The Value of Concrete Goals in Youth Sports

Youth sports coaches face a host of daily challenges, such as making decisions on playing time and finding the right balance between competition and fun. However, this often difficult responsibility could be made slightly easier by setting concrete goals for your team. No matter the sport, these goals can be devised in a variety of ways. Perhaps you’d like to focus a goal on an individual - helping the most uncoordinated youngster score his first points. Or maybe you’d choose to construct a team goal - making the playoffs.

Like a fat man on a treadmill chasing a Twinkie, young athletes can be motivated through concrete goals and other psychological influences.

Running with a plan

Louise Damen, the multiyear women’s national cross country champion, spoke with Athletics Weekly about the psychology of a race and said that her best finish at the European Cross Country Championships was in 2008.

Before the race that year, she established a firm goal of finishing in the top 10. She kept that goal with her from start to finish and it paid dividends. In the heat of competition, young athletes could benefit from doing the same.

“It is better to set a firm, specific goal in relation to a finishing position rather than a vague one,” she told the publication.

The numbers behind victory

Young athletes often hear coaches repeat lines like: “This game is 10 percent talent, 90 effort.” Well, those skippers better not forget about psychology.

According to BikeRadar, a new study by Andy Lane, a professor of sports psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, found that 40 percent of sports performance can be linked to physical fitness factors, another 40 percent is connected to skill and biomechanical factors, and 20 percent is rooted in psychological factors.

Within that last 20 percent figure, 50 percent is related to visualization, goal-setting and a self-mantra, 30 percent is linked to coaching guidance and support (here’s looking at you, youth coach readers) and 20 percent is attributed to family and friends.

“Having this support network helps build [the athlete’s] confidence and is key in terms of visualization, goal setting and self-mantra,” Lane told the publication.

Coaches may want to pay heed to Damen’s concrete goal setting and the findings in Lane’s study. Psychology plays a very important role in sports, and that’s especially true among impressionable youth athletes. In team meetings, players can brainstorm realistic goals. Coaches can later create Web page resources and sports team websites to compile these goals in one place.