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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.
