the kids who are the most timid that get transformed into a place where they're possessed by Pele. I thought, 'Everybody in our league needs this.'"
Now, thanks in large part to Guillen, they have it. Last year, the Jack London Youth Soccer League -- the second largest in Northern California, serving about 9,000 kids in Oakland and its surrounding communities -- began incorporating Positive Coaching Alliance workshops, and Guillen calls the program an unqualified success. More than 1,100 coaches and parents attended meetings, and nearly half of the 350 teams sent more attendees to workshops than were mandated by the league. The response was overwhelmingly positive (only five people sent flaming e-mails, Guillen says), and the highest participation rate of parents and coaches belonged to the most elite club teams. "If it were just about satisfying requirements, we would never have had these numbers," Guillen says. "And here's the thing: The program is cheap. We spent $3,000, 30 cents a player, which is ridiculously inexpensive. And in one year, this stuff is working.
"You hear me talking, it's almost like a religious fervor," Guillen gushes. "This has changed my parenting style, my coaching style. I've been in the game a long time. I want to go back and relive my childhood and be coached like this."
