Confidence in youth sports articles and tips for sports parents, young athletes, and youth coaches to improve mental performance and consistency.
What Hurts Sports Kids Confidence? Do your sports kids hold goofy beliefs about what boosts their performance? They may think that they’ll perform well if they wear a certain pair of socks, or sport a red headband, or eat five granola bars before a game. Often such ideas come from … Read Sport Psychology Tip
Repetition in Youth Sports To Build Confidence Parents, do you know practice and repetition can boost young athletes’ confidence? That’s the word from Dr. Vernon Williams, neurologist and medical director of the Kerlan-Jobe Center for Sports Neurology in Los Angeles. “High quality repetition will help your brain learn patterns,” he … Read Sport Psychology Tip
Helping Perfectionist Sports Kids Do you have sports kids who criticize themselves for making mistakes? Do they hang onto a mistake for too long, talking about them or reminding themselves about how much they goofed up? If so, it’s likely you have a perfectionist on your hands… Many people think … Read Sport Psychology Tip
How Can Sports Parents Distract Kids? Unruly parents and crowds can really hurt kids’ confidence, says Gil Fried, professor and head of the sport management department at the University of New Haven and an expert on crowd control. Why? Just think about it. When athletes are trying to perform, what … Read Sport Psychology Tip
Encouraging Sports Kids Bjorn, a 12-year-old hockey player, joined a AAA team after three years of playing hockey, and suddenly found himself surrounded by other athletes with 7 or 8 years’ experience, while he only had three years’ experience. The other players didn’t pass to him and the coach initially … Read Sport Psychology Tip
Building Confidence in Young Athletes Over and over, coaches and parents tell us that when kids build confidence in sports, they boost it in other areas of their lives. For example, at Kids’ Sports Psychology, we teach kids how to cope with worries about what everyone is thinking of them. … Read Sport Psychology Tip