ADM Kids

The concept of resilience is not new in youth sports, but it might not have been more important at any other time than it is in the present moment.

The combination of higher stakes in youth sports and a mentality from adults that doesn’t always leave room for resilience makes this a subject worth discussing.

To do so, we spoke with Dr. Larry Lauer, the Director of Mental Performance for the United States Tennis Association. Lauer, who previously served for eight years as a sport psychology consultant for USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program, is an excellent resource for this discussion, particularly as it pertains to 14U/16U hockey players.

At a basic level, being resilient means “Someone who is really bouncing back and is still believing and optimistic” even in the face of adversity, Lauer says.

It’s more about effort than results because mistakes are going to happen and even the most resilient athletes don’t always win or get the desired outcome.

“If they have a bad shift, they’re probably going to come back and have a pretty good shift,” Lauer says of a resilient player, “or at least they're going to have good effort and be able to refocus on something that's going to make things better.”

If the focus has been on skill-building and other physical tools at younger ages, this is the time to talk about the sort of mental fortitude needed going forward.

“At this age, if you're talking about 14U and 16U, these aren't necessarily skills that have been taught to them, and emotionally they're still young,” Lauer says. “So there's a lot of room to grow. This is really an ideal age to be talking about this and working on it.”

Lauer is familiar with the sentiment that kids these days are “soft,” and he’s not buying it. Instead, he would challenge adults to give kids the space to grow from their mistakes.

“One of the key things about resilience is there has to be adversity, right? For someone to have a resilient response to bounce back from something,” Lauer says. “And so if we as parents are trying to shelter our children from failure, from making mistakes, then they don't learn the lessons and learn the skills necessary to deal with the reality that you are going to make mistakes. You are going to lose.”

In charged environments with a lot at stake, it’s convenient to try to clear a path for kids or to blame external factors for failure instead of meeting it head on. But that doesn’t create resilience.

“Everybody's so uptight about success right now that they make a mistake and now it's the coach’s fault or it's the team did something or the officials,” Lauer says. “No, your kid made a mistake, it's going to happen, it's OK.”

And by letting kids make mistakes within the context of a game – something that might seem important and is important in a certain way but is not life or death – it helps them build resilience not just in hockey but in life.

“When teenagers make mistakes, you want them to make the ones that they can recover from like making a turnover in a hockey game, which is no big deal versus, you know, taking drugs or something like that,” Lauer says. “You want to teach them how to make good decisions through the game. So when they're on the big stuff, you can trust they're going to make good decisions, right? So we're talking more about life and developing a healthy young adult.”

And to Lauer, the ice is a great place to learn those skills.

“Hockey is a great sport for learning resilience because you go out, you play a shift and a lot of stuff is going on,” he says. “You make some mistakes, you make some good plays, you come back, you learn from it and you go again, and you have time to reflect on that.”

Lauer deals with a lot of high-level tennis players, and before that he was working with a lot of high-end young hockey players in the NTDP.

As those players were funneled up through various levels, they didn’t always experience much adversity because they were often the best of the best. In an environment where suddenly everyone is the best of the best, the experience can be eye-opening for a young athlete.

“This goes all the way back from my time with the USA Hockey National Team Development Program. They were coming from wherever they were coming from, to Ann Arbor, and they were the best from wherever they came from typically,” Lauer says. “So having someone else beat them, they weren't used to that. It’s probably one of the times it really became clear to me, like we need to really focus on resilience more so than finding the zone or trying to play perfect because the zone is hard to find consistently and perfect doesn't exist.”

One of the best tools to develop resiliency is to focus on the process over results.

“I think one of the things that young people have to learn is that effort doesn't always lead to results. And you've got to focus yourself on the process of the way you're doing things, the things you can control,” Lauer says. “So if we're losing, but we're turning them over with our forecheck, we’re keeping them out of the middle of the ice, but we're just losing because their goalie is hot or we're missing the net or whatever, then we can learn from that. I think quality coaching is to draw your players and your team's attention to the process goals.”

Lauer was asked if he has had any “a-ha!” moments as he’s worked with and talked to young athletes over the years. He mentioned a couple things in particular.

“One is that certain people aren't just predestined to be resilient, and others are not, but there's a lot of room for variability here. Some people are going to be resilient, and others are not. And then the next day it could be someone else who wasn't resilient the previous day,” Lauer says. “Some resilience is genetic. It's in the personality. But a lot of it is developing the skill sets and perspectives and providing support to your players so you can get a resilient response.”

The other big idea he mentioned is helping players understand what they can control.

“I don't control everything that happens in the game. I can't control the puck, if it bounces off my teammate’s stick when I pass it. Sometimes I can only take responsibility for what I can control. The rest I have to accept and move on, let it go,” Lauer says. “When I saw players really start to take off, be way more resilient is when they took ownership over what they controlled. … Let’s plan the response. Let's rehearse and prepare the response for what we know could happen and will happen at some point. It normalizes the messiness of the game and the reality that you're not going be perfect.”

That carries over to external factors, too. A young athlete might be going through a tough situation at home or might have something at school he or she is worried about.

“As coaches, we really need to be aware of what's happening with our players and try to have those individual discussions with them, supporting them, listening to them and also trying to refocus them on the game,” Lauer says. “But what you can do is just kind of park that in the car, pack it in your bag, leave it, focus on hockey. If you have fun and you improve and you do well, today you're going to feel good and be ready to go back and deal with the stuff that's waiting for you on the outside.”