Does Your Young Athlete Have Motivation When They’re Overmatched?
Answering this question in the title provides an important insight into a young athlete’s mindset. When a young athlete is clearly overmatched in a competitive situation, their behavior speaks far louder than words.
Unquestionably, all competitive athletes love winning and hate losing. However, the love / hate relationship with winning and losing is not equally healthy for one’s mental toughness.
You have to risk losing before you can win. Therefore, if an athlete hates losing more than they love winning, there’s a chance they will choose not to compete when they think it will be tough.
On the other hand, if an athlete learns to love winning more than they hate losing, then they embrace the losses as stepping stones to help them win more. Athletes with this mindset celebrate the opportunity to compete against someone better. This gives them more motivation than when they compete against someone with less skill.
In youth sports in particular, coaches and parents have a major influence on whether the love or the hate drives an athlete’s competitive nature. If parents and coaches only offer praise and love for winning, then this drives the hate mindset. This is because the absence of praise and love for a young athlete is painful. The athlete would rather not compete then to experience this feeling.
As a result, if a parent or coach wants to raise a true competitor, they must overwhelmingly embrace the lose to get better mindset when an athlete is young.