How to Modify Your Coaching Style When Working with Youth Athletes

Kevin Lilly earned a master of business administration degree from the American Graduate School of International Management. Most recently, he was the senior vice president at MiMedx, a biomedical firm in the Atlanta area. Kevin Lilly enjoys coaching youths in sports like softball, football, and basketball.

Although adult and youth athletes are passionate about sports, they must be taught in different ways to gain proficiency. Coaches must adopt a teaching style that caters to participants’ attention spans, capacity to comprehend complex information, and proprioceptive abilities (the body's capacity to sense itself).

To effectively train youth athletes, coaches should split complex skills into simple drills combined with breaks to learn new skills or engage in recreation.

Youth coaches should stop athletes from practicing a skill after repetitions and corrections stop being productive. Once that point is reached, young athletes can take a break and practice a different skill for a while. This strategy will reduce frustration. Moreover, athletes may experience sudden mastery of a particular skill after taking a break from it.

Coaches should keep training sessions short so that young athletes don’t lose focus. Youth below 10 years of age can only tolerate 30 minutes of focused training at a time since they have a shorter attention span.

Finally, research reveals that making five encouraging remarks for every instance of constructive criticism will help coaches teach youth athletes more effectively.