Now, I don't know if you notice this, but at certain times of the year, the relationship between a parent of an athlete, a coach, and the athlete is just full of friction. Now, it might be because it is near the end of the year and our frustrations have got to the point where we can't take it no more, our nerves are shredded, or it could be as simple as we're coming to the end of the year and everybody's diving for the line. Everything is really important. The whole year rests on the final race, the final competition, the final game, or whether it is something more systemic is going on. And that's what we're going to talk about today. The one thing almost every parent of an athlete gets wrong.
Dave's a high-performance sports mind coach, helping athletes, coaches, parents, and crew do it smarter in their sport. Any sport, any continent, if you want to learn what it takes to turn athletes into champions, then buckle up your boots, strap on your helmet, and take a deep breath as we dive into another episode of Brain in the Game as we unpack the mental strategies to perform smarter in and out of the arena. Bye, please.
So welcome to Brain in the Game, the podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents. And this episode, 103, We're going to be going into that deep, dark place, parents in Sport. So okay, it's a little bit of a challenging topic to talk about because it's full of emotion. And the caveat before we get into all of the things that happen is, first and foremost, as a parent, you're a parent of a child before you're a parent of an athlete. So if there's something that's going on, if there's something that's untowards, if you see something that's unsafe, then absolutely everything we're going to talk about today gets pushed to the side and you do the right thing and you step up and step in. So with that perspective in place first, that framework of we got to protect our children first, now let's talk about the relationship between the athlete, the coach, and the parent, because throughout time, it has been one of those relationships that has always been fiery. You've got these highly invested parents who have their young son or their young daughter involved in the sport, and they've put them there because they want them to succeed and do well.
They've put them there because they've selected that organisation, that coach, that sport for a reason. But then there's a perception that they're meddling. They want to control. They want to tell the coaches what to do. And then you got the coaches on the other side. And what the coaches are doing is going, Hey, look, step back. We don't want you in our gym. We don't want you on our field. You can't stand on the side of the pool. Whatever the sporting organisation that they are, they don't want the parents involved. So now you've got this conflict with the athlete sitting in in the middle. I want to talk about the relationship and the roles of each of these contributing factors, these people involved in this journey. So let's start with the obvious. Let's start with the athlete. Well, out of everybody, although they've got the most important job, arguably, they've also got the most simplest job. And the most simplest job for an athlete is to perform, to train, to listen, to engage, to commit, to do all the things that they are advised to do for the right reasons. So the role of an athlete is, albeit stressful and highly demanding, is probably the clearest and cleanest role to have.
The role of an athlete is all about communication. It's about knowing the role of that parent and what they do, and we'll get to that, and how that athlete contributes to that. I have a belief that an athlete, and I'm not talking about a son or a daughter at the moment, I'm talking about an athlete, needs really clear defined boundaries around each of the people in their entourage, and that includes the parents. There's times where the athlete has a responsibility to differentiate between the athlete and the son or the daughter. It's on them too. And when we get to talk about the parents role a little bit further into this podcast, you'll see why. So let's talk about the coach? So if you're just listening to this on one of the streaming services, there is a PDF that you can follow along with. If you're watching this on one of our YouTube channels or on our website, then What you'll see here is a graph that we measure the interactions between a coach and an athlete. Now, I know we're talking about parents here, but as a parent, we need to know the different phases that the coach and the athlete are manoeuvring through.
What you'll see here is a graph based on control and the age of the athlete. Now, of course, it doesn't mean when you step out of being on your eighth birthday that you switch. This is an organic growing dynamic. This graph that we're going to go through is an ideal high performance protocol. There's going to be some variables, There's going to be some best-spoking around this, and depending on the sport, too. However, this is a very good opportunity to look at what the optimal is. When our children get involved in sports and they start to build a relationship with their coach, if they're really young, when they go into that environment, us as parents expect the coach to take full accountability and responsibility for how that looks and works, purely and simply because the child, now athlete, doesn't know what they don't know. And because of that, we want a educated, trained, and qualified coach to guide that transition into that world. So when you look at graph here, what you'll see is the vast majority, around 90% of the interaction is driven by a coach in those early years, and rightly so, because they've got the experience, they've got the responsibility, and they've got the protocol and the training to do that.
When the athlete moves into the next phase, we talk between 8 and 12 years old, then we start to see an increase in the control mechanism that the athlete brings to that dynamic. So they might turn around and go, This is happening to me. What do we do? Or, This is working, that's not working. Why is that bit not working? So the interaction between the coach and the athlete is starting to be a little bit more interactive by the athlete. What we're growing here is a collaboration. Now, when we see this, it's still around 75% driven by the coach. But what we're training in the athlete now is to contribute, not to just be a puppet at the end of a string, not to just expect to be told what to do, not to just wait for the coach to see something and correct it, but to be involved and have ownership. There's some skill acquisition and performance resilience that comes with ownership. By the time the athlete is in their mid-teens, we want a 50/50 collaboration. The reason being is you want that athlete and that coach to collaborate and work together. You want the coach to give that guidance and that direction and that information, the technical, the advanced awareness of what happens and where it happens and the trajectory.
But you also want the athlete to be given very healthy feedback. They need to be saying, This is working because my body hurts here, or This doesn't look right. Why? I can't control this. I can't do that. I can do this, but it doesn't work here. It gives the coach better information. It gives them more data to work with. When we start to get to the end of our teens and we start to get into the early 20s, now we're up to around about 75% of the input and the control and the direction should be driven by athlete. The coach at this point should be more like a consultant in that area, but a more active hands-on consultant. They're still collaborating, they're still giving input, they're still asking the right kinds of questions. However, the athlete at this point should be a lot more interactive, driving a lot of the learning, the processes, the things that they focus on, the the ignition and the reward. Again, when we come to perform, this degree of ownership means under pressure, they're more self-reliant. By the time the athlete is into the young adulthood, and they're still performing, this is when 90% is driven by the athlete.
They, by this point, should know exactly what they need to perform. They should know exactly what works for them and what doesn't work for them. They should know exactly what they need from their entourage, the people around them. And the most purest version of a coach at this point, realistically, is just a hired consultant. The athlete should be asking the right kinds of a question, and the coach should be delivering the right response. So when we look at this as a graph of the relationship dynamics between a coach and an athlete, It's not a lot different between a parent and a child. By the time our kids are in their mid-teens and they're most challenging, we want to have this relationship where we're working together, this collaboration collaboration. It's going to be challenging, but we want buy-in from them. We don't want it to be a dictatorship. We know that if we start dictating at this point, they're just going to push back. From an athlete or from a child, the relationship between a parent and a coach mirrors each other. In showing you this graph and making the connexion between how a coach grows an athlete and how a parent grows a child, what we start to see is there's a lot of similarities, a lot of crossover.
So it makes sense, realistically, that the coach and the parent should collaborate, too. And this is where it tends to fall over. A parent will want to turn around and take control of the environment for their child. Absolutely. And like I said at the start, the caveat to this is a parent is always responsible for the environment that they put their child into. So if something is untoward or something isn't right or ethically immoral, then that's our responsibility as a parent to step in. However, when we're talking about coaching, very rarely is a parent an adequate coach to an athlete. And if you were, the reality is you probably wouldn't be paying to get somebody else to coach him. You'd coach him yourself. What we want to do is recognise the role of a coach. It's that technical advice, a direction, it's in understanding the sports specifics. It's showing a growth template of, this is the plan I have to grow the athlete. So from a coach's perspective, their focus is on the athlete development. With a side note that it's human, and sometimes coaches forget that they're human. Whereas a parent's mandate is to grow a human with a side note that they're an athlete, too.
So we can sometimes have conflicting objectives. So it makes sense that a coach and a parent should collaborate. And it blows my mind why so many coaches feel intimidated and they push parents out. That's not to say that all parents are made equal. I think all parents have the right intention. All parents want the right thing for their children. But trust me, there's some difficult parents out there. In actual fact, I'm navigating a situation at the moment with two parents who are by far the biggest inhibitor to their child's future. It's not the athlete's skill capabilities. It's not the athlete's desire and willingness to do what they want. It's the parents trying trying to orchestrate that career for their child without any understanding. So that is where I think coaches see that the parents often inability to coach crosses over with the coaches, lack of rights to parent. So how do we navigate this? If we know that parents have a mandate to grow their child, and then what they're doing is putting them in the world with a coach, they've got to learn to trust that coach. Or if you don't trust that coach, find a better coach.
What is the role of a parent? I have always had a philosophy that when a parent takes an athlete to training or picks them up from training or takes them to a competition and brings them home from that competition, that the training and the competition needs to stay in situ. I often say that when you pick up your child from training, and they are your child at that point, you're picking up, you're not picking up the athlete, you're picking up that child. Leave that sport there. If you want to inquire, By the time you get to the car to take them home, or your time you get to the bus or the train, stop that conversation. Start talking about parent and child conversation. If that child wants to discuss something that's happened at training or happened at competition, us as parents need to ask a very specific question, which is, are you telling me this because you want me to solve something? Or are you telling me this because you want to vent something? Letting your child know that they can vent without you taking action is such a liberating thing for that child. They can get on that bus, that train or in the car and go, They did this today, and I hated it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah I think, then our role as parents is, Okay, give me all the information and tell me exactly what you want me to do.
Because when you can have that conversation with your child, they know that they can come to you with specific things and know that you are going to take action on it in a way that they actually want. Now, I'm a parent of three children and a grandparent as well, and I know how challenging it is when your child comes to you and vent something, and what you want to do is fix it. I get that. I have those same impulses. I have those same desires to go and fix. What we We need to be conscious of, though, is in our effort to fix, do we push our child away from opening up to us, to telling us the information in the first place? Do we make them feel more isolated, thinking, I can't tell Mum and Dad because they're just going to go off their rocker, and then I can't go in the gym, or I can't go to the swimming, or I can't go to the pitch. The coach is not going to talk to me. The coach is not going to select me. So all of those but what ifs will go through our children's mind.
So we've got to give them, what platform do you want me to engage? Is that just as a sounding board without any feedback? So you can say absolutely anything you want, and I'm going to sit here and go, Okay, that's terrible. But we don't want to give them feedback on suggestions, what they should do, unless they say to us, Okay, all I want from you is, what do you I think I should do? Or, Help, I want you to go and deal with this. We need to know our mandate from our children. Primarily, our role as parents of high-performing athletes, actually athletes of any degree. It's just support, love, caring, and be happy that they're happy doing something that they love to do. Again, the caveat here is if they're unhappy, if they're coming home in tears, if they're not enjoying it or trying to not go to training or to their competitions, then we step in because our children are unhappy. One thing I ask of all coaches and parents is to have a framework of communication. If a coach doesn't give the parents an opportunity or a framework or a vessel where we or monthly, they get the opportunity to have a conversation and ask how their child is going in that sport, then the only time they're going to hear from that parent is when that parent is frustrated or that parent is worried or that parent is feeling isolated.
And then the parent will rock up at training and the coach will be, Oh, that parent's coming again. Close the door. Lock them out. And then you don't ever get to move that situation forward. So coaches, I always advise to have a open-door policy at specific times. Of course, you don't want that parent marching across the gym floor or standing poolside or on the side of the pitch, screaming, I want to talk to you. There needs to be a time, a place, and a process where, Hey, if you want to come and have a conversation, absolutely. My door's always open. You need to make an appointment. And these are the windows that you can make that appointment in. It can't be 3: 00 AM. It has to be a time that's a proper time. The role of a coach is to be the conduit for the child to be able to say things to them because they're going to have their own unique dynamic, their own unique relationship, and it should be all about the growth of an athlete. It needs to be that relationship and that conduit between the parents and say, Hey, what your son, your daughter is doing in this sport is fantastic.
However, I'm seeing this. A parent should be able to turn and go, I've not seen that. We're not having that at home. I've not heard anything from the school. Thank you for that feedback. I will have a conversation as a parent. If we get this two-sided conflict, then you've got this athlete and child in one that doesn't have an avenue or conduit to be able to say, Hey, I need support here, or, Hey, this is making me feel this way. They become insular and separated. And that's not a good environment to nurture a child into a good adult or an athlete into a high-performing athlete. Often I'll hear parents say, Well, at home, I got them to do extra stretching, extra recovery, extra, extra, extra. Again, unless you're a highly trained, qualified, and even then, I would urge you not to coach Then don't be that mixture of the parent-coach at home. All three of my children have been involved in high-performance sport, and my mandate was to be dad. And I did I did that on purpose. Even though I was a gymnast and my two daughters became gymnast, my youngest daughter became a higher performing gymnast, even when I walked in the gym, I was just dad.
Even though I had been a high performance coach myself, even though I work in gyms every day of the week, I was just dad. And as she's now become an adult, I think she appreciated that. She used to say to people, Why do people talk to my dad? He's just my dad. And I liked that. I liked the fact that all she saw me as was dad. She didn't see me as though I'm coming home from training and my dad's going to make me stretch. I'm coming home from training and my dad's going to turn around and say, You've not done enough this. Why didn't that skill work? What are you not doing this for? We don't want them to avoid coming home because they feel that they can't leave their training, their sport, there. We want them to come home and feel comfortable, feel safe, that they can have a conversation. Hopefully, they've You've got strength and conditioning coaches there who are specifically employed to do that role. They might have biomechanics involved to help them with skill acquisition or recovery processes or physios and doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, sleep specialists. I've seen a lot of those.
So all of the things that are performance-based, you want them to go and utilise a specialist if they've got access to that. Now, of course, if they're having issues with recovery, sleep, nutrition, speak to the coach and go, This is what I'm hearing. Do you have any resources in-house? If not, any recommendations where we can take them? Because it needs to be collaborative. Too often, I've had coaches say to me, They've been off to see a sports psychologist. I didn't know until I get a phone call from the psychologist saying, Hey, what we need you to do is X, Y, and Z. It's important for the parent to understand the role. It's support, it's nurture, it's to be that non-judgmental sounding board and to collaborate with the coach. Let the coach, coach, and the coaches, let the parents, parent. You have two different things going on. One's technical, we're both technical, but one's more your emotive. So as we come to the end of the year and the emotions are bubbling up, parents are reevaluating the investment time, effort, and money that they put into their child's sport. As the coach is looking at the end of the year and goes, Has this been a return on my investment?
Have we achieved the performance expectations we set out at the start of the year? And as the athlete is thinking, Am I good enough? Did it work? Was that worth it? We want to have a healthy, robust conversation with everybody staying in their lane. Understanding the true context of high performance. Know what your area is and be an expert in it, but don't cross into anybody else's lanes. From a parent to a parent. I get it. I understand. I know that it's challenging. I know there's a loss of sense of control. Put your child, your daughter, into an environment that you trust. But don't control the environment. Just choose wisely. To coaches, from a coach to a coach. Don't isolate you and the athlete from the parents. All you are doing is feeding them and upsetting them and frustrating them and winding them up to come and attack you. Collaborate with them, work with them, communicate with them. Allow them the opportunity to ask the questions in a controlled environment and format. Working with them means that you are going to create an environment that that athlete is going to thrive in. And athletes. Work with your coach as a coach, your parents as parents.
Understand that their roles are different. If we all work together and understanding our specific role dynamics, then you're going to be in a really good place to grow, thrive, and perform as an athlete. Hope you got a lot from this. If you are a parent, share it to all the other parents. If you're a coach, share it to the other coaches. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game. Train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Degle.
