382 - Raising Great Humans Through Sport: The Real Path to High Performance
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
Steve Magness x Matt Dixon on joy, resilience, and what actually creates long-term success in young athletes
Too many conversations about youth sports focus on podiums, rankings, and early success. But the real power of sport isn’t medals— it’s the humans our kids become along the way.
In this special conversation, performance experts Steve Magness and Matt Dixon break down what truly matters in youth athletics: joy, resilience, confidence, identity, and the pathways that create long-term success. They bust myths around early specialization, explore what actually predicts high-level performance, and offer practical guidance for parents, coaches, and athletes at every stage.
Whether your child loves sport for fun or dreams of competing at the highest levels, this episode gives you the roadmap to support their growth—as athletes and as people. If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-2:12 Episode Promo
2:41-6:17 Introduction
6:23-end Meat & Potatoes
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TRANSCRIPT
Matt Dixon 00:00
Hi. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 00:29
and welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever your host Matt Dixon, and I tell you what, folks today, it's just one of those shows. It is a show that I'm incredibly proud to share with you. It's one of those that I would identify as being unmissable, and it's also one that I hope can help you if you're a parent, if you're a sports coach, if you're involved in sport, and particularly youth sport at any level whatsoever. A few weeks ago, I was invited by the school that my son goes to, San Domenico in San Anselmo in California, and it's a wonderful school. Baxter is in seventh grade, and and they do a speaking series, and and they invite all aspects of the community to come everything from Ai developing resilient children, whatever it might be, and they invited me to be a special guest with a great friend of mine, a performance expert, the one and only Steve Magnus. And Steve has an incredible journey. Is not only a world expert in performance, he has a rich history in sport himself, navigating some real challenges in his own athletic journey, being an absolute high school standout, 401 for the mile in running, never going any faster than that, as he went on to his later career in college, went on to coach age group level, collegiate becoming a highly successful collegiate coach all the way up to the Olympic level. He has an incredibly rich history in sports coaching and now in performance expertise, the author of multiple books, including his most which is winning the inside game and the one that many of our listeners have listened to and lean on heavily do hard things, and Steve and I got to host an incredible conversation at our school. It was all around kids in sport, and it went beyond just turning our kids into champions, because ultimately only 1% of our children that participate in sport will go on to compete at the elite level.
Matt Dixon 02:44
Less than 7% will go on and compete at any level in college, but all of them are going to end up being adults. And so this was all about leveraging sport to help our children grow up to be fantastic human beings. We also talk about some of the systematic challenges in the structure of sport, the perils of early specialization, and for those kids that do want to go on to that next level, what is the right journey? How do we actually unlock talent and help them be successful so that when they are 1415, 1617, 18 years of age, they still love the sport and are on a journey of continued progression. It was 60 minutes of one of the most empowering and enjoyable conversations that I've had, working with a performance expert in a parallel field, myself in swimming and triathlon, Steve in running, both united by a common mindset, we had a great Q and A session with the audience afterwards, and very kindly, San Domenico agreed to record the session. And so now we fostered up and mastered up the audio a little bit, and we can share it on the purple patch podcast today. And so very simply, I give you this session, kids in sport, I will say, just before we launch into the meat and potatoes and we release the interview, I want to say a couple of things. The first is, I really encourage you to listen deeply if you're a parent. And one of the questions we got at the end was, Oh, my goodness me, my kid is a junior, and I feel like I've messed up, and that's not the message at all. It was incredibly brave of the person to ask the question, but we're all doing our best. We're doing our very best.
Matt Dixon 04:33
And this isn't about right and wrong. This is about building out patterns and systems to help people flourish. And it doesn't mean that you ruined your kid if you haven't followed this journey. And the second thing I'd say is that this is one of those episodes that I'd really encourage you, and in fact, ask you to share, send around to people that are also parents of kids that are maybe into sport or want to be. Parents, or perhaps a coaches of your kids and see what they think. Of course, we're always available. So if you're listening to this episode and you're a coach or you're a parent, you have any questions at all, this is a great opportunity. Whether you want to ask Steve or myself, feel free to just send us a note. Okay, send us a note. Ask any questions you like. It's open field. We will do our best to answer all of the questions that we can. It's info@purplepatchfitness.com we would welcome your feedback on this, and of course, your questions. We want to help, because this is perhaps one of the most important episodes that we can put out. And so feel free to share. Feel free to send around. And as I suggest, feel free to ask any questions that you have. All right. So without further ado, Matt Dixon of purple patch, Steve Magnus, performance expert at San Domenico, a wonderful evening of entertainment and a very important subject. I give you the meat and potatoes you
Matt Dixon 06:06
is so tonight is not about podiums and wins and and I want to start off just with a couple of statistics. We might throw a few statistics at you over the course of the evening. So of all the kids that compete in sport, less than 7% go on and participate at the collegiate level, less than 2% go on and participate at the professional level, but pretty much 100% of them end up being adults. And so today, we want to dig in, and we want to talk about the impact of sport in broader life, about how sports shape character and some of the perils of early specialization, some of the structural components that drive kids to that and how coaches and parents can help our kids fall in love with the process, not just the podium, or, I should say, the process not just the podium. And we are going to leave some room, though, to to address and share some ideas of those kids that are destined for higher levels and and so Steve, buckle up. Are you ready? Let's do it. We're going to dig in. Here's how we start. And we were chatting this morning, and and we we giggled. We had a little laugh because of how similar our journeys were in so many ways, both as an athlete, a coach and a performance thinker. And and I thought it'd be helpful for us to get going by grounding the conversation with before we dig into the meat of potatoes and ask a very simple question, which is, how do we get here? How we hear, not talking about splits and intervals, but how we hear where we're talking about the human side of sport? And so I'm going to allow you to ground the conversation in
Steve Magness 08:00
that way. Well, Matt, it started 10 years ago when your kitchen it did, where I had, we had a good mutual friend who said, Hey, we need to talk to this Matt Dixon guy, and I was writing my first book, and I was like, alright, is a triathlon coach. Like I was a running coach college and professional athletes at the time, I can dig triathlon, so we go over to his house and we're talking about performance, and at that time, I think it's really important to understand that, like Matt was trying to coach some of the best athletes in the world, and I was trying to coach athletes to the Olympic team. We cared about performing, but as we started talking, we shared something that I think was more important, which is that we both made a lot of mistakes. And as you heard there is, I was a four minute miler, four one miler in high school, at dreams of Olympics, all of these things. And then I just smashed myself in training and never got any better to never improve. And then Matt would tell me about, yeah, I was swimming, you know, 2025, hours a week in a pool in college, and just killing it in practice, and then race day would show up, and there was nothing there that's true. And we bonded over this understanding. And I think we also understood, like, wait a minute, that's why we are at the time in coaching. Was almost like this, can we correct our own wrongs? Like, can we do this a better way. And I think where that puts this conversation, why we're here 10 years later, is because hopefully we learned a couple things and figured things out. But I think where it's really important is we're not just up here to tell you, hey, like sport, let's have fun. Like, enjoy. All that stuff we're going to tell you that's important, but is there a way to have that fun and joy where we're also acknowledging that, like competition matters, and like me and you wanted to coach world champions and Olympians and help people, but we didn't want to destroy people along the way.
Matt Dixon 10:17
And I think that two things can be true at one time, you can be deeply ambitious. You can embrace the competitive side of sport, but not necessarily at the sacrifice of the other thing that can be true, that sport has an important role in our children's lives and, in fact, in adults lives as well, and so having a human first approach to enabling people to find their potential to get the most out of it is is ultimately the superpower. And so we wanted to share that grounding as we go in, because this isn't, as we say, a conversation of just soft everybody have fun. It's about high performance in sport and in life as well. And so with that, we're going to dig in and and I'm going to ask you a question, Steve, with the biggest picture that we can and in the audience, we have parents, we have coaches. I saw a couple of coaches in there. We even have some athletes about eight rows back, looking very, very cool through your lens. What's the deeper value of sport in our children's lives?
Steve Magness 11:29
I think for kids, what it does is it sets the stage for everything we care about, about psychological well being and development. And this isn't just my opinion. If you look at the research, there's a wonderful researcher named Tatiana Schnell who looked at what does it take to flourish, to thrive in world, in life, and she kind of broke it down into like sense of belonging, a sense of mastery, autonomy, the feeling like you can get better at something, and that you have some sort of secure sense of identity as you go along. And to me, support is like the laboratory for developing that. And it's one of the few places where we can get this development of holistic self in a, you know, in a positive direction, in a world that is often kind of, let's be honest, like superficial, instagramified kind of nonsense. So to me, it's like sport has this sacred place of it's real, and if we utilize that for kids, we can develop and I think one other thing that comes to mind is there was actually some recent research that came out that looked at the development of emotional regulation, of your sense of self, of these core components of being a human being, and where the places our kids, you know, learn those things. And one of the places that was, I think number one on that list, was play. And if you think about it, we have teachers in here. We have students. Where do you learn to solve conflicts when you're out at recess and you have a dispute? Where do you learn how to work together with other people when you're playing some sort of sport? And one of the reasons that it's so important in sport is because, like, often it's like kids have to figure it out. Mom and Dad can't solve that problem for them. They have to do it. So I think when it comes to sport, it's those things. And the last thing I'll say that I think sport does really well is just this sense of, like, resilience and doing something really freaking hard, where, like, you got to figure it out. And there's, there's neuroscience on this, right? Whenever we look at developing resilience, what if I'm going to simplify it, if we have any new neuroscience in here, don't shoot me for this. I'm fine. But basically, we have a battle going on, right? We have our amygdala, which is like our alarm, telling us, like, danger, danger, escape this situation. And then we have our prefrontal cortex saying, Yo, man, chill out. This is just a race. You're not going to die, okay? And what sport does really well is it trains that prefrontal cortex. It says, hey, yeah, this is really difficult, but you're still in charge. You're still in control. Yeah, and we don't develop that hyper reactive alarm where everything becomes a threat or danger, because we've developed that, that that resilience,
Matt Dixon 14:34
and I will add to it, because resilience is a word that extends well beyond sport and and overcoming challenges and setbacks and failures, all of these traits that you will make up. The important, I think, thing for us all to understand is these are not genetic so these are not gifts. These are things that, just like a muscle, you can train and and we train them when we get out of our comfort zone. And so in many. Way, sport provides this magical, low risk vehicle or crucible in which it's very real. There's no place to hide, and at this yet, at the same time, there's very low consequence, ultimately, and it is a place in which all of those traits are transferable as well. And so we go through these lived experiences in sport, but and when you emerge out of the other side, the brain doesn't understand the context it is in. And so as you develop these they become a part of your toolkit that you can leverage across all of the components that are important to us in life.
Steve Magness 15:44
I mean, that's it. I mean, last weekend, I was at some former athletes wedding, and the thing I kept hearing from all athletes who were college kids when I coached them over a decade ago, they said, Hey, you remember those things that you told us that this would apply to life. Well, I just use this in my surgery that I'm performing. I just use this in whatever high performing thing. They're like, we didn't really believe you, but you were right. And like, that's one of the most refreshing things to hear as a coach, because you know it right. And as parents know this too. Sometimes you teach the lesson, you understand it, you develop the skill, but it sinks in later, and then they realize, like, oh, this does actually transfer. That old guy wasn't crazy.
Matt Dixon 16:30
I would add as well this because we talk about this development of resilience. And Steve, you mentioned defensively, having to navigate real challenge. And you could say discomfort, sport does present and provide wonderful discomfort. It's a great gift and and the the essence of that is the antidote of comfort, of course. And we live in an area where, generally, there is a high percentage of people, including our family, that live in relative comfort, and sometimes as parents, we wonder, Where can we actually enable our children to build the context of overcoming Challenge, getting through struggles and sport is that great antidote to that, and and so it's a really powerful tool that you can leverage.
Steve Magness 17:28
It is. So I'm gonna, we'll tell the story. I guess I'll go for it. A couple months ago, I was speaking of this, this big private equity firm thing with a bunch of like, mega, mega rich people, not just like rich people, but like, mega rich people, like, ungodly rich. They were in, like, amazing. Yeah, yeah. Well, they took out the whole Ritz Carlton and said, like, do whatever you want. It's all our hotel. So it's like, insane. But they kept asking, how do we not mess up our kids? And it was myself, my friend, Brad Stolberg, some other authors you've probably heard of, like David Epstein and Morgan Housel and all these, like other gurus who know things probably more than me, definitely more than me. And the answer kept going, coming back. They were like, well, have you tried just sticking your kids in sports? And the reason was pretty simple is because the research is very clear this. There's this whole line of research. They call it talent needs trauma. Now, trauma doesn't mean capital T trauma, of like, oh God, something really bad. Matt's, yeah, it means lowercase t trauma, which means you need challenge, you need discomfort, you need to not to plug the clock, but you need to do hard things.
Matt Dixon 18:45
That was excellent, by the way, fantastic, that is a professional.
Steve Magness 18:49
And the point is, what they found from studying all these athletes and all these performers who ended up making it to the high level versus who don't, is that they had some lower case key trauma. Sometimes that just meant, hey, I grew up with six brothers, and I had to figure things out. Like, that's enough of a challenge. But other times that's Hey, I got stuck in all these sports, and some I was really good at, but some I kind of sucked at, and I had to figure it out. So I think especially in places where, like we're our lives are pretty easy for the rest, not always, but our children don't have some of the natural challenges. We have to put them in positions where it's like a safe to bail experiment, yeah, where in sport bites that perfect venue for that.
Matt Dixon 19:37
Now we the question, if anyone remembers, the question was the role in broader life, and I actually want to highlight something else as well that's important, because we immediately focus on resilience, navigating discomfort and everything. But I think there's, there's a there's another point that I want to make sure that we don't bypass before we move on, which is a big role. Of sports as well is to help our kids fall in love with and build habits for a lifetime. And we're in an interesting place in society, where, when I was young, and I went and looked up the statistics for this because I was interested. And I grew up in England, obviously, but the the numbers are pretty much the same when I was when I was young, the life expectancy was about 73 women tend to live a little bit longer than men, but let's just call it 73 the health expectancy. So the amount of years on average that we can expect to live before we are navigating severe pain or other ailments from diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc, was about 69 so in other words, we didn't anticipate the last four or five years of life being really challenging, not very pleasant. Today's life expectancy has gone up. We actually can expect to live somewhere around 80 years of age. The health expectancy just over 60 years of age, so almost a quarter of our life now we can anticipate is going to be riddled with pain or severe functional limitation. That's not a good thing, and a lot of Sims room are aware of this, because we are looking to build habits and foster elements that can help us hopefully navigate the last chapters of our lives with joy and be able to play with our kids and grandkids and everything else. But I think a big role of sport for our kids as well is to establish really positive habits of the joys of moving our body, the joys of competition, the wonders of challenge so that they can fall in love with sports absolutely 100% and I guess one challenge there is to make sure that we don't prevent that joy from emerging. And so I want to move on, because I think it's important, when we think about this and we establish that the lessons and experience of sport represent a huge catalyst for personal development. And there is a truth there as well, that elements like theater or learning a language or guitar, etc, academics can can also teach very similar lessons. They're very valuable. And so what? What makes sport in your mind unique? What makes it stand alone?
Steve Magness 22:24
Oh, that's a good question. First off, my caveat, all those other things are great, but I think that sport does a few unique things. First off, it's embodied, which means it's a fancy word that means we connect like mind and body, the feeling and the action, and that's really freaking important, because there's a bunch of neuroscience research that shows that, like part of connection is like doing things together, okay, is when we do things together. In fact, there was a wonderful study in the US military that figured out, you know, have you ever seen them like March in sync? And you're probably like, What in the world are they doing? Like this is kind of a pointless activity. It sticks around because there was study that shows when we move in sync, like marching in sync, like we literally feel connected to the people around us much more so than if we did some other activities together, but didn't move together. So I think when we look at that embodiment, it provides something special. I think sport also does something else, which is, like you touched on this earlier, but you can't, like hide, it's you. And I think in a world where we live again, way too much on social media, and you can always compare people. And unlike where when I was growing up, where it's like, Hey, are you the fastest in the neighborhood of the class, every kid can go online and say, yeah, yeah, I'm the fastest in my class, but like, Johnny over here in Montana, kicks my ass, so I'm not very good. So I think there's something important about learning about being in the arena, sometimes falling short, and understanding how to navigate that process. What it gives you is this like short feedback loop, and again, a relatively safe environment where you get to fail and then have guidance, hopefully from good coaching and support and parents to process that failure and then eventually turn that into a story of hopefully growth, like Matt and I somehow did in our own personal athletic failure. But that's what it's about. So I think sport offers something unique. And then I think the other thing that that, that it does really well is, is that it builds confidence that can expand off of sport. And one of the reasons is because of that clear feedback loop. I haven't saying I like to. I mean, other people say it too, but like, confidence demands evidence. What's the easiest way to get evidence? Like, understand that you've been in the arena. You gave it your all. Doesn't matter how it came out. You did everything you can. And next time you're in a similar situation, you can do that. I mean, it's, again, not to talk about us too much, but it's the reason we can sit up here on stage because, like, I'm naturally, like, a shy, introverted dude who would rather just write books than talk to people. Sorry, that's true, but the reason I can do this is because I spent a lifetime competing in the arena, and I say, Okay, I'm going to get to the starting line. What do I got to do? I'm going to feel a little nervous, but I got to flip that switch and turn it on and do the job of performing, which is what we're doing up here.
Matt Dixon 25:48
And that's the the lessons that it provides are so visceral. And I just want to hammer the point. It is one of the few arenas in which the brain and the body is genuinely tied together, and so the lessons are so much harder to ignore. And even if we're not relating our results to our peers or Johnny and Montana, who ran faster than me, when you just get a little bit faster, a little bit stronger, you go a little bit further, you you build this self trust, and this self trust becomes a part of you. Whereas talk about athletes, they don't believe they're resilient. They know they're resilient because they feel it. They've lived it. It's a lived experience. And that is a a catalyst that I think, just Matt's sport really standing alone in many ways.
26:47
You said it
Matt Dixon 26:53
early specialization. We're going to do a complete left turn. We've got a lot to go through. And this is, this is critical, and I want to dive to the heart of it. The I wasn't sure how to ask this question, because I'm going to read what actually wrote down, which is, let's start with the athletes who make it. And then I thought, What does that even mean? But let's we'll all agree, okay, those kids that end up competing at the higher levels of sport. Okay, go on to college, pro, etc, athletes that we've worked with. I'd love to hear your experience, your thoughts and insights into those athletes that make it under that context. What do they have in common? What are some of the patterns that you said?
Steve Magness 27:38
Yeah, so I spent almost 10 years coaching collegiately, and because, as you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a nerd, so every year I'd have those kids fill out a validated psychological questionnaire on motivation.
Matt Dixon 27:58
And when he told me this, I just looked at him, really, that's what he did.
Steve Magness 28:04
You know, one day I'll give you all the guinea pig stuff that we did with college kids. One time, I had them stare at each other into their eyes, because, well, that's the story, but we filled out this questionnaire, and then I'm not if I'm honest, like we kept doing it, and then, because life gets video, I didn't do anything about it until probably year, like seven or eight into into my college coaching career. And I said, You know what? I got all this data, let's run numbers. And I looked at improvement over their four years in college, and the number one predictor of improvement over the four years was their level of intrinsic motivation, meaning joy, love, of the process, mastery, that internal drive just to explore and see what I can do and get better at something, the thing that predicted you didn't do very well. It wasn't my coaching, maybe it was, but it was their level of extrinsic motivation, meaning, if they showed up that freshman year and were like, I need the award, I need the trophy, I want to get the recognition, this is what matters most. Didn't get better. It didn't improve. If this wasn't just like me nerding out on this a couple years ago, I had the chance to talk to this guy named Tom House, who is basically the like, growing Maestro of the world. Okay, he's worked with a couple people, you know, Randy Johnson, Nolan, Ryan, Drew Brees, a guy named Tom Brady. And I asked him, I said, What do all these greats having in common? And he said, straight up. And said, they are obsessed and love the process winning only takes some out of that for a moment, and that runs. Counter to, like, often, what we're told, which is like, Oh, these guys are killers. They just want to win, and that's all that matters. And I'm sure there's some guys like that, but here you have these legends in the sport saying, like, process, love mastery, and then to tie it, we'll go outside of sport a little bit. I came across this researcher named the greatest name ever, I think, for a research named Ellen winner. And she studied prodigies and sport, but also math and chess and all this stuff. And she said, hey, I want to know what like makes the prodigies who actually make it like the phenoms or like the chess stars who don't burn out. And what she found was, she called it the rage to master. What is the rage to master? Not the rage to win? It's that intrinsic motivation. And interestingly enough, in her research and others have shown this is that as a parent, you can, like help stoke that fire and keep it burning, but you can also smother it and put it out. And what winter found is that if you're over controlling or try to be the one driving the ship that takes that takes it out, that destroys that intrinsic motivation. So I think like those are the things that are the commonalities between the greats who actually make it when we
Matt Dixon 31:25
when we purple patch for our pro squad, one of our I had a lot of silly sayings. I like to have hooks for athletes to easily remember things. And it was always about a passion for the process, and that was really what we were talking about here. But, but it also extends the conversation into talent. And when we look at the even using the athletes that you mentioned there, Tom Brady, etc, and so often we look at these athletes that have achieved world class greatness and become true champions, we think they just must be wired different. They must just have these different physical gifts. And they do have a certain talent level, but there's a real myth around talent and and I have an athlete that I often tell a story about, that I'll tell you a quick version of now. Her name was Sarah piampiano, and she came to the sport of triathlon quite late. She was actually working on Wall Street, working a lot of hours, smoking cigarettes, got into triathlon and reached out to me for coaching and, and I was relatively young in my coaching career so far as coaching elite athletes, and I first kind of dismissed her. I just didn't think she was good enough, is the truth of it. And, and she was living in New York, so she Sarah, been Sarah. Now that I understand, Sarah flew to San Francisco and demanded that I have a coffee with her, and I came home to Kelli, my wife, and I said, I'm going to coach her. And she had something in her eye, but she showed that tenacity and and when we took her on, we sent her to the Red Bull Performance Center. They don't just make horrible drinks. They're actually very heavy and in in sports performance. And we measured her. They went, she went through a series of assessments in which you measured everything that you might imagine would make up the components of being a professional athlete, and so strength, power, speed, agility, coordination, mobility, the size of the physiological engine, all of that stuff. And she came back, and she ranked low or lowest in every single one of those parameters relative to her peers in the thin air of world class performance so quantifiably I had taken on the least gifted professional athlete that I've ever thought I was right. My instincts were right, and yet she went on to become a multiple time Iron Man champion, the second fastest us female ever. And the difference was a set of practices that she took on that fueled consistency, high coach ability. But it was this an absolute love for the desire to get better. And in the introduction, you heard, I got to coach world champions. It was great, but there was a common thread across every champion that I ever coached. They would sometimes come and they might even say, I want to be world champion. Put it out there. We never discussed it once. And if you ever asked them what was important to them, there was a common answer, some version of, I want to become the best that I can be. That's my quest. That is the definition of extrinsic motivation.
Steve Magness 34:32
So, I mean, that's it. I love that story in that spot. And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to deviate off script here and give you a Carl Lewis. Story. So Carl Lewis, I got to work with him for a number of years at University of Houston. Great guy, a little bit crazy, but great guy. When he was getting recruited, he was the high school record holder in the long term. It was obvious his talent. He went all. All the big schools tried to recruit him. And everywhere he went, they pulled out the red carpet that showed the shining locker rooms and all the gear and all the stuff, and they showed all the trophies that their team had won, and like, this is what you do, blah, blah, blah. He came to the University of Houston, who, at the time, was, it was the, I think, the first or second year of a coach named Tom Tellez, who came from UCLA and took over a program at Houston. And he got to Houston, and their track was dirt, like little dirt. They didn't have a modern track, okay, they didn't have a fancy locker room. They didn't have any of this thing. But Coach Tellez took Carl up, and he said, Well, what matters to you? And said, I want to get the best as I can be. And then in that recruiting visit, all the coach did said, Okay, great. I've looked at your video. Here's what you can do. Here's what we would change if you come here, and this is how I would get you better. Carl went home, told all the other rich school said, No, I'm going to Houston. And when he came to Houston, he took he was the one thing that he had more than anybody else, since he would coach me. So his freshman year at Houston, again, remember, he's a high school freaking record holder in the long jump, okay, made the world championship team as a high schooler. And the coach piles, goes up to Carl and says, I think you need to switch takeoff legs for the long jump. Now, in the long jump, like, you don't switch takeoff legs. Like this is what this is the whole reason you run back or you can jump bar. But Coach Les saw something. Carl said, Okay, let's switch what's which take off of the rest is history. So sometimes we talk about these things and it becomes like, oh, that's just the cliche, like, focus on the process. Bill Walsh, the score takes care of itself. John Wooden telling us all the same stuff. But there's a reason that all of these really good coaches like tell us these things. It's just most of us are dumb, me included, when I started and say no, no, they're they're just staying stuff. They don't want to give us the real secret. But the real secret is that it is that interest, intrinsic motivation. It's that drive, that curiosity, that coachability, that really defines like those who make it to the highest level.
Matt Dixon 37:27
And if you lined up, and I can speak for Steve in this one small, narrow scope, that if we lined up the very best athletes, the most successful athletes that Steve coach, I'm just talk on his behalf and who I coached, the common thread across the ones that were most successful, they would almost go down like this. Is how coachable they were. That is the the most common thread. How do you provide feedback, receive feedback, collaborate, partner in a journey to go on to your success so that you can become the master. And then, as somebody said, Walsh, the score kind of takes care of itself, and it's genuinely true. Now I I know that everyone in the room is passionate about helping their kids have the best sporting journey as possible, and and there is a structural component to many of our sports and so we have to attack this head on. We have to talk about early specialization. Kids going all in on individual sports, eight years of age, nine years of age, even 10 or 12 sometimes. And we understand when we're talking about this, this is a structural norm of many sports that we face. And I grew up in a sport that was just like that, swimming. I'd love your perspective first on this, the do's the don'ts the good, the bad.
Steve Magness 38:44
I mean, here's what I challenge you to is go look up the eight year old records in any sport. Tell me if you recognize any of the names. Most of the time, for most of them, there's a rare occasion, rare, rare occasion. It happens, okay, but most of the time they're like, Who is that? Like, what did they do? They dropped out later. And it's not just me saying this again. There was a recent study where they looked at over 6000 world class athletes, and they compared them to those age group athletes who, like, were really good when they were young. And they said, well, let's figure out what the world class athletes did. And what they found is, overall, the world class athletes who actually made it had more multi sport practice early on. They started later in their sport, they accumulated less practice. Okay, and I think most surprisingly but interesting, is they progress lower. Now think about that like so often we think, Oh, man, little Johnny, it's like getting really good at eight, nine, like that must mean they're going to set the world on fire. It's like, No, we have all these, all these different developments. And here's the big myth that I think never. Guys is that we all suck at talent identification, all orb Matt and that we suck. I mean, he almost had a, you know, Iron Man champion. It was like, this person sucks. Like, I don't know, but all you have to do is look at the NFL draft to understand this. Like there's general managers that can pay millions and get to watch every single game, and they still suck at understanding that Jamarcus Russell is going to be above okay, it's because we can't predict the future at 22 let alone eight or nine. So the point is, like all the data points to like, the best thing you can do is keep kids, keep as many kids in in the environment as possible for as long as possible, to give them a freaking chance. Because you never know who is going to be good. And I think the example I'd give this again, you don't like the data and numbers is like, look to Norway. Norway has this youth program. They call it joy for sport of all, and they have a literal Bill of Rights for youth sports, which basically says, like, hey, parents don't do dumb things. I mean, it says there are no you can't keep score and you can't post standings before they're 12. You can't have national travel competitions until like 11 or 12 or 13. I forget the age, but it's something. They have all these things where it's autonomy. The kids need to choose to do the sport. It cannot be parent LED. And guess what Norway does at the elite level? They kick ass like for a very small population, they do really freaking well.
Matt Dixon 41:44
And to give you, in my sport, triathlon, the Iron Man World Championship, in the men's race, they just went one, two and three. Not bad for a weird Scandinavian sport that's definitely winterized most of the year. And in the women's race, they won that one too. So they're endurance sports. They have it cracked. And just, just to add to the numbers here, I've got a couple of numbers to share with you, age group records holders. This is across multiple sports, between 12 and 14 national age group record holders, less than 10% what will even show up as an elite as a senior athlete, less than 10% so that kid that's the fastest at 12, less than 10% of them will go on at the senior level, not the elite level, not the pro level, which is amazing and division one collegiate athletes. So that's the highest level of collegiate sport. 17% of them specialized in single sport by 12 years of age. So I'm not very good at my mathematicals, but that's a pretty high percentage that we're doing multi sport during this and and it extends into this, because that's a one thing that you didn't say about the Norwegian model was that was the mandate that kids must do multiple sports. They're not allowed to do single sport. And this is a, as Steve mentioned, this is a, almost a a constant when you actually look at the highest levels of sport. So let's go outside of our endeavors. He's just a nerdy run coach, and I'm a boisterous English triathlon coach. Let's go to the NFL. And some of you guys might remember the 2020 Super Bowl, and I don't remember the score. It was the Chiefs versus the 40 Niners. I can't remember whether the 40 Niners won or not, but, but of those players, they looked at the roster of the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 40 Niners and so of those athletes that were on the roster, of you could argue, the pinnacle of one of the most viewed and largest sports in the world. 92% of the athletes the NFL players, were multi sport through high school. 92% of them, that's a pretty staggering number to go through. So when we think about this and we look at it, it's a structural even if, and we want to think about, Okay, what does multi sport provide? Because even if Steve and I chose one of the kids in the room and said, Okay, we're going to take them at 10 and we're going to do everything we can do to get them to be ready for this sport. Our lens would be okay. Let's look at it 360 degrees. We want to train them across multiple disciplines, to get their body to move in every direction. We want to have be exposed to various different challenges. If they tend to be more of a single sport, getting them to participate in team if they're a team sport, getting them to do some individuals, train the mind so that you can ultimately arrive at the destination. So even if you were narrow mindedly just saying, we are trying to create an elite athlete, you would choose multi sport deliver,
Steve Magness 44:58
and it's it's. It's there's a physical component, like, what does multi sport do? It makes you a robust athlete. It makes you where you can be Patrick mahomes and do crazy things because you played baseball, right? And no one thought to do this as a quarterback. But there's also a psychological component that comes to it. Okay? In psychology, there's this, this concept called self complexity, which basically means, when we see ourselves as a full human being, and not just as, Oh, my God, I'm the best 12 year old soccer player, and everybody knows me as a soccer player, we actually become more resilient. And the reason is simple, because if we lose a game, it's not an existential crisis, a quick story. You heard that I was a very good failed phenom, not then getting better. What you didn't hear is right during that, I think was 18 or 19, when I was in the middle of my failed phenom phase, I met a sports psychologist who worked with all these major league baseball players, who just happened to be a track fan at a track meet. And he knew a little bit about me, starts talking to me and stuff. He's like, Oh, yeah. Like, I, I worked with this athlete. Do you know who they are? And I'm like, yeah, they're one of the best women in the world. Like, they're potentially going to win the Olympic medal this summer. That's 2004 I think. And he's like, Yeah, I worked with her. You know, she struggled for a while. You know what pushed her over the edge and helped her get to where she's a metal favorite, give me the gold doc. And he looks me straight in the eye, and he goes, he took up knitting. And as 18 or 19 year old, I'm like, Dude, seriously knitting. But the point was, this is that is for so long, she was a really good phenom who struggled a little bit and then came out of it, because her entire identity was running. And when she showed up to running practice, she was worried about doing well, and then when she left, she was worried about how practice went, and she'd stressed all day so she didn't get the best out of herself, and when finally convinced her, Hey, join this old lady knitting group, which is what it was actually, was she went home from practice and enjoyed knitting instead of obsessing about it. And the point is, it's even more important for kids than it is for adults. If we create that self complexity, we create robust individuals who can handle the difficulty that they're going to go through. And the last point I make on this on the psychological side, is that when you narrow your identity around here, you generally create more fear of failure, because it's like life or death around this thing. And what research tells us is that parents and coaches are the greatest driver of fear of failure in youth sports. Because that kid, whether you think it or not, starts to think like, oh man, my mom and dad are putting all the eggs in the tennis basket, and they're paying all this money to give me the tennis pro, and I just lost the match. And even if you're not giving off the signals, sometimes that kid goes like, I'm letting down my parent. And that's where that cycle of fear of failure comes. But if you create that robustness, where you're creating that multi sport we're saying, Yeah, you're great at tennis, but guess what? We're gonna go over here and play basketball, which kind of suck at, but like, we're gonna show that we love you and support you and we want you to have fun at it. They realize that it's not life or death when you play tennis. And as a parent, you don't just value them as the tennis player.
Matt Dixon 48:40
I think there's a really lovely local and personal example of this, actually, of going out outside of the single sport specialization and resisting it and and building a broader perspective. And that there's a bunch of families locally where their kids are really into baseball, and their kids are really good at baseball, and they do the travel baseball, and that's great. And they intuitively, or whatever it was, but they understood the importance of having a broader perspective. And they got the kids together and said, Let's do a let's do a soccer team. Let's do a rec soccer team. And my son, Baxter, is is a really keen swimmer, and he loves swimming and, and that's a funny thing for me, because I grew up a swimmer, and so I'm on shaky ground and struggle, as any other parent does, and and we got to tag along on this journey, but it created this amazing environment where these kids are doing now a second sport, and they're not the best in this sport. So there's a little bit of humility that comes along with it. It builds different kids are at different levels. And so they're mixing things up physically, but they're also mixing things. It becomes a really galvanizing, powerful thing, where that whole identity was not you are going to be a baseball power or baseball player, and it. Enabled an environment where the kids can just expand their their sort of mindset in many ways. So about college, because you're a college coach, so this one's for you, okay? And when it's all about recruiting college athletes, there are some parents in here that are going to have some kids, and we live in it in an area, by the way, Marin, where it produces a lot of really good college athletes and as well as some professional athletes. And so we love that. We want athletes to go if that's their passion. We want them to thrive. And so I wanted to make sure being cognizant of time, but that we talk a little bit that the coaching process, you have recruited many, many kids on your journey. So what are some of the red flags that you see in highly accomplished youth performance? What are some of the areas when you were recruiting real like, oh, hang on, let's put the brakes on this one.
Steve Magness 50:55
So my I remember my first week when I started the college coach at Houston, I had my first recruit in. His parent came in and sat down. The kid came with them. We're in my office, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. It's my first week, so I'm just talking to the parent and the kid and nerding out I'm running. And what I quickly noticed is the parent was doing 99% of the talking. They were just going on and on, and it was like, car salesman is, like, selling this kid, like, you, yeah, it's times. His times are this, but he's capable of this. Like, we just haven't gotten him in the right coach. We're trying a new coach. And, like, we're moving around. And like, he just needs the right training, and we have it figured out, but he's going to be great, and he loves it, and blah, blah, blah. And then I'd ask the kid a question, and then, like, the kid would be like, and then start to talk, and then dad would talk again. And I remember being like, this is really strange and weird. And then the the kid left, the parent left. And right after that, the coach who had that Jason office, who was a really good tennis coach, came in and said, Steve, I know absolutely zero about running, and I don't know if that kid's fast or not, it was pretty fast, he said. But here's my advice to you as a new coach, do not recruit that kid. Don't do it. And I did. But his point was this, and this is what you notice. And I give you the secret here, when your kids go on college recruiting trips, when a coach comes out to watch your kid run a meat or play a game or what have you. We're not just looking at the kid. We're looking at how the parent is. Are they over controlling? Are they like going to be so heavily involved that it's going to drive you nuts, right? Are they pushing the kid and they're the one who obviously pushes the kid to show up to practice and do all these things, and if mom or dad wasn't there, this kid wouldn't do it after the meats. Is the kid going to the coach to talk to them? Or are they bee lining it to the parent? Or is the parent like running up and intercepting the kid before he talks to the coach so that they can put their two cents out. The reality as a college coach is you want someone who's coachable. You want parents who support, yes, we want you involved, okay, but you want them to support and realize that, like you're coaching their kid, right? They're not the coach, they're not the driver. And we look at all those things. I mean, I could sit here and tell you stories, which I won't for this specific instance of where we're having recruiting talks among coaches like Carl Lewis and Leroy Burrell and these legends who were at the coaching table with me, and they'd be like, yeah, yeah, this kid's pretty talented. But man, did you? Did you meet the mom? Do you want to deal with that for the next four years? And, like, when we're talking about handing out scholarship money and, like, more importantly, building a team culture, those things matter. So my advice to you is, don't be nuts.
Matt Dixon 54:09
The only addition I have and the only the addition I have to it actually directly ties back to early specialization as well, where, if you have a kid that has been eight, 910, years into their journey, and you're looking as a collegiate athlete at them, like, where's the upside here? If they've been hardcore training, fully immersed in this, they've moved from California to Texas because it's a better swimming state, or whatever it might be, it's like, where's the upside? And that's what you're looking for us, a collegiate coach, to go through. I'm going to do a little bit of coaching, by the way, really quickly, because we pre arranged this. We need to pick up the
54:47
tempo. Yeah? Well, we're
Matt Dixon 54:49
running out of time, and we want to play door stuff. Okay, yeah, we're going to lock in here. Okay, we're going to this is, this is the beginning of the end. Yeah, okay. This is where we're at. So, rock and roll, let's. Let's do it. There's still, I think I do want to double down on this part of it, when there is a natural tendency, because it's very easy for us to sit up here and say, Don't have your kids specialize early. But there's a natural human emotion of saying, hang on, I don't want my kids to fall behind as well, because there are kids that are accelerating beyond and it's all very nice to listen to the, you know, the statistics that we throw out. But what would be your your very quick advice for the natural tendency of feeling like I want to do everything I can to help my kid be successful?
Steve Magness 55:40
I think it's acknowledging that the anxiety is real, and that makes sense. We all want the best for our kids, right? I'm a parent. We want them to succeed. We want all the best for them. And it can be really easy to look around and be like, oh gosh. Like, Johnny over there has 10 private coaches, and I'm not doing the best for my kid. Like, what do we do here? Okay, so I think number one is acknowledging in that. And then I think for a parent, it's like zooming out and having perspective. You all probably know way better than I, I do, but if you gave investment advice, what is it like? Don't chase the like thing. Just invest in a pretty good index fund, and just like, hey, just ride it for the next 3040, years. Right? For most people, that's good advice. That's kind of what it is for parenting an athlete. It's like, find good coaches who care about the human being in development, and then like, trust that process. Like, don't look over here at Little Johnny and Susie. Don't do this over there. Because I'm gonna tell you, I've been in this game for a long time. Like, you can generally tell us, like, Oh yeah, that guy's great at 15, but they're not making it 20 or 21 or what have you. And you've you've you've just got to, like, hold that temper, that that anxiety, or that fear missing out just enough to make sure you don't do something crazy.
Matt Dixon 57:09
We talked earlier before, as well as saying, hang on, let's think about this through a confidence lens. If you say you have four years the length of high school to develop into being the best version of yourself, whatever the arena is, that's a lot of time. And Steve asked me earlier on, and he said, What in your life have you ever loved to do for 10 years? And all I could come up with is drinking beer that was outside of that was like, that's a really long time. And so if you're starting with an eight year old, you're playing a big gamble to drive the wagons until they're 18, and expecting that they're still going to have the passion, the rage for mastery and that and that process driven mindset. And so instead, we lean back and actually say, let's give them the arena to actually develop and have fun and establish past a lifetime, and the key, key message here, there's a dirty truth on this, and I want to remember it. The talent always finds a way. It always does. And you always see the people that have made it and made it, and you go through they often will navigate not the best coaching in the world, not the best scenario, not often the kids surrounded with the private instruction, they find their way and and it's because they have a passion for the process and a certain amount of talent. And as Steve said, with terrible identification of it. So let them play, and they'll Excel. I want to make sure that we leave in the last seven minutes. We're going to go for here. We're going to go a little bit over, but I want to make sure that everyone in the room, both coaches present, as well as parents, will start with parents have some actionable takeaways. I think it's it's really important. And so I'm going to do a rapid fire section here. I'm going to go through three phases, preteen, teen, and then high school age, and some of the parenting advice that we would have at each of the phase so let's start with pre teen, so we'll call that between six when kids start getting into structure sport up to about 11 years of age. What's the approach
Steve Magness 59:23
play and exploration? Like, it's play. It's fun. It's like, let's try this thing. Let's do multiple things. Let's go compete all of those things. I think the other part is, like being careful to like craze kind of what you're praising Are you instilling the like, hey, all I care about is you get this trophy. Or are you instilling like, hey, like, that was a cool opportunity. Did you see what you guys did in the last quarter of the game, or whatever have you, it's really starting to instill those patterns and allowing them to explore different things. And as parent, I think. Your job is to like you notice that curiosity and like, you know what? Whatever? My kid has fallen in love with badminton this week. Let's go, let them play badminton if that's what we want to do.
Matt Dixon 1:00:12
It's fantastic. Here's the tough one for me, because Baxter is writing this, so we're going to go into team now. So this is 12 to 15. It's really freaking hard,
Steve Magness 1:00:23
really hard. Yeah, I'm not gonna give you any parenting advice. My kids are real young. I think 12 to 15 is like, what I'd call the trouble time, because you start getting you start getting good enough at something where all the piranhas come out, and they're like, oh, come join my new sports team. I can make your kid a scholarship champion. All this stuff. And they, they ploy on, like, you know, parent fear and the desire to, like, be one scholarship all those sense. So I think during this, this phase, it's really important to say, Okay, if they're showing talent and they're quote, unquote good at something great support them, but at the same time, have some constraints. Have, like, what Matt illustrated earlier, of like, Hey, we're gonna keep a side sport. Of like, we're gonna play basketball in off season, or we're gonna do Ultimate Frisbee or whatever it is, so that you can have something else before we, like, get trapped into this thing. So we, we kind of keep that variety alive.
Matt Dixon 1:01:24
And it's, I think it's important, if our kids are showing a real interest in the sport we want to, we want to do everything we can to support them and enable them to go on that journey, but not triple down on it as well, and keep the broader perspective and making sure that there's multiple interests going along. You know, what most ambassador is, very lucky, is a part of a swim program where they really embrace and swimming it. The reason I bring this up is, swimming is classically a sport where they say, you're eight years old, it's 10 times a week in you go, let's load them up, and it's, it's multi sport all the way. And that's, you know, I'd say, as a parent at this stage, it from this stage on, particularly, is choose your coaches carefully, because from this stage on, developing up into the next stage, as they go into high school, it can be the most important relationship that our children are going to have, someone that is going to mold and help them navigate all of these challenges that we're promoting, and so it's a really important choice that we go through, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. I also want to highlight the absolute and let you talk about this, but failing safely and developing autonomy on this. This is a time that we start to melt into, that we're not blocking anymore. We're just sitting behind you.
Steve Magness 1:02:48
Yeah, I think this is crucial, especially as we hit the teenage years. It's like kids have to if we know one thing, there's a theory called self determination theory, which types of psychological well being, and one of the key things is autonomy. If we have that developing autonomy, where kids are making choices, where they get to try things and fail and potentially and mom and dad don't swoop in to save them, or, like, save the day, or what have you, that develops this robustness. So I think especially as we get into our teenage years, or later teenage years. It's like the relationship becomes like, if the kid led, like, if the kid wants to train really hard, and it's them like, let them train relatively hard within the coach's bounds, right? But it's like them driving the ship that keeps that passion and that that that drive going to me, and
Matt Dixon 1:03:42
we, yeah, we move into those teen years that that's the transition. So in the in the sort of 12 to 15, they're developing that. Then by the time they're 15, Hey, have at it. And it can be almost under the banner of coaching, whatever is required, whatever they want to drive towards, because specialization is okay
Steve Magness 1:04:01
there, yeah. I mean, once you get up to up to that age, you start specializing. And so I did a lot of crazy things as a as a teenager running. I was running 100 miles a week as a 17 year old, I don't suggest that at all, but one of the keys that my parents did really well, if they would have loved for me to train less, but they just, they were just like, well, we don't know anything about running. Steve wants to run again. I guess he's going out the door and running, yeah, like, whatever that was. Like, all me driven. And I think sometimes from the outside, what happens is we see really successful athletes, and they're like, look, they're at the track in the gym all day, like, I've got to get my little son or daughter out to the gym and track every day. It's like, no. At that age, they're choosing to do it. And I'm going to tell you, as a college coach, I could tell sometimes I made the wrong choices in terms of performance on recruiting kids. And we get a kid and I'm like. Oh gosh, your mom and dad pushed you to like, show up, and when you don't have them driving you to practice like you're not gonna show up to practice like, this is why during those years, it's so important to give them that autonomy where it's like, Hey, if you want to do it like, I'm gonna support you, but I'm not going to be the one like pushing and driving you, because eventually that's going to fall back and like for your development.
Matt Dixon 1:05:27
Well, let's finish off with just a quick fly, because there's some language is important here as well. So that's sort of the structural perspective. But I want to go through a quick, quick hit list of five things that that encompass and are an umbrella across all of these ages, and particularly as they start to get a little older, from 12 up to 18. So supporting their kids. I'm going to have you go first. What are some of the hot tips that you can say first,
Steve Magness 1:05:53
supporting their kids. I mean, be there. Have a productive car ride home. This is where so many parents screwed up is like, if you start to become Coach, your kid is going to tune you out and start to think, like, Oh, mom and dad only care about how I perform. Like your job is like, support be there to listen. Like, don't say anything dumb. And like, that's it.
Matt Dixon 1:06:19
Yeah, there's there's language, and particularly younger kids that think is really good. And I wrote a couple of downs. I think it's important. I love watching you play. That's a really powerful set of words. I'm sure some of you have heard that before. But there's also empathy, that was really tough, that was really that was really tough, and particularly when they've lost the game and they're frustrated and they're everything else that come with it all, or validating effort as well. So you will love what you play, but you're working really hard. You're really working hard, and that's it's retaining ownership for the kid. It's their ownership and and ultimately, with those words, your actions need to align there. There is a reason that from the age of 1213, 1415, there is this person called a coach, and they've gone through training, they're pretty good. Choose your coaches wisely, but, but that's not your badge. Your badges, mom, dad, parent, supporter, and that's that's a critical component.
Steve Magness 1:07:23
So I want to double down on that. I know we're almost out of time, but like so here's what I got when I start coaching high school kids. And I spent a long time coaching college kids, and here's what I realized, is that at some point teenagers will tune parents out, but they will listen to the coach, because the coach is the other adult who spends way too much time with them, because you're at practice with these teenage kids or young adults all the freaking time. And I used to tell college, you know, parents that I recruited. I was like, Yeah, care about your professors. They're going to see them like three hours a week or whatever have you, but they're going to see me like an hour and a half every single day, and then on weekends, we're going to take these random busts and flight trips all over the world, and when I'm a chaperone in all so I spend way too much time with your kids, so you better feel comfortable on the lessons that I'm going to impart on them. And what a lot of smart parents realized is that, like, we had a really good relationship with those parents, is they realized that, like, hey, if that kid was struggling with something, they could tell me, and I could have a conversation with that kid, and that kid would listen to me, and they would not listen to their parent. They were tune it out. So my advice, similar to Matt, is saying, like, when you look at whether it's high school or college coaches, is those are often, like, the mentors that they actually kind of listen to. Don't worry, they hear you too. It just sometimes they don't admit it for a number of years, but those are the people who kind of like, can get in their ear and teach them things and have that lesson sink in quicker. So a lot of this comes down to and sport is like, choose coaches well, and that means not just from like, hey, this coach is going to guarantee my kid gets a scholarship. No, this is going to be a coach who is a role model, who teaches good actions that develop my kids for years. And as the cliche goes, but it's true. Is like, as a coach, you judge your successes, not based on, like, the trophies, awards, whatever, but it's like the amount of weddings you get invited to.
Matt Dixon 1:09:32
Yes, true. Yeah, it's absolutely true. And, and there are, I want to make this, I think, a very important point. There are some, many, many great coaches out there that get it. Many of them are at the school, by the way, and and I can only share my personal experience, but it's tough for me, being a swimmer that has gone through a journey that included burnout, chronic fatigue and everything else. And. I have a kid that really loves swimming. It's an uneasy platform for me. I want to absolutely support him and absolutely drive it, and he loves it. He really does. And and we have, we have a couple of some programs that we're a part of, and when you have the conversations with the coaches, and you see by their actions, and they are instilling, showing up on time, being a great teammate, commitment having fun, enjoying the process, being a good person, shaking people's hands. And you think that's great, that's actually great. That's That's what I'm here for. And I think as we transition to the coaches. To finish tonight, I'll start talking about the coaches first. And I think because we started today saying, Look, this isn't just wishy washy about just go and have fun. I think for for coaches, it is absolutely appropriate, through that vein, to have very high standards. You can have high expectations. That's actually a part of coaching, is that you can expect a lot of the kids, as long as you also provide a really positive environment of support. And so that old classic, when we think about and I have real PTSD on this, because I grew up in England, you can't even imagine how bad it was, but coaches with mustaches and whistles and sticks in England that would beat you, that just doesn't work long time. And so when we pick our coaches, but for the coaches in the audience, it's great to have standards. It's okay to expect a lot of the kids, but the role is to develop a really supportive environment where they can immerse their self in their journey. I'll let you lead on, on the coaching. So, yeah, I mean,
Steve Magness 1:11:53
that's, that's 100% it. I mean, there's research that validates this. There's thanks actually, parenting research is where it came out of in the, I think, the 1990s Diana bomberine Did this elaborate study where she looked at parenting styles. And what they found out is that you need, just as Matt eloquently said, high expectations combined combined with what she called high responsiveness, which is essentially high care. If you have both good things happen, kids develop well, if you have high expectations and no care, bad things happen. Okay? If you have no expectations, that doesn't turn out that well either.
1:12:36
Okay, indifference, yeah,
Steve Magness 1:12:38
and that's what it's about. It's about this non duality. It's not just like, Hey, have fun, do whatever you want. We talk about any expectations, expectations. It's that support. And the other thing I'll end on, on the coaching is one of my favorite studies that I've come across is the study where researchers study NBA coaches and NBA players, so highest level. And what they looked at is they looked at when, what happens when you have like a Bobby Knight style coach that's like a total jerk, right? Who does crazy stuff? And what they found is that NBA players, once you played under that coach, you started getting more aggressive, you had more technical fouls, and you played worse. And it didn't just affect you for that year that you played under them. It affected you for the rest of your career. Back the researchers titled The study, scarred for the rest of my career. Mel, now I want you to think about this. This is the NBA players, right, highest, you know, get paid millions whatever can probably are thinking this guy's crazy. But whatever, I get millions of dollars to play a game, so I'm good, and it still affected not only their performance, also their underlying aggression, okay, and ability to control it, which is technical files represented. What do you think happens to a 12 year old or a 14 year old? So I think as coaches, we have a real responsibility to have that non duality of like. We need standards, we need to compete all those things, but we also need the environment that is responsive, that is care, that shows that kid like, Hey, you're gonna mess up, you're gonna fail. But what matters is like how we respond to that.
Matt Dixon 1:14:33
The one thing I would add with coaching as well, which which is worthy of acknowledging, and there might be some parent coaches in the room as well, if not full time youth coaches and and the greatest work that you will do will will not be seen in the years that you're doing it for the kit. It emerges on the back end, where, as youth coaches, we're developing adults. We're not trying to create 10 year old stars. And it's really. Be really hard to take that on. But if you ever look at documentaries done or little you know, snippets with great NBA players like Steph Curry, I think they always bring up the high school coach. They're ways that they that high school coach is always there, not because they would, they, and I'll use an American word that doesn't exist, by the way, the winningest coach, no matter how you guys say that, that's not a word, but anyway, but they always bring it's not because of that, it's because of these values they instilled. And that's a really powerful coaching relationship. And that's the project in many ways. And so if we believe in that, what we want is variety, even at sometimes at the consequence of short term gains and victories. And so the worst thing that we could do, if you're a baseball coach of 10 year old to say that's our picture. He's got the strongest arm. He's only going to pitch or, okay, you're going to stand there, because then what you might actually be missing is the really talented kid that gets dumped in the outfield the whole time, but maybe it was later the sport. And so you want variety, even if you are going to create the best picture alter or the best baseball player, ultimately, mix up positions. I coach a kid now on triathlon. He's a very, very good amateur triathlete, but his sport growing up was rowing, and I call him left turn Scott because in rowing, he was a part of the British Junior Olympic program. He never actually made the Olympics, but they had him always rowing a single position on the boat. He is literally twisted for the rest of his life, his hips and his back. He sits on the button. I said, You're turning left the whole time. I make him wear two right shoes so we can keep in straight, but it's an amazing thing. What a disservice, what a disservice those coaches in the British Olympic development program did, even if they were trying to get this clip to be the best row both sides at the Middle East even more play multiple sports. And so we comes back to what are we trying to do here? What are we trying to do? And if we buy into we are looking to build kids that are resilient, that are vibrant, that are challenge driven. They're great teammates that know how to communicate and can navigate all of the ups and downs that's going to help them become growth adults. We don't need to worry about much else, because the talent will rise. And so Steve, I want to thank you so much, not just for tonight, but making the big trip. And for the last 10 years or so, we've been great friends. We have the greatest respect for each other, and it's been an absolute joy to be able to sit here and share this experience. And I want to thank you guys for bringing it tonight. Thank you so much.
Matt Dixon 1:18:01
I know that we're, we're a few minutes over. Am I allowed to ask any questions? Or we get kicked out now, all right, I think there's a, there might be some, some people that maybe have some questions. If not, we're going to have, well, anyone got any questions? Go ahead. There's going to be a microphone. So you gotta you're on the spot. No, just amazing.
Steve Magness 1:18:26
Thank you so much. So for us parents that have been already high school and literally,
1:18:40
what could you do? How you
Steve Magness 1:18:42
steer the ship correct in some of the things that you've mentioned, great
Steve Magness 1:18:51
question. Oh, man, that's a big question. How do we write the ship? I mean, I think, I think number one is like, don't beat yourself up. Parenting is hard, yeah, like, that's there. That's the truth. Like, no one's going to do it perfect. It's impossible. So you're doing the best you can. So I think that's number one, is, don't beat yourself up. And then I take the second part is, like, take some of the principles we talked about and say, Okay, how can I change the thing? Some of the things that are like the weak points of maybe we didn't do well, maybe it's you specialize. Well, they're almost through high school, so whatever. But maybe you can say, hey, maybe we can create some diversity in their training, or talk to their coach and be like, hey, they they did this one sport for a really long time, like we need some other stuff. So for instance, with runners, what we always, what we often saw, is like, Oh, you specialize early, like you can only move in one direction, and if we go to the side, like you're dead. So you start building that robustness in. If it's like on the motivational or the psychological side, what you do? Yeah. Yeah, what you do there is you just be honest with your kid. You say, like, look, Maybe I put too much pressure on you to do this. Maybe I put too much this, this on this, on you. But, like, that's part of parenting. Is trying things and sometimes messing up, but I want to learn and grow just like you did, okay? And all the story that comes to mind is this is I had a young lady when I was coaching in college who had very nice parents. I get along with them great. But that kid, she was scared to death when her parents came to watch her race. In fact, one time she came up to me and said, Coach, can you tell my parents not to come to the conference championships? And they had no idea they were just thought they were doing the right thing. So I brought them in, and I sat them down and said, Hey, like your daughter kind of feels this way, like I know you're good people. I know you're trying the best. Can we, like, evaluate this, then try and think of like, how can we resolve this, then get it in a better spot? And it ended up they just had a sit down conversation. I was part of it, of like, hey, we didn't know we were putting this pressure on hey, we want you to know that, like, win, lose or draw. Like, we want to support you. What would you like us to do at meats or competition? How would you like us to behave? What do you need to hear from us, before competition after us? What do you need? And that was really powerful for that kid, because it gave her a little autonomy. And it said, like, okay, Mom and Dad, like, this is what helps me get in the place to perform. So I would, I would encourage you to reframe it as, like, what happened? Happened doesn't matter. You know. Well, it happened. Like, how do I make that relationship some sort of positive learning experience that takes some of that load off that kid?
1:21:58
Does that help? Maybe a little bit.
Matt Dixon 1:22:03
I'll add something as well. Everything he said, Great. And the only thing I would add is, it's okay to have a conversation. You got a, you know, you got a mini adult in the making, basically. And look at I'd love you and, and this is your sport. And if you want to carry on, I absolutely support you at the same time, if you don't want to carry on and really enforce this is your journey. This is your life, and and, and really making it clear that you know, I just I love you as a human being. That's who I love you at and if you want to do whatever the sport is, I love watching you play still. I always have, and it's great. It's your journey. No one else
Speaker 3 1:22:48
multi sport. Did you inherit multi sports? Deducted? So you would mention the 49 in the chiefs, my guest in the college, they weren't doing, I don't know, water, cold load or something. They were probably doing track and field. Most of them would be my guess. I could find certain multi sport pairing that make them like that actually work better.
Matt Dixon 1:23:14
There's no pairing with swimming necessarily, because 90% of your weight is displaced, but it's fantastic for a swimmer to go and play baseball or play so I would think about it less. This is my perspective. I would think about it less. Of all, swimming is really good because of water polo, and that's where I want that kid to go. And it's it's doing something in a completely different arena that is ultimately training the brain and training the body. And so a great pairing for swimming might be baseball, lacrosse or soccer or flag football or anything else, and the same compare so and you're right. You know you're absolutely right when you know the NFL players, most of them were not also swimming in high school, just using that as an example, they were probably doing track and field or baseball, these components. But I think the key is just keeping the variety, both athletically and emotionally and I really, really love, particularly younger age groups, doing something like track and field or cross country, you know, when they're 910, 1112, something individual, and then doing water polo or baseball, where it's team something into because it represents a different type of challenge, and there's team dynamics, and it all fuels into the same thing.
Steve Magness 1:24:35
Yeah, I like, I like that a lot. I think everyone should do track and field, so that's my bike, but I think a lot of it, so it depends on age group as well. Is, I think when you're young, the overarching driving message should be like, Well, what in the world interests your kid? So my quick story to this is, when I was, I think was, it was fifth grade, we had to run the PE physical fitness model. Mile, and I was I played baseball and soccer, and I crushed the mile and just missed the school record. And the PE teacher goes like, Don't you want your name up on the cafeteria for the school record? I'm like, yeah, that'd be cool. She's like, well, you can take another shot. Why don't you go join this local track club, and then a month later you can try again? I'm like, great, go home, tell my dad. He's like, we'll show up to practice track, whatever. I show up to practice the first day, and we run like, this stupid, hard interval training. And I go up to my dad and like, track sucks. And it was like, Okay, go back and play soccer and baseball. And that's what I did. And then four years later, I found my way back to track and fell in love with the thing. So I think when we're young, it's like interest as we develop, I think like the team and individual is a really good dynamic there. And I still think it's interest. I mean, Tiger Woods ran freaking cross country. Yeah, yeah. People forget that. Do you think? Like, what does cross country have to do with golf? Nothing but like, he did something else. And I think like that is often the point is, like, whatever it is, like, have them pair with that, and it's like, hey, go do it and have fun with that.
Matt Dixon 1:26:21
We talked before about having similar paths. And you know, mine was, I was swimming. I was a young swimmer, and was one of the top swimmers in the country, in Britain when I was 12 years of age. And that was when my mom, God love us, said, You know, I want my chef that fair share of the Olympic glory, and which is not the best parenting, by the way. And and I quickly burnt out and quit, and I went multi sport instead, and I did soccer and pups. That was my two things that I did as a young British guy, and but then at the right moment, found my way back that was timely for me, and I had as a youth, and you don't gain this perspective until you're you're way older. But as a youth, it was all external. I was doing it for validation of other people around me, my my peers. But when I went back, I was just before 15, just before 16, I was 15 years of age. I had two years and and that was it, and that's where things ignited for me. I was ready to specialize on my on my own. So is it someone else?
Speaker 3 1:27:27
Yeah, I was just thinking a couple things. You said, it really was like the kids should drive, and also the multi support participation. What have you ever been that just one sport. How would you handle that?
Matt Dixon 1:27:46
I can give you sort of my thought on that is, actually, I'll borrow off of Steve's other component is, as much as we can try and introduce and say, do another passion. So is it? Do you want to learn an instrument? Do you want to do theater? Do you want to but, but make it multi disciplinary, if it's not multi sport, and that's great, because not all kids are athletically a client. We believe in the power of sport, but not all kids are there. So make it and gaming isn't one of them, you know. So that's preferably, I mean, I personally gaming is okay, but that's not, that's not another passion that should require a focus.
Steve Magness 1:28:31
Yeah, I think I agree 100% I think it depends on the age too, yeah, as well. And I think at some point it's like, well, if, if you're specializing and like the kid is like whatever, just all in on it and obsessed, it's whatever. As a parent, you just have to look out for the guardrails, which is, essentially, is, is my kid becoming one dimensional identity? Is this all he cares about? Is this, this? It Do we have a way to expand that, often through instruments or plays or theater or whatever it has. Something else beyond that. From a physical standpoint, you have to look at is the coach like, do I trust them to not do dumb things? Essentially, if you have a single focused athlete in one sport, physically, what you often need is like, well, that coach needs to introduce, like, again, the running example, move in other directions, like, go lift some weights and do some other things that support you in that that thing. So having a coach who can understand and see that is important
Matt Dixon 1:29:34
as well. And I would just double down on that as maybe the last thing, which is at age, is really important. So you got a 15 or 16 year old and that is their absolute passion. You don't have to be multi sport to be successful. And I want to make sure that's not the message kid that just absolutely loves it. And it's like, Yep, go for it. But as as Steve that that's where this all ties together with hopefully that the parent. As well, if not. All right, that's it. Let's go, you know, and it's still like really enabling and fostering that sort of broader perspective as well. That's where we go. We'll go last question, how's that?
Speaker 4 1:30:19
Early on about So, how would you care to show make somebody like very to be motivated? Yes,
Matt Dixon 1:30:33
with what age, I think is maybe a qualifying question.
1:30:38
Either you need a key
1:30:41
or gene. 14, okay.
1:30:56
And you know,
Steve Magness 1:30:58
without being American, I I met, yeah,
Steve Magness 1:31:06
so you're asking if kids, like highly entered, the Commodore vated, but still burn out. Yeah, okay, so what we have here, and this was me, so what you have here is, I call them pushers. There's certain people who are incredibly intrinsically motivated, but they are going to push and push and push and push. And whenever I encounter this person as a coach, what I realize is my job is to I use this way too much, but bear with me is keep them from doing dumb things, which means, what is the safe balance within that pushing of that sport that's physically and psychologically? That means maybe sitting there and being like, Okay, we're going to have a conversation on long term development in our plan to develop you where it's like, we're not going to race every week, even though you want to race every week because, like, you just want to push we're going to talk about taking days off and mandating days off from a coaching standpoint. And I think again, this is why my advice is, always find a good coach, but what you have to do is almost like, depending on age, is look at the constraints that are appropriate for that child. Okay, and you don't want to smother the thing, but you also don't want them to run 100 miles a week when they're 17. So how to do that is really tricky. So hire a good coach. I think the other thing that works really well for those kids is give them a role model. Is give them someone if they are a pusher, you know, they want to end up somewhere. Could be a college scholarship. Could be making varsity. Could be something else. You go find someone, or get an example, or bring back a former athlete, or whoever who has been in that spot who can, like, show them and guide them that they'll actually listen to. Because, like, so often it's like, the thing that makes us us good is the thing that prevents us from being great, and we don't see it because we're kids and we don't have that perspective. So we need, like, as many voices in our head, from the parent, from the coach, from a mentor, from someone else, that tells us, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. This is great. Partnership. But we also have to be aware of this over here for your long term future, which can't quite see, but it's really important that we have that there, if that makes
Matt Dixon 1:33:52
sense, and every strength is a weakness as well, and that that's a catalyst. But there's one thing that we didn't mention in in coaching, which, which I think is very important, I should probably bubble it up now, because Steve talks a lot about guardrails, and it's really valuable, and that's a big part of the coach's job. So if you think about what is great success, if you're coaching kids that are 1112, 1314, years of age, and they're going through this development, it's that when they get to the age of early specialization, of not early specialized, and where real dedication comes into play, what does success looks like? And it's probably great development of skills and technique, really good tool, care of coach, ability and an absolute love of the sport and those, if you can deliver that where then the kid is 15, that's a much higher likelihood of success. And so everything that Steve said, like controlling the throttle on that and that child will need to do. Develop that, that that ability to actually pull back and have a broader perspective and a longer term journey, because the journey of sport and the journey of life is not a sprint, it's a marathon. So it's a great tool to develop young and you can do it with good coaching,
Steve Magness 1:35:19
for sure. And the other thing I'd add is, I look for examples from professional athletes, those kids know. So I'd look at, you know, if you're a basketball player, I'd go read the article or send whatever Tiktok videos, whatever they do now, of Caitlin Clark learning how to channel that fire and like, the emotional control, and not just like, be blindly competitive. Like, there are examples throughout of, like, really good athletes who have to learn like, that nuance of like pushing, but also the constraint. And if you can find those examples, it often, like, resonates much more because, like, again, that's who they often want to be or emulate.
1:36:06
Thank you very much. Guys. Appreciate a lot of fun.
Matt Dixon 1:36:10
Guys, thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing head to the purple patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey, and in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the purple patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Sport in youth, athletic potential, performance expert, early specialization, multi-sport participation, intrinsic motivation, resilience, emotional regulation, self-complexity, talent identification, coaching strategies, parental support, autonomy, holistic development, competitive mindset., Resilience, teamwork, communication, growth adults, parenting, multi-sport, specialization, diversity, coaching, long-term development, motivation, guardrails, emotional control, role models, performance journey.