*Click the featured image above to watch the full speech from Coach Lucia

If you do some research on the history of the most successful college hockey coaches, you can be sure that you will come across the University of Minnesota’s Head Coach Don Lucia. Although this speech is almost nearly 10 years old, it strikes some important lessons that we need to remember as coaches and as parents when our kids are in youth sports.

Lucia stresses the importance that coaches need to focus on the children having fun and enjoying the game instead of their own winning record. Today, too many coaches are yelling and barking orders from the sidelines trying to win their district’s youth soccer/basketball/baseball/hockey/softball championship because they have been brainwashed that winning is the most important thing for kids at a young age.

“We have to change the attitude from a coaches standpoint that it is a ‘Win at all costs’. It’s not. It needs to be a ‘Fun at all costs’.”

Instead, Lucia reflects on his past experiences as a child growing up in Minnesota playing pond hockey and encourages coaches to teach their kids to take risks in games.

“We need to allow kids to take risk. When I look back, the repetitions that we formed as a youth player were done on an outdoor rink without a coach there. If you made a mistake and it ended up in the back of your net, all you did was take the puck out and go play again. There was nobody yelling at you or screaming at you to not make a move.”

Lucia to Coaches: Focus on Skill Development & Practice

‘If you can’t do things technically, you can’t do them tactically.’

If coaches and parents want their players/children to develop at a young age, they need to be encouraging them to put their full effort into developing their technical skills in order to allow them to become better athletes. Every sport has at least three to five major skills that younger players should be mastering in order to play the game at a high level. For example, these are not in any particular order, but you can see that there is plenty of things to work on in these sports to run an effective skill development model.

Baseball & Softball – Throwing, Catching, Hitting, Fielding

Hockey – Skating, Passing, Stickhandling, Shooting

Basketball – Dribbling, Passing, Shooting, Running

Soccer – Dribbling, Juggling, Passing, Shooting

Football – Throwing, Catching, Blocking, Agility

Golf – Tempo, Swing Plane, Chipping, Putting

“We talk about skill development and practice ratios. Even at our level, I bet that we spend 75-80% of our time at the college level on skill development because it still boils down to who can skate, who can stickhandle, and who can pass. It doesn’t come down to who can play the best systems, who can breakout the puck the best” says Lucia.

“It does not matter if you win or lose. We have to keep the game in perspective and keep it for the kids. That is the most important thing that I see. You have to teach skills and not be concerned if you win or lose. Last time I looked, a pee-wee coach is not going to be up for an NHL job because they were sixty five and two.”

High adrenaline youth coaches and nay-sayers will denounce this philosophy and point to their track record to reaffirm to parents that intense coaching at a young age is what develops athletes.

Think about it though… Do their methods actually work or do they maybe have a handful of athletes at most that happened to make it because they were passionate and developed their talents on a consistent basis?

We should always remember as coaches that unless we are being paid to win, we don’t need to coach that way. Let the kids experience things. Let them succeed and fail. Let them learn what it feels like to both win and lose and to be humble in victory and defeat. Let them know what it feels like to make a wrong decision and how to correct it instead of barking orders at them to avoid failure.

Lucia to Parents: Tone It Back & Calm Down

When it comes to parents and their behavior, Lucia urges that parents need to take a step back and calm down.

“I kind of sit and laugh when I go to my child’s hockey games and see how ‘in to it’ parents get. It’s like their whole self worth is being determined in Johnny or Jenny at 8 or 9 years old whether they are going to win or lose a game”

Too many parents today have an end game for their child when it comes to their participation in youth sports. The days of support and silence are being replaced with parents that think they need to participate in their child’s experience as well to fill some empty void. More and more parents today are taking their frustrations out on officials and coaches and living their actions in the car rides home and when they surf social media.

Their intensity is a ‘badge of honor’ for them, reaffirming themselves that they are a good parent that is looking out for their child’s best interests. However, Lucia hits a point home that parents and coaches at the youth sports levels can’t accept: THE KIDS DON’T CARE AS MUCH AS YOU DO.

Coach Lucia preaches “When yelling at officials – We wonder why more than 50% of officials quit. I don’t know why you would be an official in this day and age with parents yelling at you all of the time. We get worried about a 14 year old kid making a bad call in a game?…Who cares?”

“Most kids when they leave the rink, what do you think they’re concerned about? Do you think that they are concerned about whether they won or lost? No, they’re not. when they get out of the rink, they are concerned about what the snack is going to be and when they can go play. They’re not concerned whether they won or lost, so we have to keep it in perspective”.

Parents need to steer away from being intense and instead need to be supportive. Almost all professional athletes that have made it to the highest level credit their loving relationships that they have with their parents. They never cite that they were so thankful that their mother or father was extremely intense and pushed them to earn a college scholarship.

It can be argued that a majority of children are exiting from playing sports between the ages of 12-16 because of the lack of enjoyment they receive from playing. Intense coaches & parents that live vicariously through their children are forcing more and more kids out of sports.

“Kids should play because of the social, physical, allow them to be a part of a team. Not to be there so that they can earn a scholarship one day and not to be there so that they can play in the NHL some day. If you’re concerned with that, take all of that money you’re going to spend at seven years old and put it in the bank and invest it. I guarantee you will have your scholarship when your son or daughter is a senior in high school”.

Whether you agree with this article or not, just remember that you have been warned. If you stress winning too much at a very young age and don’t allow the kids to play and fail, you will fail them in giving them the total experience that playing sports has to offer.

“Its all about giving the game back to the kids. It has to be fun.”