Softball Coaching Tips - How to Teach Decision-Making Skills

Did you know that most parents, coaches and instructors, despite all the best intentions in the world, are actually hurting the development of their kids/athletes?

You see, young softball players need to have good technical skills and know how to play the game to be successful on the field and develop as talented softball players. That's the job of parents (in the early stages), coaches and instructors to help them learn the skills and how to play the game.

Most will teach skills by demonstrating how to do it, emphasizing key elements, and help the kids learn and refine the skill by giving feedback and "telling" them what isn't correct and what to change.

That's this way of giving feedback that's the problem. Unfortunately, most parents, coaches, and instructors are giving feedback that way - mostly because that's how they also received feedback in their life. However, excellent studies in sports pedagogy has shown that this method of giving feedback (direct telling of what's wrong or needs to be changed) is actually detrimental to the long-term development of athletes (i.e. they never reach their full potential).

Why? Because with this way of giving feedback, the athletes become "dependant" on the feeback of parents, coaches, and instructors to progress. She never learns to figure it out by herself, to perform a self-analysis, to become her "own" coach, to really understand how things works. Instead, they rely on their parents, coaches, and instructors to give them all the answers that they need.  That's because they are train from a very age to do that because they've always been told exactly what they needed to do without really ever thinking about it.

What's the solution? You need to help your kids/athletes "figure it out" by questionning them, helping them find the solution by themselves. That's not that easy to do but does it ever pay off when she becomes her "own" coach and doesn't always need someone to tell what's wrong or not working.

Studies have clearly shown how important that is.  You have to do "decision-training" with your kids/athletes to help them in the long-term.

I discuss how to do this and why it is so important in the video below.

In the mean time, if you want to become an even better coach - take a look at my Super Coaching Bundle .

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