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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.
