- Joined
- May 8, 2002
- Posts
- 1,256,490
- Reaction score
- 59
USA TODAY Sports took a deep dive into the work of the Million Coaches Challenge (MCC), which is implementing a broader approach to coaching than wins and losses, and the work others are executing around its ideals. We look at how sports, and those who lead it, can build a more holistic individual independent of the level of success one achieves as an athlete.
Part 1: What does it really mean to be a ‘quality’ coach?
Randy Bates was a college football coach for more than 40 years.
He and his wife raised three daughters, moving them from Ohio to Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
He coached James Harrison, who would become an All-Pro linebacker with the Pittsburgh Steelers, at Kent State. He was the defensive coordinator under Pat Narduzzi at the University of Pittsburgh when they won the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2021.
“Pitt won the ACC and he turned to all of us and said, ‘OK, 60 to 70 hours a week, I'm approaching 70, it's time to walk away,” says his oldest of three daughters, Samantha.
Samantha Bates became a licensed social worker. She got a Ph.D. in social work specializing in sport-based positive youth development.
She says she’ll never forget the day her dad called her about the player who was showing up late.
“I want to rip him,” Samantha Bates recalls her father telling her, “but I can't do that anymore. It's a different generation.”
She suggested he ask the player what a good day looks like: To catch him on the day he's there on time and looks like he's got it together, and ask him what he's doing on that day.
Her father called three days later.
“That was the best advice, and I think us as coaches would benefit from consultation with folks like you because you just gave me a better strategy than laying into him,” he said. “We figured out what was working for him and how we could replicate that over time.
“I know that works in the weight room. I can help him with replicating some of those things in life.”
There are so many layers of coaching. Stretching down to the youth level, it’s a nuanced position, with built-in leadership and motivational responsibilities, but also social and emotional ones.
Bates and her mentor at Ohio State University, Dawn Anderson-Butcher, sought to mine those dimensions by leading the U.S. National Coach Survey as part of their LIFEsports program, which models and applies sport-based positive youth development.
“The number one training that football coaches with 20-plus years of experience wanted in 2022 was mental health,” says Bates, digging further into her research that surveyed nearly 10,500 youth sports coaches around the country. “I would not have hypothesized that as the daughter of a college football coach. That is not what I would have said they wanted.”
It was part of a larger effort of the Million Coaches Challenge, which addresses coaching obstacles by expanding access to coach training and has continued to survey coaches to understand their deepening roles.
Maybe you are a youth, high school or college coach, or a parent to an athlete in those categories. USA TODAY Sports spoke with Bates and others involved with the Million Coaches Challenge to better understand how coaches and athletes can get the most out of their athletic experiences.
The MCC is funded by the Susan Crown Exchange, a philanthropic organization that has concentrated its focus on preparing youth with skills to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
“Sports are this powerful opportunity, especially in this moment, where we have a youth mental health crisis, and a youth belonging crisis,” says Kevin Connors, managing director for venture philanthropy and social impact at Susan Crown. “We need really creative and bold and upstream solutions to support that, and sports are this powerful antidote both to prevent and heal.
“Aspen Institute research has demonstrated that for young athletes, coaches are the most trusted person in their life outside of family. Yet we also know, based on the research that existed, that less than a third of coaches had been trained in youth development and practice, just like a baseline. Compared to other youth serving professions, that was a gap that we saw.”
The MCC launched in 2021 and has close to two dozen partners, including Little League International, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the National Recreation and Park Association, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and U.S. Soccer Federation. The partners are helping to expand access to coach training grounded in youth development and related practices.
The MCC has engaged coaches and organizations that are school based and community based, generally serving boys and girls between the ages of 3 and 26.
The coaches it serves are paid, but others of them volunteer across a variety of sports that are individual and team based and compete at different levels of performance and competition. Between 2021 and 2025, it collectively trained 1,173,354 coaches.
They are trained in-person, virtually or using a hybrid of the two methods.
The work has since focused on changing the system around coaching with calls of action to understand the root of “quality” coaching.
“Even introductory training can do wonders in improving confidence and knowledge, and in some cases, coaching practices,” Connors says. “Almost 90% of coaches say that these initial trainings, these baseline trainings, are helping them feel more confident around mental health, life skill development, creating safe environments and so forth. So, the data is there, I think, in addition to just the big picture framing of, ‘Hey, we're in a moment of need, and here's a place, a sector, that is really ready to step in and coaches are at the forefront of that.’ ”
More Coach Steve: A coach can make or break your kid's sports experience. How to find the 'right' one?
If the MCC executes its intentions, they can be one in the same. But answering the question becomes a concerted effort by the coach to understand what his or her role means, whether they are educators in a school settings or travel or recreational coaches.
An implementation study of the MCC drawing on survey data from nearly 14,000 coaches helped inform a guide of 12 core practices and strategies for developing “quality coaching” skills. These skills include fostering athlete agency and self-empowerment and running purposeful practices and scrimmages.
Eighty-eight percent of coaches who took part in the MCC implementation study said youth development training across MCC partners made them a better coach, while 72% believe that being trained in and implementing these practices would increase athlete retention.
The numbers correlate with a theme the MCC has embodied: Most coaches say their primary responsibility is to help young people develop as individuals.
The Susan Crown Exchange sees a world where schools, community organizations and travel teams unilaterally adopt the MCC coach development practices. The organization is working with its partners to identify new revenue streams and remove structural barriers in a new national effort to support quality coaching training and environments that foster it.
“We learned that quality coaching alone isn't enough,” says Haviland Sharvit, the Susan Crown Exchange’s executive director. “We need to create structures and systems to better support all coaches. Some coaches may have access to this type of training, but certainly not every coach does. And so we are trying to think about ways that we can support systems building so that every coach is trained in positive youth development.”
YOUTH SPORTS SURVIVAL GUIDE: Order Coach Steve's new book
What about trying to win? Has the objective, you might wonder, of leading kids onto the field or court been lost?
The original national coaches survey administered by Butcher and Bates at Ohio State found that coaches who ranked teaching life skills as one of their top coaching philosophies also reported higher win percentages over the course of their careers compared to coaches that did not share this value.
“As much as we're thinking about that old school coach, I think COVID really played an interesting role in, ‘Oh, wow. I'm not seeing them. How do I follow up? How do I know that they're OK,’ ” says Ohio State’s Samantha Bates, who is working on another national coaches survey to better understand environmental factors influencing youth sport and coaches. “As a mental health therapist myself, I'm tracking all the data. It's been a 30 to 50% increase in mental health symptomology for kids. So, I think they were telling us we're seeing it. We need more tools, and I think we're more ready now.”
The initial goal of the MCC was to train 1 million coaches in positive youth development (PYD). Sharvit says the definition of PYD is multifaceted. It’s an intentional process, she suggests, in which you ask yourself such questions as, “How do I interact with young people?” “How do I build inclusive safe spaces?” “How do I empower athlete voice and choice?”
Embodying such practices, the MCC has learned through its research, also gives coaches confidence in their ability to coach and makes them more likely to continue coaching.
“One of the things that's fascinating to me is given the diversity of partners and the environments they were coaching, from five-year-old soccer through the most elite sports, these numbers were really consistent,” says Connors, Sharvit’s colleague at the Susan Crown Exchange. “It reminded us at the end of the day, good coaching is good coaching. No matter what environment you are in, no matter which age group, the core of coaching is the same no matter where you are and the data is starting to show that.”
The next step is getting more buy-in and support from parents for creating positive youth development through coaching.
While the MCC is about maintaining — and in some cases, changing — the idea of what it means to be a coach, it also has an opportunity to influence how parents view their kids’ athletic journeys.
“So many of us are caught up in the current moment and trying to understand what is best for our kids,” says Connors, who has been a varsity baseball coach as well as T-ball soccer and basketball coach to his own kids’ 7-and-under teams. “How do I navigate it? Perhaps speaking directly to parents and helping them feel more empowered will actually kind of lift the tide for everyone who's trying to pursue these goals.”
As a coach myself, I’ve had a parent ask me about my coaching philosophy. While our response might be to give them what they want — we’re here to try and work hard and win games — we are learning it can be more robust.
Data from the 2022 national coaches survey reveals a more comprehensive way of thinking is inside of us. According to the survey, 97% of coaches reported that parents praise the performance of their own child, 96% report they demonstrate support for other athletes and about 9 out of 10 report parents/caregivers consistently model “sportspersonship” and express appreciation of their coaching.
However, coaches also reported perceptions of negative parent/caregiver behaviors such as criticizing referees and officials (67%), criticizing the performance of other athletes (50%), criticizing the performance of their own child (66%) and criticizing their coaching performance (33%).
Sometimes as parents and coaches, we need to take a deep breath and look at the bigger picture about what training athletes in sports means to us. We can be more intentional with our comments and observations to our kids’ coaches, too.
“We’ve been thinking more about parents, and we haven't gone directly to them with this content, but we are certainly interested in it, because I think demand from parents will result in huge change, and even understanding your questions: Are your coaches trained? How much playing time is my kid getting? What does the environment look like?” says Sharvit, the Susan Crown Exchange’s executive director. “Just preparing questions could make a huge difference. And so we are starting to think about, like, what do parents need to help bring that knowledge and understanding to them as well?”
Part II (coming next week):What training a ‘quality’ coachlooks like
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He played baseball in high school, rowed in college and spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents to a college and high school baseball player. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How training ensures quality youth coaches aren't one in a 'million'
Continue reading...
Part 1: What does it really mean to be a ‘quality’ coach?
Randy Bates was a college football coach for more than 40 years.
He and his wife raised three daughters, moving them from Ohio to Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
He coached James Harrison, who would become an All-Pro linebacker with the Pittsburgh Steelers, at Kent State. He was the defensive coordinator under Pat Narduzzi at the University of Pittsburgh when they won the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2021.
“Pitt won the ACC and he turned to all of us and said, ‘OK, 60 to 70 hours a week, I'm approaching 70, it's time to walk away,” says his oldest of three daughters, Samantha.
You must be registered for see images attach
Samantha Bates became a licensed social worker. She got a Ph.D. in social work specializing in sport-based positive youth development.
She says she’ll never forget the day her dad called her about the player who was showing up late.
“I want to rip him,” Samantha Bates recalls her father telling her, “but I can't do that anymore. It's a different generation.”
She suggested he ask the player what a good day looks like: To catch him on the day he's there on time and looks like he's got it together, and ask him what he's doing on that day.
Her father called three days later.
“That was the best advice, and I think us as coaches would benefit from consultation with folks like you because you just gave me a better strategy than laying into him,” he said. “We figured out what was working for him and how we could replicate that over time.
“I know that works in the weight room. I can help him with replicating some of those things in life.”
There are so many layers of coaching. Stretching down to the youth level, it’s a nuanced position, with built-in leadership and motivational responsibilities, but also social and emotional ones.
Bates and her mentor at Ohio State University, Dawn Anderson-Butcher, sought to mine those dimensions by leading the U.S. National Coach Survey as part of their LIFEsports program, which models and applies sport-based positive youth development.
“The number one training that football coaches with 20-plus years of experience wanted in 2022 was mental health,” says Bates, digging further into her research that surveyed nearly 10,500 youth sports coaches around the country. “I would not have hypothesized that as the daughter of a college football coach. That is not what I would have said they wanted.”
It was part of a larger effort of the Million Coaches Challenge, which addresses coaching obstacles by expanding access to coach training and has continued to survey coaches to understand their deepening roles.
Maybe you are a youth, high school or college coach, or a parent to an athlete in those categories. USA TODAY Sports spoke with Bates and others involved with the Million Coaches Challenge to better understand how coaches and athletes can get the most out of their athletic experiences.
What is the Million Coaches Challenge?
The MCC is funded by the Susan Crown Exchange, a philanthropic organization that has concentrated its focus on preparing youth with skills to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
“Sports are this powerful opportunity, especially in this moment, where we have a youth mental health crisis, and a youth belonging crisis,” says Kevin Connors, managing director for venture philanthropy and social impact at Susan Crown. “We need really creative and bold and upstream solutions to support that, and sports are this powerful antidote both to prevent and heal.
“Aspen Institute research has demonstrated that for young athletes, coaches are the most trusted person in their life outside of family. Yet we also know, based on the research that existed, that less than a third of coaches had been trained in youth development and practice, just like a baseline. Compared to other youth serving professions, that was a gap that we saw.”
The MCC launched in 2021 and has close to two dozen partners, including Little League International, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the National Recreation and Park Association, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and U.S. Soccer Federation. The partners are helping to expand access to coach training grounded in youth development and related practices.
The MCC has engaged coaches and organizations that are school based and community based, generally serving boys and girls between the ages of 3 and 26.
The coaches it serves are paid, but others of them volunteer across a variety of sports that are individual and team based and compete at different levels of performance and competition. Between 2021 and 2025, it collectively trained 1,173,354 coaches.
They are trained in-person, virtually or using a hybrid of the two methods.
The work has since focused on changing the system around coaching with calls of action to understand the root of “quality” coaching.
“Even introductory training can do wonders in improving confidence and knowledge, and in some cases, coaching practices,” Connors says. “Almost 90% of coaches say that these initial trainings, these baseline trainings, are helping them feel more confident around mental health, life skill development, creating safe environments and so forth. So, the data is there, I think, in addition to just the big picture framing of, ‘Hey, we're in a moment of need, and here's a place, a sector, that is really ready to step in and coaches are at the forefront of that.’ ”
More Coach Steve: A coach can make or break your kid's sports experience. How to find the 'right' one?
What is the difference between quality coaching and trained coaching?
If the MCC executes its intentions, they can be one in the same. But answering the question becomes a concerted effort by the coach to understand what his or her role means, whether they are educators in a school settings or travel or recreational coaches.
An implementation study of the MCC drawing on survey data from nearly 14,000 coaches helped inform a guide of 12 core practices and strategies for developing “quality coaching” skills. These skills include fostering athlete agency and self-empowerment and running purposeful practices and scrimmages.
Eighty-eight percent of coaches who took part in the MCC implementation study said youth development training across MCC partners made them a better coach, while 72% believe that being trained in and implementing these practices would increase athlete retention.
The numbers correlate with a theme the MCC has embodied: Most coaches say their primary responsibility is to help young people develop as individuals.
The Susan Crown Exchange sees a world where schools, community organizations and travel teams unilaterally adopt the MCC coach development practices. The organization is working with its partners to identify new revenue streams and remove structural barriers in a new national effort to support quality coaching training and environments that foster it.
“We learned that quality coaching alone isn't enough,” says Haviland Sharvit, the Susan Crown Exchange’s executive director. “We need to create structures and systems to better support all coaches. Some coaches may have access to this type of training, but certainly not every coach does. And so we are trying to think about ways that we can support systems building so that every coach is trained in positive youth development.”
YOUTH SPORTS SURVIVAL GUIDE: Order Coach Steve's new book
What is 'positive youth development' and why should we care about it?
What about trying to win? Has the objective, you might wonder, of leading kids onto the field or court been lost?
The original national coaches survey administered by Butcher and Bates at Ohio State found that coaches who ranked teaching life skills as one of their top coaching philosophies also reported higher win percentages over the course of their careers compared to coaches that did not share this value.
“As much as we're thinking about that old school coach, I think COVID really played an interesting role in, ‘Oh, wow. I'm not seeing them. How do I follow up? How do I know that they're OK,’ ” says Ohio State’s Samantha Bates, who is working on another national coaches survey to better understand environmental factors influencing youth sport and coaches. “As a mental health therapist myself, I'm tracking all the data. It's been a 30 to 50% increase in mental health symptomology for kids. So, I think they were telling us we're seeing it. We need more tools, and I think we're more ready now.”
The initial goal of the MCC was to train 1 million coaches in positive youth development (PYD). Sharvit says the definition of PYD is multifaceted. It’s an intentional process, she suggests, in which you ask yourself such questions as, “How do I interact with young people?” “How do I build inclusive safe spaces?” “How do I empower athlete voice and choice?”
Embodying such practices, the MCC has learned through its research, also gives coaches confidence in their ability to coach and makes them more likely to continue coaching.
“One of the things that's fascinating to me is given the diversity of partners and the environments they were coaching, from five-year-old soccer through the most elite sports, these numbers were really consistent,” says Connors, Sharvit’s colleague at the Susan Crown Exchange. “It reminded us at the end of the day, good coaching is good coaching. No matter what environment you are in, no matter which age group, the core of coaching is the same no matter where you are and the data is starting to show that.”
The next step is getting more buy-in and support from parents for creating positive youth development through coaching.
What is the role of parents within the Million Coaches Challenge?
While the MCC is about maintaining — and in some cases, changing — the idea of what it means to be a coach, it also has an opportunity to influence how parents view their kids’ athletic journeys.
“So many of us are caught up in the current moment and trying to understand what is best for our kids,” says Connors, who has been a varsity baseball coach as well as T-ball soccer and basketball coach to his own kids’ 7-and-under teams. “How do I navigate it? Perhaps speaking directly to parents and helping them feel more empowered will actually kind of lift the tide for everyone who's trying to pursue these goals.”
As a coach myself, I’ve had a parent ask me about my coaching philosophy. While our response might be to give them what they want — we’re here to try and work hard and win games — we are learning it can be more robust.
Data from the 2022 national coaches survey reveals a more comprehensive way of thinking is inside of us. According to the survey, 97% of coaches reported that parents praise the performance of their own child, 96% report they demonstrate support for other athletes and about 9 out of 10 report parents/caregivers consistently model “sportspersonship” and express appreciation of their coaching.
However, coaches also reported perceptions of negative parent/caregiver behaviors such as criticizing referees and officials (67%), criticizing the performance of other athletes (50%), criticizing the performance of their own child (66%) and criticizing their coaching performance (33%).
Sometimes as parents and coaches, we need to take a deep breath and look at the bigger picture about what training athletes in sports means to us. We can be more intentional with our comments and observations to our kids’ coaches, too.
“We’ve been thinking more about parents, and we haven't gone directly to them with this content, but we are certainly interested in it, because I think demand from parents will result in huge change, and even understanding your questions: Are your coaches trained? How much playing time is my kid getting? What does the environment look like?” says Sharvit, the Susan Crown Exchange’s executive director. “Just preparing questions could make a huge difference. And so we are starting to think about, like, what do parents need to help bring that knowledge and understanding to them as well?”
Part II (coming next week):What training a ‘quality’ coachlooks like
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He played baseball in high school, rowed in college and spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents to a college and high school baseball player. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How training ensures quality youth coaches aren't one in a 'million'
Continue reading...
