Episode Details

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Show Notes

Fall basketball season is kicking off, tryouts are here, and Coach Bill wants to talk about the person nobody writes a rubric for: the parent. Two sides to it. What coaches should be teaching parents to expect, and how parents can actually support their kid through a stressful week.

Coach Collins goes first, and his list is unglamorous on purpose. We are dealing with kids, not young adults who can drive themselves. So the number one parent responsibility is logistics: shoes that fit, a ball in the bag, properly hydrated, everything they need, and there on time. That is most of the job.

Tryouts can be genuinely stressful for a family, especially when nobody knows whether the kid makes a team at all, or which team. Coach Collins' advice is to drop both the coach hat and the parent evaluator hat and just be the supportive person in the front seat. When they get in the car, ask how it went. Ask what was fun today. Not "how'd you do" and not "were any of the other kids good." That one shift is what makes a kid want to come back next year.

Coach Bill's biggest coaching side point: share your tryout rubric with parents before tryouts. How are teams being picked? If there is an A and a B team, what actually separates them? If there are cuts, why would a kid get cut? Say it plainly and say it early, and you avoid most of the fallout after the list goes up.

He also names the thing everyone has seen: the leagues where the three dad coaches end up with the top three kids, automatically, because of how the structure works.

Coach Collins frames it as a triangle. Parent to kid, parent to coach, coach to kid. When one leg of that breaks down, what the kid heard and what the parent tells the kid stop matching what the coach actually said, and that is where the problems come from. Ten spots, here is what we are looking for, here is what competitive means. Say it out loud to all three points of the triangle.

Coach Bill lays out two scenarios worth walking through with your kid ahead of time.

Your kid makes it and their best friend does not. One kid is thrilled, the other is crushed. Teach yours how to handle that, because the bragging happens more often than you would think.

Your kid does not make the team you both expected. Talk through what it actually means, which is not much. A career is not over in fifth grade because someone did not make the A team.

Coach Collins agrees and adds the frame: life is about disappointment, and you learn more from failure than success. But he pushes it one step further.

His favorite parenting lesson from this episode. Before tryouts, have your athlete go ask the coach what they are looking for. After tryouts, have them ask what to work on for next year.

The story behind it: his son Drew, in fourth or fifth grade, got in the car furious about a book report. Coach Collins pulled over about three hundred yards from the school and told him to go back in and talk to his teacher, who was still there. The teacher had a great conversation with him. Coach Collins believes that single moment taught Drew more than the rest of that school year, and that it made him an advocate for himself through his entire education.

Coach Bill's addition is that this is really about teaching a kid how to speak respectfully to an adult in authority, which outlasts basketball by decades. And it is the kid who should do the asking, n