How to win all the time

At the post-season party for my son’s Little League team last year, one of the dads got up to express his appreciation for the volunteer coaches. “You guys don’t know how important you are,” he said. “Looking back, I don’t remember all my teachers, but I remember every coach I ever had.”

Quite a thought. And true for many of us, in ways both good and bad. I can still see the red face of my high school baseball coach, a hidebound disciplinarian who knew the game inside and out but was in need of anger management before anyone knew what that was. Disappointed in our performance in the last regular season game my senior year, he got into an argument with the umpire, was booted from the game, made a theatrical, dirt-kicking exit from the diamond and tore up the locker room. We never saw him again.

The image of the seething, tough-talking coach is deeply ingrained in a nation whose sports fans still pay homage to the memory of Vince Lombardi, who said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” That’s a dumb enough idea even when applied to pro teams, but in youth sports it has led to such lamentable and outrageous behavior as that of the Pennsylvania T-ball coach who allegedly paid one of his players $25 to disable a less talented teammate to keep him off the field, and the Pony League player in Palmdale who struck and killed another player with a baseball bat after being taunted over a loss.

But the truth is, coaching and parenting in youth sports is harder than it looks. I know. I’ve done it. I never would have thought the score of a soccer game between 6-year-old boys could possibly matter until I learned that it did matter, at least to me when I was the coach, against all reason. When my son was in the second grade, playing in a coach-pitch playoff game in the L.A. city parks league, the tension between the opposing coaches was so palpable, a fight nearly broke out--between grown men in charge of 8-year-olds! Scenes like that made me question whether organized sports are such a good thing for kids at all.

Then one day I discovered that a small backlash had formed on the sidelines. It was being led by a man in Northern California who wanted to reclaim youth sports from the high-stakes, win-at-all-costs attitudes seeping down from Division I colleges and the pros to grade schools. The man’s name was Jim Thompson. I went to find him.

“People are psychologically frozen,” Thompson tells me after we meet in the Palo Alto industrial park offices of the Positive Coaching Alliance, the nonprofit organization he started at Stanford University seven years ago. He was talking about the narrow models most youth coaches rely on when they start out. “It’s based on the way you were coached and the coaches you see on TV. We unfreeze them. And we don’t think you get unfrozen by watching a video or reading a book.”

Thompson is dressed in workout clothes and still sweating, having just returned to his desk from his morning three-mile run in the nearby Baylands Nature Preserve. A former athlete and coach, he is 56, of medium build, with thick, round glasses, sandy red hair and a disarmingly soft-timbred Midwestern voice. He grew up in West Fargo, N.D. His modest, cluttered office is decorated--if that’s the word--with a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover of two boys in football knickers and leather helmets, from a time well before the advent of sports talk radio. There are framed awards from foundations and a metal bookcase full of titles pointing to his past as a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, including “How Great Decisions Get Made” and “How to Change the World.”

Strictly speaking, that is what Thompson has become: a social entrepreneur, tackling a societal problem with the tools used by the corporate world. He developed a product, the two-hour PCA coaches workshop, which he offers to leagues and schools that can afford it (the fee is about $800) and some that can’t, subsidized by corporate grants. Led by Thompson or former athletes he recruited and designated as “trainers,” the workshops are built on the principles laid out in two books he wrote, “Positive Coaching” and “The Double-Goal Coach”--that coaches, parents and players should “honor the game” above all else, while respecting their teammates, the rules and officials instead of thinking only of scoring more runs, points or goals.

The title “The Double-Goal Coach” means simply that winning can be the first goal of a youth coach as long as the coach recognizes the more important second goal of teaching life lessons through sports. Phil Jackson was so taken with Thompson’s ideas that he wrote the forward to “The Double-Goal Coach” and became the PCA’s national spokesman.

By the time I met Thompson, I already was making my way through the books and wishing I had read them--or attended one of workshops--before I started coaching. Maybe I wouldn’t have yelled at that really bad Little League umpire in Eagle Rock who blew a call that cost us a game. Maybe I would have shown more compassion toward the inexperienced kid who didn’t know there were only two outs and wandered off third base to be tagged out to end the inning. Maybe I wouldn’t have deconstructed every game and at-bat with my son as if I expected him to become the next Vladimir Guerrero. Maybe I would have benefited from Thompson’s discovery, after coaching his own son, that the glories of youth sports tend to be all too fleeting.

“I think I bought into [the idea that] he’s going to be a great athlete and all that,” Thompson tells me about his own gifted son, who quit baseball and basketball before he was through high school and took up surfing and snowboarding--sports in which the general enjoyment does not involve a coach. “There are so few tangible things that show you’re a good parent, and when your kid excels at sports you can just feel a rush of genetic pride.” And the success, or failure, is out in the open for all to see. “When a child gets a grade in school, it’s private, between him or her and the teacher. But sports is public and dramatic. It’s something parents can focus on.”

Like the mom who called to hector me about why her third-grade son wasn’t playing in the infield. The unexamined fantasy behind a lot of bullying parents is that their kid is headed for the pros and how dare you stand in his way. I wish now I could have directed that mom to the section in “The Double-Goal Coach” where Thompson discusses the long odds against high school seniors ever playing professionally. For example, according to NCAA estimates, only about one in 200 high school baseball players will ever be drafted by a professional team; for male high school basketball players, that ratio falls to one in 1,333. Meanwhile, Thompson says, 70% of kids who play organized sports in grade school drop out by the time they’re 13.

Which brings up the question: Why do we want our kids to play sports in the first place?

Over lunch at a nearby deli, Thompson and I compare notes on our coaching experiences. “The great life lessons of sports are that they put you in situations where you have to act in the moment,” he says. “You can’t think about it overnight. Kids benefit from this.”

But while he was coaching youth league baseball and basketball 15 years ago, Thompson was seeing dark edges around so many sunny Saturday afternoons, when bad behavior among other coaches and parents was turning his stomach and turning kids away from sports. “Sports,” he says, “when it’s done right, is so beautiful. And when it’s not, it’s so ugly.”

A former schoolteacher and Hewlett-Packard marketing specialist, Thompson found that kids performed better when they were praised, that maintaining emotional energy was key, that young players benefited from participating in decisions that affected the team, that practice should be fun and that coaches needed to watch for the “teachable moments.”

He lays all this out in his books, drawing on his personal experience to create useful exercises and drills that lead to positive coaching. He makes a persuasive case, but he also is asking most of us to reprogram our minds and emotions to a Zen-like state where victory is seemingly incidental. I’m not sure that human nature, backed by the 24-hour highlight reels of ESPN and Fox Sports, is a surmountable obstacle.

“We’re not noncompetitive,” Thompson insists, citing this as the biggest misunderstanding about the PCA. “We like to win, too.”

Like other nonprofits, the PCA is underwritten by businesses and charitable foundations. But it has come to rely on the fees charged for its workshops, which last year amounted to 44% of its $2.3-million budget, up from 10% in 2000. In its first seven years, the PCA, now with a staff of 25 plus a network of 100 trainers nationwide, has given 1,800 workshops for 72,000 coaches, administrators and parents.

The PCA is a success as a business model, but when an organization’s goal is to change an entire culture, it’s hard to judge how well it’s doing. (In recent years, confrontations between coaches or parents and officials at youth sports events have risen 10% nationwide, according to one study Thompson cites in his book.) Consider what Thompson and the converted are up against: the legacy of Lombardi; television, where sports reports and highlight shows fixate on bench-clearing brawls and other mayhem; the increased acceptance of cheating and use of chemical substances, even among high school athletes, to get a competitive edge; and the long-held notion that sports at whatever age requires a military mind-set to build champions.

Kids too young to tie their shoes now are marched off to weekly uniformed competition, 8- and 9-year-olds are eschewing “recreational leagues” (an increasingly pejorative term) such as the American Youth Soccer Organization and Little League to compete for spots on high-status “travel teams” that sometimes fly cross country to play in tournaments. Parents are warned by other parents that if they don’t push their young athlete to specialize in one sport year-round by the age of 10, he or she will be outclassed by those who do.

“We’re waiting for the tipping point,” Thompson says when I remind him of this daunting reality, referring to the idea popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell that sweeping changes or social epidemics can occur quickly and unexpectedly when a powerful idea is unleashed. He also likes to quote the Victor Hugo line about the inability to resist an idea whose time has come.

Thompson repeats that line to an audience of soccer league coaches and administrators one night in Oakland. Their league had an incident last season in which a coach attacked an official (the day after the televised NBA player-fan brawl in Detroit), and they asked the PCA for help. “I’m not here tonight as a trainer but as an evangelist,” Thompson says. “If you like what you hear, tell everyone you know.”

Thompson tells them about the importance of establishing a “shared vision” of acceptable behavior, of creating a culture, of becoming an “educational athletic organization,” that the win-at-all-costs mentality will prevail unless challenged--by them, the league leaders. He says it’s hard--if not unwise--for an individual “to go up to someone and tell them they’re acting like a jerk.” But there is strength in numbers. He defines the concept of culture for them as “the way we do things here,” then adds hand gestures while emphatically parsing the phrase. And he gets them to repeat after him, with the same hand gestures: “The WAY . . . WE . . . do things . . . HERE.” And again.

He’s good.

Back at the PC office the next day, I tell Tina Syer, the PCA’s associate director and former Academic All-American field hockey player at Stanford, that while I embrace the PCA mission, I’m not sure as a coach I would feel comfortable wearing its insignia in case I couldn’t live up to its high standards. She reassures me, “That’s OK, if you’re willing as a coach to admit that you make mistakes.”

Bob Heckmann, who recruits PCA partners nationally and also is the basketball coach at nearby Mountain View High School, tells me, “We’re not saying we’re a panacea, we’re just another set of tools. Everybody here feels like we’re changing the world, but nobody feels like we’re better than anybody else.”

A few weeks later I travel to Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County to watch PCA trainer Nick Davidson, the athletic director at New Roads High School in Santa Monica, lead a workshop for several hundred coaches from the local AYSO. Patrick White, the league commissioner, tells me, “I hope it helps. We still have a few people who think a Boys Under 6 soccer game is the World Cup.”

Davidson tells the assembled coaches that he was a WAC (Win at All Costs) coach until he was dragged to a PCA workshop four years ago. “I was all over my kids when I was coaching them,” he says, referring to his two sons, now grown. Later, he confides: “It’s too late now, but I wish I had asked them what they wanted.”

Driving home that night, I hoped I could avoid the same mistake. Which made me realize that Jim Thompson already had left his mark on me, even if I did not see the same tipping point coming. The odds are against him succeeding in his quest to alter our desperate and over-involved national sports culture. But after reading his books and talking to him, I was beginning to make peace with my son’s and daughter’s athletic endeavors, and with my expectations for them.

I’m not coaching now. I no longer even shout instructions from the stands. My attitude is, “Let them play.” I bit my tongue when an umpire called an ankle-high fastball a strike (hey, it’s Little League!) and I stopped deconstructing my son’s at-bats after games. I stopped caring whether he was going to be a better ballplayer than I was. What did it matter? What did he want?

In “The Double-Goal Coach,” Thompson wrote, “Here’s the bottom line for parents. Your child’s experience with youth sports will come to an end, and it may happen suddenly. If you are at all like me, you will look back and think, ‘I wish I had enjoyed it more. I wish I hadn’t obsessed so much about how well my child was performing, or the team’s record, or whether he or she was playing as much as I wanted, or why the coach didn’t play him or her in the right position.’ ”

He reiterates the thought with me on the phone. “We get caught up in the day-to-day events, and sports are so compelling. Sports are life with the volume turned up. But in the moment, caring about whether your kid gets a hit or not, that’s not what it’s about.”

I tell him about my son’s last Little League game this season, a game his team lost 1-0 in the finals of the district tournament. It was a tough loss--for the players, the coaches, the parents. I did not achieve Zen detachment. “Yes,” Thompson says, “but 30 years from now, on your deathbed, are you going to care what the score was? No. You’ll be thinking about just being out there and watching him play, with the sun shining, the perfect day, the beauty of the moment. This is a gift from God.”

I couldn’t argue with that. It was a gift from God to be watching my son and daughter play baseball and basketball and soccer--running, lunging, jumping, having fun, delighting me and their mother with the sheer wonder of their healthy presence in the world. Was this not enough?