What Comes Out Of A Player’s Mouth
Posted on Nov 20, 2007 under Coaching Practice |The disease of bad language infects almost all of today’s youth and sports as a whole. Is your game immune from profane language? Unfortunately, no.
PREMISE
Youth players are using more and more profane language on the field. There is a part of me that recognizes that a coach gets older and the players only get younger. As I transform from a full-time player to an overly pensive and serious coach, my ears and conscience clearly become more offended by profanity. Profanity is learned at school, on the playground, at the mall, etc. But are you as a coach allowing the use of profanity to continue to grow in your training sessions and games?
1. You are an example. Players are extremely impressionable, especially to those they learn from, respect and hopefully emulate. Put simply, do not use improper language within earshot of your team. Every coach can slip, especially during the heat of a tense match or frustration of an ineffective training session. If you swear or curse, your players will hear you. Do not go on without apologizing. If you don’t take your slip seriously, why should they?
2. The threat of referees is real. To varying degrees, referees are attempting to clamp down on profanity during games. The problem of inconsistency remains since a bad word to one ref may not necessarily be a bad word to another. Yet the argument of whether or not a word is deemed profane by the player, the ref, or the dictionary is not the issue. The matter of discussion is the actual exclamation more than the word chosen.
3. Practice makes perfect. If the coach allows the profanity to go without reprimand or punishment in practice, it will only increase during games. If your team has a problem with profanity, start your very next training session with a stern discussion and then, more importantly, enforce your guidelines.
4. There are many negative effects of poor language in matches.
- Demonstration of a negative representation of the coach, the parents, and the club.
- Disruption of the players’ composure, concentration, and performance.
- Pollution of the purity of the game.
Never forget that you are influencing and producing people, not just players.