How to support your child to chase their sporting goals.
Years ago, I thought my greatest dream was to become a professional footballer, then at the age of 22 I was faced with the reality that I would have to work multiple jobs while also completing a heavy training schedule 3 hours away from where I lived on a regular basis, all because female athletes were paid measly wages. This combined with my desire to be a mum before I was 35 felt like a pressure cooker of decisions that directed what I would do next in sport. Not wanting to give up motherhood for sport, nor a career I had only just started I stayed with my career and stepped away from trying again to make it happen, it helped that an epic injury followed later that prevented me from playing football again. Looking back at those decisions now as a single, 35 year old it all feels ironic. I cannot change the decisions that I made, and I don’t have regrets, but I do want to share what I have learnt about chasing high performance in sport for upcoming athletes and parents that endeavour to support them.
I think many children grow up wanting to be someone famous, a popstar, an actor, their favourite sports star but few understand what it really takes to become their idols. Those that do work their butt off as soon as they can sink into anything that resembles a pathway to success. It begins in primary school, your parents introduce you to sport to help you socialise with others, learn team skills and to have fun (amongst other things) and for those that are coordinated or have been gifted with their parents’ ability to read game play picking up a sport comes naturally. Before long you have coaches that witness your potential and encourage you to do something with it. That was me at age 7. My tennis coach encouraged me to play against 18 year olds in a competition, one that I knew my parents couldn’t afford and to be honest, I didn’t want to play. At 7 years of age, I loved playing the sport, but I didn’t want to do it for anything but fun. It wasn’t long though before I found a sport that I did love, and I was obsessed. Enter football or soccer as most Australians call it.
I was the kid who created their own drills in the backyard and practised even when she wasn’t meant to. I was the teenager who got dirt all over herself on weekends when the other teenage girls were focussed on ‘picking up the boys’. Football was life. I had read a book about David Beckham given to me by my sister’s boyfriend who had played professionally overseas, and I was enthralled by the way Becks was committed even though I often thought ‘maybe I started too late.’ In school my parents always found a way to pay for each of the trials I wanted to go to, and they didn’t just include football. I don’t know how they did it, but I only recall them saying no to me once. When my brother was in senior year and I was at University, he was in a high school musical and for the first time ever I realised something that I missed: life had only ever been about sport. When I sustained an injury that left me with one ligament left attached and my specialist said ‘don’t play soccer again if you still want to walk at 40’ I was gutted. I was in my early 20s and I thought I had at least another 10 years of high-level sport in me, it took one thing to change it all and to be honest it left me lost.
‘Run a marathon or doing anything that is a straight- line activity, that would be best for your health.’ It felt like the specialist was asking me to get excited about snoring. I was bored at the thought already. I’ve talked to other people about hearing that moment since, I’ve related to athletes (that played sport at a much higher level than me) who had career ending injuries many times over who all felt the grief of life simply changing but it doesn’t change what I know about pursuing and playing sport at a high level.
If you’ve ever wanted to be a high performing athlete or to support someone who is trying to be one, here are my tips for you.
1. Do something other than sport. You may be besotted with the sport that you want to become the best at but not doing something else that isn’t sport may leave you with regrets or leave you unprepared beyond sport. You have more than one talent, don’t pour all your energy into one.
2. If you are playing a sport that involves kicking for goodness sakes learn to kick with both feet. Unfortunately, over time I’ve seen how coaches no longer select sportspeople who have this skill, but it seriously limits the capacity of a player. When I was going through the ranks you didn’t get much of a look in if you couldn’t kick with your left and right foot. You were too easy to defend, and you didn’t have the flexibility that players who could kick with both feet had. Today kicking with both feet is incredibly rare, do yourself a favour and be seen as the rare talent by establishing skills on both feet and if you play a sport where you are also required to use your hands, learn to use both as well.
3. Be coachable. A player who knows it all is not capable of being a high performer. Funnily enough some of the best players you encounter especially in the teenage and young adult years will think they know it all but their growth as a sportsperson is stagnant and fast. If you cannot take on board feedback, you cannot improve. High performers are not finished products that don’t work on their craft, they are people who realise that there is work to be done and they get to work.
4. Work on being a smart player. Seek to learn from coaches and mentors that teach you how to be mentally exhausted after a training instead of physically exhausted. Fitness is easy, mastering game play is harder. A player who masters game play will always be more beneficial than a fit player because they can make even the fittest of athletes run circles around them.
5. Know how to rest. Working out 7 days per week is nonsense. You need to know how to rest, a rest is not going for a run, it’s actually doing nothing. Embrace it.
6. Understand that not even your parents or your loved ones has the right to stop you from your goals. If you stop because of them that was your choice, they didn’t make you. Part of being a high performer is that people will often not understand your tenacity, but they don’t need to, if it matters to you turn up and make it happen.
7. Your mindset is your problem. This is connected to number 6. Your loved ones may have a mindset that is different to yours, they may think that aspiring to be a professional athlete is a hilarious pipedream but that is their mindset, as long as it isn’t yours their opinion doesn’t matter.
8. Get a job, especially if you are a teenager. At some point you might find that the direction you want to go with your sport cannot be taken without some skin in the game (cash investment) and your parents/guardians might not be able to pay for it. Get a job and invest in it yourself, psychology has repeatedly proven that when you place monetary investment in something you are more likely to commit. Reality is, if high performance in a sport is what you want nothing is really stopping you, so make it happen.
9. Be prepared for politics. Unfortunately, in high performance sport there is politics. In Australia’s most elite sporting programs some of our best athletes don’t make the cut because they are 2 centimetres too short, in other arenas parents with cash make payments to ensure their child secures their spot in high level sport- NONE OF THIS MATTERS, IT DOESN’T REFLECT YOUR ABILITY. Politics is a way of life, perhaps just like me you’ll encounter someone whose parents paid their way somewhere only for you to find them later sniffing a line of cocaine…politics will never win sports performance.
10. Have a thick skin & consider intent. Some coaches communicate poorly but you can identify their intent. One of the most interesting coaches I had as a teenager you could describe as ‘rough as guts’. He insulted basically all of us at training but when he gave you a compliment it actually meant something. His intent wasn’t to make us feel amazing all the time, it was to make us better footballers. While I remember him as being quite the a-hole I will also always remember those 3 compliments he gave me made up about one third of the most memorable ones I ever received.
11. Don’t put something off for a future that may or may not happen. Now I said earlier that I don’t have any regrets and I don’t but this one is more so because now sport has changed. Women now have a better future in sport so don’t get stuck thinking that you don’t have the possibility to be paid well doing what you love or that you have to give up or severely delay motherhood for sport- you just don’t.
12. Keep the fun. The more that you try to get in the next team and the next, the greater possibility that the pressure can turn your love for sport into a constant competition, so you need to do things that remind you how much you loved it in the first place. It is easy to dislike your sport when it becomes a long list of goals, targets and pressure especially when sponsors come on board, you become a more senior player or take on a leadership role.
13. Learn how to be compassionate with yourself. This skill must not be underrated. People will put pressure on you to get the best out of you, you may have already discovered that you work best under pressure and so you put pressure on yourself too, but you need to know how to relax. Being hard on yourself can create overarousal and underperformance. It can also negatively impact your mental health because the more you are hard on yourself the more you entertain your harsh inner critic.
14. Trust your decisions. You will make decisions that may impact your trajectory- embrace that even if you feel things won’t turn out exactly at you like at first, in the long run they will turn out exactly as they are meant to and quite possibly even better than you imagined.
15. NEVER PLAY INJURED FOR SOMEONE ELSE & NEVER MAKE A PLAY TO INJURE SOMEONE ELSE. I really cannot communicate that loud enough in written form. You will find coaches and managers that encourage you to play injured, who will convince you that you are so vital to the team that your choice to not play will impact everyone. Your responsibility is not the result of the entire team or the coach’s results, your responsibility is to make a choice that is right for you. Your body is your career when you play sport so if you do not look after it then you are cutting your career short. So, if you are told, ‘take 5 weeks off’ from a doctor, take the 5 weeks off! And if heaven forbid yet another coach (sadly this happens all too often) tells you to ‘take that player out; they are annihilating us’ with explicit instructions about how to do it or you’ll be benched or something like it, do NOT take that action and injure another athlete. You know recovering from injuries sucks so don’t do it to someone else. Play with integrity.
16. Trust your ability. When you are a high performer in sport or any other field in your life people will be jealous, expect it, you do not need to make them feel comfortable about their own sports performance by lowering your self- confidence. If you know you have the ability and the grit to see your dream through damn well do it! Do it in the way you want to as well. For me I never wanted to turn up to a training and ask to be scouted, it was a stupid ego thing for me and to be honest a bit of the little girl in me- my superstars in football never went to a training and asked to be scouted they were scouted for talent off their own back. Both of my biggest breakthroughs happened when I was simply playing football, the second I will always remember as it ended super well (the first was thwarted by politics). I was at a coaching clinic learning how to train other footballers and the man leading the training recognised that I know how to play football and asked me to play for his team. I was in no position to pay for the season, let alone travel but he said he would find a way to make it happen and he did. I ended up with my season fully paid for, it felt unreal. It was the best feeling because I got to play at the level I wanted to, by being scouted the way I wanted to. There is no reason why the same thing cannot happen for you as well.
17. An injury it is not the end of the world. You are going to experience injuries. I had plenty before I was told not to play football again. Take your rehabilitation seriously, work really hard to get your body back to full strength. As humans we have this insane ability to bounce back quick when we are young, don’t ruin it by being half assed recovering from injury.
18. Learn prehab and activation exercises and if you coach doesn’t do them at local community sport take the initiative and do it for yourself. Mobility is the key to getting more out of your body both in each session and over the life of your sporting career. Many of these exercises are available online, including on our Magnetic Confidence app, so reach out if you want to access them!
19. Invest in a nutritionist and a personal trainer even if it’s only for 2 sessions each. Working with a nutritionist can help you significantly understand what you can do to improve your health and wellbeing as you grow and develop and how you can support your body better while you train. Training with a personal trainer a few times (if you cannot afford any more) will help you with understanding correct technique to use for different exercises and provide you with a sample program you can continue on your own.
20. If you want to stop pursuing your sport at any point in time, it is 100% acceptable.
