How Athletes Can Deal with Coach Criticism

The goal of this exercise is for your athletes to avoid taking the criticism personally and to get some value from it that they can apply in practice and thus improve.

It can be hard for your young athletes to take criticism productively from coaches. Kids often don’t interpret communication from coaches correctly because of the delivery or the emotion with which the feedback is conveyed.

When their coaches criticize young athletes, the kids may focus on only the negative part of the message, or miss the message entirely.

This is especially true if the criticism is done in an excessively loud manner. Kids can interpret loudness as overly negative.