Johnny Tauer, head men’s basketball coach at the University of St. Thomas, spoke with Minnesota Public Radio about the growing pressures of youth sports and how overinvolved parents can affect children’s development. Tauer discussed the importance of allowing young athletes to build independence, resolve conflicts and enjoy sports without excessive parental pressure.
From the conversation:
Angela Davis: Johnny, any stories stand out to you? Players sharing what their conversations with their parents or grandparents or well-intentioned aunties have been like?
Johnny Tauer: I thought Laura’s series was phenomenal, and it did capture so well note a bunch of problems or issues with youth sports. But one of them is the ride home that kids will remember, even adults will decades later. I always liken it to how many of us would love our boss on the way home, sitting next to us, second-guessing every decision we had made throughout a fast-paced environment, right?
And so here’s these kids that you think you go to school all day and they’re probably excited to go play baseball or softball. And then on the way home, why didn’t you swing at that pitch? What happened on the ground ball? It’s like, I don’t know. I’m 9 years old.
But you start thinking about the role of a parent, and it is interesting because most parents will espouse academics are more important than athletics, and yet most parents are not doing something similar. They’re not asking, can I come watch you take your math test? Right. They’re not doing things that would add a lot of pressure from that calculus world, right?
Davis: Coach, you wrote a whole book and you coined the term WASP. It stands for Well-Intentioned Over-Involved Sports Parents. Overinvolvement. This is what that looks like. Tell me about the book. What’s in it?
Tauer: Well, the overinvolvement, I think the moment for me was running these summer camps and just seeing parents who are great, but they were clearly not teaching their kid the life skills that, if sports has a major benefit for young kids, I think it’s learning the life skills that you alluded to, Laura. Conflict negotiation. How do you make calls? How do you go talk to a teammate when you don’t think they’re sharing nicely?
And so sports has the ability to teach all sorts of things that are going to be correlated with positive outcomes in life. And yet, I think right now in youth sports, the parents have taken over so much of it that the kids aren’t developing the very skills that sports were designed to create.
