Pivoting for the Goal: How to Help Athletes Through Mid-Season Adjustments

Pivoting for the Goal: How to Help Athletes Through Mid-Season Adjustments

By TrueSport

Follow these tips to help your athlete make mid-season adjustments. 

A recent study found that children today are under significantly more pressure to be ‘perfect’ than past generations. If you’re halfway through the season and it’s not going the way you hoped, it’s also easy for you and your team to fall into a slump. When the goals you set at the beginning of the season are suddenly unattainable, how can you and your athletes find motivation to keep going?

As a coach in this tough environment, you can show athletes that not reaching a goal isn’t the end of the world. Rather, it’s a chance to re-focus and pivot towards a new, more attainable goal.

Click here to read the entire article

Read More

Learning Life Lessons Through Sports

The Strength Of Sports - Learning Life Lessons Through Sports

While society seems to be shifting its focus away from competition and towards participation awards, proclaiming "everyone is a winner", this is not a realistic viewpoint of real life.  In real life, there are winners and losers, success and failures, and participation in sports is a perfect avenue for learning life lessons.  In sport, there are winners and losers, there are success and failures, there is the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory.  Participation in sports teaches our youth valuable life lessons.

Participation is both individual or team sports is such a great avenue for learning life lessons. In sports, athletes will experience failures, so it teaches young athletes how to handle failure and disappointment.  More importantly, sports teaches young athletes how to handle failure, how to bounce back from it and handle adversity.  It's all about teamwork and that is important to prepare kids for life off the field.

Participation in sports educates young athletes and teaches them discipline.  Sport is not all physical - sport teaches young athletes to think, to know how to handle different situations.  A good coach teaches his athletes to think about the play before it is executed, where am I going to throw the ball if it is hit to me, who am I going to block on this play, and to react to the ever changing situations in the game.

There are so many life lessons that athletes can gain by participating in team and individual sports - that it's more than just winning and losing.  Whether it's overcoming adversity or a tough loss, time management, leadership, or how to work as a team.  Athletes are not only benefiting physically from participating in sports, but it also prepares them for their post-sport life.

Read More

CT High School Power Rankings

October 28, 2018

CT High School Football Power Rankings - Top 10
Read More

Soccer Ball Size Breakdown

When it comes to soccer balls, there are several differences. There are numerous colors and a large number of materials available, but one of the major areas of variation among soccer balls is sizing. 
Read More

USA Hockey Reports Increase In Participation

USA Hockey Reports Increase In Participation

Youth involvement in team sports has declined over the past decade. According to a report by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, inactivity among kids hit 20.0 percent in 2014 and further increased to 37.1 percent in 2015. While fewer children have been making the decision to choose a team, a few sports have seen an increase in youth involvement. One of those sports is hockey. In fact, hockey has been seeing an upward trend since 2009. “For us, participation continues to grow,” said Dave Fischer, senior director of communications for USA Hockey,  the governing body for organized amateur ice hockey in the United States. “And that’s across the board at all levels, including youth, girls/women, disabled and adult. So, our playing population is expanding.”

Read More

Youth Football Organization Becomes First In Country To Ban Kickoffs

Pop Warner on Thursday became the first national football organization to eliminate kickoffs in an effort to make the game safer for its 250,000 kids.
Read More

3 Ways Coaches Can Inspire Players

Most coaches ignore the relationship game. They assume that players know when they are doing well and when they are not. They forget how great it feels to get a compliment, or to be trusted and believed in. They forget what it was like as a player to see progress, and have your contribution recognized. Maybe that is the way they were coached, so they assume since they were OK with it, everyone is OK with it. But they are not.

Read More

Females On The Ice

The growth in recent years for girls’ and women’s hockey has been significant. In January, the USA Women’s Under-18 team won the gold medal in the 2015 international Ice Hockey Federation World Championship, and in March the USA Women’s National team won the IIHF World Championship.
Read More

In The Zone - USA Hockey's Secrets For Success

Ice hockey continues to be a popular team sport in the United States, with more than one million people associated with the sport’s governing body, USA Hockey. “We’re fortunately one of the sports programs in the country that has been growing at a time when it seems like everybody has challenges just to retain people,” said Mike Bertsch, assistant executive director of communications, marketing and events for USA Hockey. “We’ve exceeded 600,000 participating members and well over a million people—players, coaches, officials, volunteers, parents, etc.—counting everyone associated with USA Hockey.
Read More

Nothing Teaches Leadership Like Football

Nothing Teaches Leadership Like Football

In stadiums and playgrounds across the country each day in the fall, young people embrace the finesse and the physical journey of football, the contact with a purpose and the joy of hauling in a pass in the back of the end zone.

Ours is a game that has nurtured millions of young men and women. Because football is more than a great sport, it is a classroom. It teaches a variety of positive attributes – character, loyalty, discipline, teamwork, physical fitness and leadership among others.

Read More

How Parents Can Understand The High School Sports Landscape

How Parents Can Understand The High School Sports Landscape

The transition to high school can be jarring for teenagers. After having figured out a place for themselves in elementary and middle school, they now have to do it all over again, at what seems like much higher stakes.

The transition also often challenges high school parents. Teenagers are changing rapidly and trying out new ways to relate to their parents as they move steadily and/or tentatively toward independence. And if your child is or aspires to be a high school athlete, there is a whole other set of challenges to negotiate.

PCA tapped its network of coaches, athletic directors, and parents to identify how high school sports parents can help their athletes thrive in high school sports. Here are four big ideas to help you understand your athlete’s challenges and what you can do to help your teen thrive:

1.) High school sports involves a lot of time and effort
2.) High school athletes are smack in the middle of a transition to adulthood
3.) High school programs have a chain of authority
4.) High school sports is a very public stage.

For expanded detail on these four ideas, download the PDF below.

How Parents Can Understand The High School Sports Landscape FULL ARTICLE.

Read More

Helmet Sensors May Help Detect Concussions In Youth Football Players

Football season has begun this year amid a striking estimate from the NFL: Nearly 3 in 10 retired players will develop debilitating brain conditions like Alzheimer's disease or dementia.
Read More

A Heads Up on Concussions

Youth Sports Health: Concussions
Read More

Part Soccer, Part Golf, Footgolf

Part Soccer, Part Golf, = Footgolf !!!!!

Read More

"Keeping Kids Safe and Hydrated In The Summer"

DID YOU KNOW.....Two-thirds of young athletes show up for practice significantly dehydrated.
Read More