Coaching Kids: All Team Sports [Kindle Edition]

Frank Watts (Author)

Book Description

Disgruntled parents, win at all costs, troublemakers, playing time, balancing talent, and tracking drop-outs... These are just some of the issues faced head-on in Coaching Kids.

Coaches experience many problems many created by excluding parents from the process. In a fun and lighthearted manner full of real-world examples, Coaching Kids provides concrete ways to involve parents in the process and is a step-by-step guide to kid-coaching basics and trouble management. It is the perfect primer for organizing and coaching kids K through middle school.

Much has been written about coaching kids. Most books are sport specific covering only one sport and going into depth on its mechanics. Others are more general mostly feel-good psychological stuff. They often focus on how to make the participants feel better not necessarily perform better. Very little, however, has been written on the basic challenge of coaching kids in general, regardless of the sport, and even less on organizing kid sports from the coach's and league's viewpoints.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Want to coach kids? Frank Watts says: Go for it! We both know however, that the problem lies in getting there. In this entertaining primer, he breaks the process down through the use of easily understood vignettes that demonstrate the pitfalls to be avoided while completely defining the road to success. You'll love his irreverent down home style of presenting the logic you will use to successfully coach kids. Read this book...then go for it! --Howard Venezia (book artist)

About the Author

Coached kids for about twenty-six kid-seasons in several sports - boys and girls. Coached boys hockey, girls hockey, boys tee-ball, boys baseball, girls softball and girls soccer. Helped one season with a boys basketball team and another with a track team. Coached skiing for handicapped kids for an additional five seasons.

Product Details

• File Size: 791 KB
• Print Length: 163 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1932549625
• Publisher: Price World Publishing (February 1, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004LROOPA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #556,713 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #54 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Coaching > Baseball
  • #58 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Coaching > Basketball
  • #66 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Coaching > Soccer

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Very basic and high-level December 7, 2011

By Andrew Certain

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Having just come off a season where I felt we coaches could have done a lot better at molding the kids into a coherent team, I had high hopes for this book. Reading the Kindle sample, I was a little nervous that there wouldn't be much content, but I thought I might as well take a chance that the first chapter was just setting the general scene and each topic would be explored in depth, with illustrative examples and specific suggestions. Unfortunately, the author spends more time reminiscing about when the league director stacked his team against the author's than really exploring how to build a team out of kids. While there is some good advice there, it's hardly worth a whole book. I literally read every word in about 3 hours.

As somebody who has coached several different kids sports teams, run an adult sporting league and managed employees at work, I found the suggestions given by the author to be for the most part simply general common-sense guidelines (e.g. "be organized," "don't blame the officials," "communicate well"). In addition, the author spends a big part of the book talking about how to organize a league. While certainly league organization is important, most people will never have to deal with that aspect, coming into established leagues. As far as getting to real, detailed suggestions for some of the complicated issues on a team of young kids, I found it completely lacking.

If you feel totally lost coaching, or if you haven't spent any time reflecting on what makes organizations work and leaders successful, you may find some useful helpful hints in this book. Most people, however, I think will not get much value out of it.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful March 8, 2011

By Stephen London

Format:Paperback

This book was helpful. It gave me some great ideas and insight on how to make my nephew's team better and (more importantly) more fun. The author seems to really understand children and how to be effective coaching them.