Why You Should Seek Personal Bests For Outstanding Results
As sports coaches or parents, the most we can ever ask for is our athlete’s or child’s personal best effort. Yet, we rarely ask for this or reward it in team sports. There is one sporting organisation, however, that bases its entire philosophy on personal best efforts. I believe team sports could learn a lot from this organisation. The organisation I’m talking about is Little Athletics.
Little Athletics is a uniquely Australian modified athletics program (track and field) for children aged 5 to 15 years. All participants are taught the skills and techniques of the different events and encouraged to perform to their best. The best part of this program is the message and rewards it presents to the children. Children perform in competitive events every week, yet they are not rewarded for coming first, second, or third. They are rewarded for achieving a personal best (PB).
What other sports could learn
In a lot of team sports, in the younger age groups, competition is removed to promote more participation. Whilst this concept is great, the one thing that is missing is the encouragement and rewards for personal improvement. Of course, all coaches encourage their players to improve, but how are they rewarded for doing so? What external rewards do you are offer your players to give them that extra motivation? And how do players actually know they are improving?
In most cases, there are no rewards and no hard proof. Sure, many teams present participation trophies to their players at the end of each year. But these trophies don’t present players with any motivation to push themselves to improve.
Little Athletics, on the other hand, award their participants with ribbons every time an athlete reaches a milestone of PBs. Athletes compete each week in different competitions and are rewarded for doing better than they did last time, and so they should be.
This model has young athletes pumped and excited about doing their best each week. It doesn’t matter if they are the fastest or slowest, strongest or weakest, each athlete gives their all each week and is rewarded for it. Wouldn’t you like to see your players present themselves with the same attitude?
Shift your focus
If you believe your team sport could benefit from players giving their all each week in pursuit of improvement, regardless of their skill level, then it’s up to you to shift your focus. No doubt you already focus on improving your player’s technique, skills, and knowledge of the game. But now, you must shift your focus to measuring their performance on a weekly basis.
Athletics has the advantage of black and white results for race times and distances. But that doesn’t mean you can’t create black and white measures too. Examples of measuring personal best performances in your sport could be;
- Shooting accuracy
- % of clean possessions
- Passing efficiency
- Number of possessions
- Number of tackles
- % of successful tackles
- Number of interceptions
- Number of times in the correct position
What you measure will depend on what skills and facets of the game are most important to you. But whatever that will be, you need to start measuring it and rewarding your players for improving in those areas.
You could measure these statistics during competitive matches, or you may create standardised tests at training to measure these skills. But whatever you decide, ensure you do the same thing each time to give a true measure of your players PB.
Reward your players
In Little Athletics, athletes are rewarded with a ribbon every time they achieve a set number of new PBs. Sometimes that is 2 PBs and other times it is 5. Consider implementing a similar system to encourage your players to give multiple efforts before being rewarded.
Little Athletics also make all their results available for the athlete and their parents. This allows them to track their progress and get excited about upcoming rewards and their personal improvements. Again, if you implement a system like this, I recommend making all your results available to your players and their parents.
Nothing worth doing is easy
Implementing a system like this won’t be easy. But nothing worth doing is easy. All I can say is if you have the hunger to see your players strive for individual improvement each week, then this is an effective way to encourage that.
Depending on your approach you may need some assistance. So, engage with your player’s parents and ask for their help. Seek out assistance from other club staff or potential assistant coaches, until you have all the support you need. If you explain how you are going to change your player’s attitudes and performances for the better, I am sure parents and the like will be happy to assist you where they can.
Now, get out there and create a system that rewards all your players for doing their personal best.
Action Steps
- Sit down and identify the most important skills of your game. Then determine how you can measure the execution of these skills on a weekly basis.
- Create a google worksheet or something similar that you can track results and share with your players and their families. You may want to create a separate documents for each player for privacy.
- Measure the performance of your player’s skills every week and reward your players once they reach a milestone of 2 or 5 personal bests. Then sit back and watch your players’ desire to improve go to a whole new level.
What was your key takeaway from this article?
Do you have any questions on any of the information provided in this article?
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