Real Talk From The Sidelines: When Your Athlete Isn't Getting the Playing Time They Deserve
Real Talk From The Sidelines: When Your Athlete Isn’t Getting the Playing Time You Think They Deserve
This is real talks from the sidelines, real questions from real sports parents. If you want your question answered, record it. Link is on the website. This week's question comes from Melissa in Virginia. Hey, Coach Daniels. I'd love to hear your advice. My daughter plays club volleyball, and she is clearly one of the best players on her team. Her teammates and the other parents even say so. But the coach keeps starting another girl who is the assistant coach's daughter. My daughter works hard, never complains, and keeps showing up, but she's losing motivation because she doesn't understand why she isn't starting. What do I do? And how do I explain this to her without making her feel like it's hopeless?
That's a great question, Melissa, and I know that that's extremely challenging for you, and I know that it's challenging for your youth athlete. First off, congratulations on all her athletic success. She sounds like a very promising young athlete, and she's got a bright future ahead of her. First thing that you need to make sure that you do is stay as positive as possible.
And it's our job as parents to keep them upbeat and to keep them positive. We're their biggest [00:01:00] cheerleaders. As far as what you communicate to your young lady, you need to make sure that she understands no matter what her role is, whether it be starting or coming off the bench, she needs to be a star in that role.
She needs to be dominant in that role. And when I say dominant, I don't mean productivity. Sometimes we're gonna have great games and sometimes we're not, but it's where our effort is, our focus is, our, our mentality is, our energy is. We need to be cheering for other teammates. We need to be working harder than anyone else, and we need to be dominating our role.
As far as understanding that this athletic development and this process of her becoming the best athlete is a marathon, it's not a sprint. And even if another kid is starting at this role right now, that doesn't mean that it always will be. She needs to keep working and keep working and be ready for her moment.
And when that moment comes, if she has that mindset, she'll be ready to dominate. Now, if this is a situation that becomes so glaring that it's obvious to everyone, it may be a situation where you need to entertain trying out for other clubs or seeing what else is out there. But to be clear, I'm not a big advocate for jumping from ship to ship any time there's any trouble in the water, because only certain situations will call for that.
But that is a situation that only you know all of the dynamics and the inner workings of that. But my advice to you is to be slow to jump teams, because the grass is not always greener. And there will always be politics in sports, and our job is to figure out how to work through them and continue to persevere to the best of our ability.
I hope that helps. If you wanna know what it actually takes for your athlete to succeed at the next level, I put together a free training video on the Next Level Athlete Success Formula. In this free training, I'm sharing the proven formula behind what it actually takes to separate average athletes from elite performers.
If your athlete has big goals, this is where you start. Access the training for free at the link in the show notes.
Sports parents, subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform. Every review helps more families find the show. I'm Coach Nate Daniels. This is Next Level Athletes, and I'll see you on the next one. Welcome to the next level.
