The longer, brighter, and lighter days of spring have slowly arrived. Not without a battle from the wind and rains of the winter season trying to overextend its stay! But we are getting close and what is even more a tell tale sign of spring is the sight of KIDS out in the fields of play!

The sights, sounds, and smells of seeing our KIDS play, takes me back to the days of childhood and the pursuit of the same sweet sensations of crazy and chaotic movement! And this is one of the healthiest things we can provide our KIDS these days is just that: the opportunity to play and learn, and learn to play.

Brian Grasso is one of the leading experts in youth sport training and education. I wanted to share a couple of excerpts from one of his articles on coaching and teaching KIDS because I think that we forget at times how valuable supervised unstructured play is for KIDS. Here is some advice he offers for teaching, coaching, and helping KIDS play to learn and learn to play:

“….Let me start with the 5 – 9 year old group. The goal of working with 5 – 9 year olds is NOT what you think
This message can be summed up in two words: Guided Discovery. The whole point of athletic stimulus within this time-frame of life is to explore, in a self-regulated fashion. One of the terribly inappropriate things I see constantly being done with children in the young pre-adolescent years is adults over-coaching them.

Think about babies for a second. It’s a generally held belief that when a baby is learning to crawl and eventually walk, the greatest possible ‘external reinforcement’ an adult could give would be to positively encourage and provide safe boundaries. No one would ever consider stopping a baby from doing what he or she naturally is trying to accomplish – we understand that in order to develop proper motor functioning, a baby must explore and self-regulate.

Nothing changes in the early pre-adolescent years. Kids must be given boundaries (outcomes) but be allowed to explore, try, fail and learn. It is the only way for them to develop proper movement skill. 1/3 of your practice should be based on athletic skill… no matter what sport you coach. 5 – 9 year old athletes are not baseball players, soccer players or football players.

They are kids. And they need (and deserve) responsible adults who understand human development. It never stops amazing me how simple and basic this concept is, but how grossly it is misunderstood in our over-zealous sporting society. That’s why in the scope of a 60-minute soccer or lacrosse practice, 20 of those minutes must be spent on the things that are important from a physically globalized intelligence factor.” (Brian Grasso, IYCA)

Remember then when you see the sun, the field, and the KIDS outside that we make sure we to help them learn to play and play to learn!

Go KIDS!