Transforming Youth Sports: A Call for Cultural Responsibility

This is Sharpening youg Edge with Chuck and Eric.

In this episode, we'll be talking with Dr. Seth Taylor.

He's an author, life coach, father, and director of content for 3A athletics, a company dedicated to transforming youth sports into a healthy space for coaches, parents, and kids.

Seth, welcome to the show.

Thank you, man.

Really appreciate you joining us.

A lot to unpack tonight.

Like you said, we got a lot of questions and it'll be kind of choose your own adventure.

We'll see where.

See where we end up.

Right.

But you've got a pretty storied journey, you know.

Can you kind of walk us through how, say, you know, you grew up playing some sports, then you made the transition to coach, and then now you're an author.

Right.

And you kind of tied it all together.

But kind of talk to us a little bit about that journey and kind of what led you to publishing some of this stuff.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny that I would work in youth sports because I didn't do sports much as a youth.

I hardly played any sports as a kid, mostly because of money.

My parents just weren't going to spend money on sports when I was a kid.

So I played soccer in kindergarten, and that's pretty much it until middle school.

But we moved to Africa when I was a kid.

My parents were Christian missionaries and so we moved over to Africa and I lived in this little neighborhood.

And we're the only white kids in the neighborhood, me and my brother, and we just sandlot soccer every single day.

That's all we did all the time.

And it's just hours and hours a day.

And so when I got back, we came back in high school and I was pretty good.

You know, I didn't mean to be good.

I just was good.

It's just what we did.

And all of a sudden I, you know, made the varsity team, but I still didn't play club ball because my parents wouldn't let me play on Sundays.

And so I didn't have a big youth sports experience.

But I ended up walking on out of college, played some college soccer.

And then afterwards, coaching just came naturally to me.

So just as a way of kind of like, even during college, I was like, o, I'll just go teach kids soccer classes and stuff like that.

And I just went into it.

But I found through my hard, the hard years, my 20s were really, really rough.

There was a lot of trauma to work through.

And coaching was kind of the only thing that made me happy, to be honest, at the time.

Like, I just, when I was on the sideline, I felt good.

But then I also started to discover a lot of stuff about myself that would show up on the sidelines that was pretty monstrous and so, you know, it.

Which kind of pushed me towards my therapeutic journey, my own personal therapeutic journey.

And so once I started really going, unpacking some of my trauma, how it was showing up on the sideline, lots of anger, lots of, you know, I was a good coach, but I wasn't a nice coach, if that, you know, and I'm sure you guys know what I mean.

And so I think I did quite a bit of damage.

So I.

Once I started kind of down my own therapeutic journey, I got really curious and I was coming out of a very religious space and a lot of that started to kind of deconstruct and there was a lot of, you know, dark night of the soul kind of stuff, you know, and.

And as I went through that, you know, it was strange because I returned to coaching in a really, really different way and started to discover some things and also unpacking my own life, my own trauma, my own child.

I started recognizing that in my players more and more and more and try and starting to truly understand what was happening with them why.

Started asking better questions like, why is there so much anxiety?

The biggest one for me is why don't they get better?

Like they don't improve, they don't.

Nobody actually here loves the game.

Like, I saw just a massive absence of that.

I saw, I mean, I started becoming that coach that was having these constant like coffee conversations with parents because, you know, trying to help them deal with their, whatever they were doing to their kids and you know, a lot of parking lot conversations and a lot of trying to.

And finally I just got the point where I was like, you know, what time for me to dive into this more professionally.

So as I continued my own therapeutic journey in myself, I went to grad school and I did a master's degree.

And then I entered back into the space with like, okay, I'm going to work this from a mental, emotional health, kind of culture transformation space.

And so I, right now, I currently am an executive life coach.

I primarily work with high level executives and professional athletes and that's kind of how I pay the bills.

And then Travis Snyder and I started 3A athletics to try to work the cultural component.

I started writing some books and started going, okay, let's see.

It's a project really.

It's.

I want, I want to.

It's a company.

Yeah, but it's much More of a project than it is a company, to be honest.

We're trying to unlock something in the culture, you know, because we're trying to recognize that the problem so much, you know, we say the problem is parental issues and these kinds of things.

But what we're actually trying to do is, I think the problem behind the problem is that the industry itself is heading towards a cliff edge, you know, with how money is being run, how the pay for play process is, how the apparel companies, all the way down, just kind of push this space.

And the industry on a cultural level, doesn't take responsibility for the type of trauma that's being done.

And we're trying to work that process.

So that's kind of in a very.

Taking my journey in a really short kind of form.

You know, of course there's lots of stories to tell in there, but that's kind of, kind of where it comes from.

No, that's.

I mean, that's awesome.

I mean, you gave us like another four hour podcast episode just on that right there.

I mean, I think one of the interesting things you said for me, and I just wanted to touch on it briefly, is you went from.

Which is unheard of today in the youth world, right?

You went from playing, you know, sandlot soccer in Africa in very unstructured play to walking on varsity.

And, you know, that's huge, right?

Parents wouldn't be able to wrap their minds around that today, regardless of sport, right?

You got to go all in.

You got to do all this stuff.

Did you.

And you mentioned it.

Did you lose kind of some love for the game when you transitioned from that sandlot soccer to a more structured high school collegiate environment?

Not really.

Just because I never played club.

I never played club.

I played for my school.

I played with my friends.

You know, my parents weren't ever there.

You know, I mean, they just.

I just played.

So I actually really loved the game.

I mean, I think I had a lot of anxiety wrapped around the game, but that was more because of my own trauma than it was.

It wasn't really wrapped around like, so just a little personal information.

My father died when we lived in Africa, so when that happened, I was 12 years old.

And that trauma, I think my relationship with the sport was very parental in the sense that it's like, if I could be good at it, then that's almost like my dad putting his arm around me going, good job, son.

You know, and so that, of course, comes with a lot of anxiety.

So it definitely had its own identity burden, I would say.

But you know, I never had the kind of thing you're seeing now.

I mean, the athletes I work with, I got a bunch of players in Major League Soccer that I work with.

And you're talking about kids that have no memories of their life without kicking a ball.

You know, there's no memory at all.

You know, I mean, one of my guys, I said, when did you start playing organized soccer?

And he said, diapers, I think.

I. I don't remember a life without it.

I'm like, okay.

You know what I mean?

So I never had that.

But there was nothing like the Samlot, though.

Nothing like it, man.

I mean, in my neighborhood, it was just.

We were, I said, me and my brother, only white kids in the neighborhood.

And we had this.

No joke.

There was like, the trash service was terrible.

So we had a garbage dump in the middle of the neighborhood where everybody just threw their garbage.

And there was a little path up through the garbage to this samod on top.

So it was like a mountain of garbage with the sandlot on top.

And that's where we played every single day.

And young kids play with the old kids and just try to get.

Wait for a chance for them to let you play.

And, you know, and so you're always having to push, you're always having to go up and mom and dad are nowhere around.

And it just, it developed the game, you develop, your relationship with the game develops in a very playful way, you know, as opposed to having to earn anything.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think there's a lot of parallels to what you see in some of the areas in northern Minnesota and New England and those parts of Canada where a lot of these guys that make it to the NHL, it's just they're on the ice with their buddies on a pond, just having fun, just having a blast.

And that translates so much better when you approach the game from a point of fun.

Western Africa, where kids can hardly, you know, at times can hardly eat and are playing barefoot on red dirt with, you know, cows walking around in the field, they produce more world class soccer players than we have in the United States.

I mean, that's remarkable.

You know, I mean, like, if you think about it, the construct and the fact that we're still sitting around kind of resisting that process, and it's still becoming something where more and more and more the wealthy kids are the ones that get the opportunities.

I mean, I.

We have one of my, one of my good friends down here.

His son is an elite hockey player and he is, I mean, he's 12 and he's playing.

I mean he.

I can't believe the time, the energy, the money and it's.

I mean, and there, I know the financial stress they're under to try to keep letting him play.

Which means the vast majority of kids that are in the under privileged neighborhoods which, where you have, I mean there's some incredible athletes in there and they can't play.

They just can't, they can't vote and they're.

And the, some of the sports don't have the street culture around here with basketball.

I don't know where it is where you guys are, but like here we have a street culture for basketball and so we can produce with or without club ball.

We can produce high level basketball players because, because you go to any court and it's packed.

You know what I mean?

But, but most of sports, it's just not like that, you know.

And definitely not hockey, of course.

You know.

No, I mean trying to go do pick up with your buddies that, you know, give rent some ice, you're talking someplace six, 700 bucks an hour.

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

It's just unfathomable.

Yeah.

You know, my brother lived in Alaska for 15 years and he raised his boys up in Alaska.

And it was funny because we go up there and I'm like, hey, where's Noah?

You know, Noah's like 12 and he's.

Oh, he's over in the lake.

What's on the lake?

And go over there.

There'd be a hundred kids out there, hockey games going all over the place.

You know, I'm like, that's how you develop players.

0.

$0.

$0.

Some of the best athletes in the world came from nothing.

You know, Mariano Rivera, arguably the best closer in major league history, talks about when he was little, he had, he used the cardboard box as a glove.

And you see Ronaldo talking about when he was younger, just kicking a milk carton around.

Just the creativity that, that you said that we've lost and developing some of the best players in the world.

So.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

We have a big audience.

So we have parents, we have coaches, we have athletes, NCAA athletes.

So I'd like to do a little deep dive into some of your books that, that you wrote.

It's just so prevalent in not only hockey, but youth sports across the board today.

Similarities in club baseball and travel.

Baseball and travel hockey.

So the first book I want to kind of delve into is the book Hero, which talks about the depths of parenting and youth sports.

So what inspired the title Hero and What core parenting issues were you trying to address there?

Yeah.

With the title, you mean?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, I.

Honestly, once I became a dad, that actually had been suggested to me, like, I.

Somebody.

We'd had a different idea, and somebody's got talking to me.

He's like, you know, what is it we're trying to create here?

And once I became a father, that made more sense to me.

It's like the idea that parenting is a heroic thing to do, and it's the hardest thing to do.

Of all the things we do, that's the hardest one.

You know what I mean?

Are you guys dads?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the hard.

It's the hardest thing, you know, and so.

And it's a heroic thing to show up to that every day because.

Partly because you don't have a choice, and partly because it's just a place where all your deepest stuff shows up.

And so, more than anything, I found that in youth sports, parenting isn't honored.

It's not honored.

Even though parents are the driver behind everything, they are the driver of the industry financially.

They are the chauffeurs, they are the transport.

They are the time, the energy, the money.

They're everything.

And we're not.

We don't really honor them, and they're kind of a nuisance in a way.

We're always kind of having.

What's your parenting policy?

That we kind of almost kind of infantilize them in a way.

You know what I mean?

And.

And make them feel less than.

Because we just need their kids to get here, and we need them to get the heck out of the way.

But, like, I wanted to at least start with just a really basic thing and honor that.

Parents are the driver, you know?

And it's funny, because now I find myself, I'm coaching my son's soccer team, which I never wanted to do, but I got kind of wedged into it, and partly because he wanted me to.

And I can see as, like, you know, that being the parent and the coach now and more than ever, I can just see it, man, that parents, we need to honor them, and we need to honor them in the industry through education.

We need to honor them for what this really is, because most of us, especially for professional coaches, we have jobs because of them.

And.

And that was really the idea behind the title, was to truly honor what it is.

Yeah, I think that's.

You raised some good points, too, about.

You know, I think there's a fine line, too, between honoring them right.

And Making sure they feel like, you know, hey, you're part of this team, this community, etc, just as much as your son or your daughter are.

But then there's that over.

Over emphasis or over empowerment of some of the parents.

Right.

And that permeates through some of the club levels where it's, hey, these parents are more important and it's usually the star player.

Right.

So they get a little bit more say in the team.

They're, you know, and that permeates the culture.

And then you get this sense of animosity between parents.

Sure.

How do we toe that line as coaches or as, you know, as other leaders throughout some of these youth organizations?

How do we toe that line appropriately between making these parents feel recognized, but then not, you know, kind of keeping it all things equal?

Right.

Like, yeah, I get it.

Your kid's a star player.

That doesn't mean you get more input to the practice plan or the game plan than the kid that does.

You know, maybe he's not as talented.

Sure.

There.

Honestly, that's a really, really large question that you're asking because that's a tip of an iceberg right there.

Because what we're talking about is the cultural approach, like how these.

How clubs and how the industry of youth sports is shaped culturally.

Because culturally there's no emphasis on parent education.

There's no emphasis on child development being a part of player development where it should be the foundation of it.

Right.

There's none.

There's none of that.

So we can't do something properly.

I can't address the fact that this kid.

So I got this star player, and so his parents have more say and they feel entitled to that because I'm not educating them as to what's healthy or not healthy.

As a coach, typically, I'm not very educated as to what's healthy or unhealthy.

We're still.

I mean, if everything is being driven towards wins, then we need that player more than we need these other players.

Right.

That's the cultural foundation.

It's about winning and.

Right.

There's a million cultural problems that cause little problems like that.

And because we're not here, we're not typically in most industries, we're not developing players, we're making money.

And ultimately that's what we're doing.

And so if that's the case, then we start.

It's almost like that with that guy, Simon Sinek.

He had that talk about starting with your why.

Our why is really messed up.

It's really, really, really messed up.

And so we can't address problems like that.

I can't go to you and say, hey, we're not going to treat you any differently you treat anybody else.

If the why at the core of all of it is winning.

Because if the why is winning, then I have to treat them all different than anybody else and I've got to get that player out and bring this player in and I got to do all this kind of stuff.

And it's a tricky thing because, you know, especially at these elite levels, I mean it's, if it's money driving the entire thing, then ultimately, if that's our why, then this is about performance and this is about recruiting and this is about you get the best players and you do whatever it takes to make their parents happy.

And so it has to start with that.

And so, you know, even answering that question in the short term is, well, if you have a coach that's willing to put his, put himself on the line and go, no one else, no one here is going to get treated then that parent, they haven't been educated, they haven't been, we haven't brought them into a culture in a healthy way.

They don't respect the culture.

So they're just going to leave.

Yeah, and you won't believe how many directors and coaches have said to me like, well, if I, if I do anything that's healthy, they'll just leave, you know?

Yeah, I mean, we've seen it.

Chuck and I have seen it firsthand.

I mean, it's an unfortunate part of the game.

Right?

Because if you treat them the way they don't want to be treated or what they expect to be treated, they're just, there's a million other clubs that are willing to have them and if they've got the money, they can fly across the country to go play for these.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Yeah.

Well, and that's why there's tends to be, for any club that decides that we're going to do, we're going to try to shift the culture to something healthy, there's a pretty big deconstruction that happens because a lot of those toxic elements tend to leave, which means a lot of your talented players tend to leave.

But then you can build something healthy from the beginning and then if you actually stick with it.

But it's a long term project, you know, I mean, there's a baseball club I'm thinking of down here that I've been working with and he really wants that culture to be healthy.

Well, the club is growing and growing and growing and growing.

What he's broken down some of these kind of things but as it's got, it's getting bigger.

And he is, the director is literally living in the tension between winning and being healthy.

And it says something about the nature of all of this.

If you have to live in that tension and make a choice, do we win or are we healthy?

You know what I mean?

Can you do both?

Yes, you can.

But you have to think long term, 10 year deconstruction, reconstruction process of cultural shifting.

And we're going to go there eventually no matter what.

We're going to because the suffering is getting bad.

And if you suffer enough, it has to happen.

Enough kids commit suicide.

I don't know how it is in the hockey world, but man, in the baseball world, in the soccer world, enough kids commit suicide.

Then something will have to change, you know, and that's an extreme example, but it happens, you know.

Yeah, but I mean I've got, I'm working with players right now.

I got a kid, 11 year old kid who's doing self harm, cutting himself.

I got, you know, I got a 14 year old kid, his parents found a suicide.

No, these are the, this stuff's normal, you know what I mean?

It's normal.

It's wild.

Yeah.

I feel like every episode we talk with our guests about just how professionalized sports has gotten and just the pressure on the kids, especially at the younger ages, 8, 10 years old, especially in the hockey world.

So hopefully something does change in the future with all of this.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not a matter of if, it's just when.

It's when and how much suffering is going to happen before it does it.

Because it's, you know, evolution happens.

You know, I mean things evolve and they, they entropy and creativity tend to go hand in hand.

So if it's going to continue, you'll get to the point where of hit the ceiling of what it's capable of becoming.

And then it has to evolve beyond that so it'll, you know already you can see it.

I, you know, you can see in the culture there is not only is there more awareness around mental health, but you're seeing more public suffering and you're seeing more.

And then you're also seeing sports psychologists and people that are pushing these healthy concepts into becoming more prominent and there's that those voices are getting louder and they're getting more amplified.

So then the truth is that some of us that hold the key where I, I understand how high level mental, emotional, psychospiritual Health can actually massively impact sustainable high performance.

And there's more and more athletes, high level athletes that are starting to tap into that.

And that's what's really going to change things, is when you got guys that are going, I'm becoming a multi, multi, multi, multi millionaire because I'm getting healthy.

And they're speaking to it more and more.

And so that's happening.

And right after I'm done with this, I'm going to watch a football game.

I got a kicker that I'm working with.

He's a high school player.

He's going to kick in the NFL.

And already he's like, becoming healthy is the key to me becoming the NFL kicker.

I want to be.

And, you know, I mean.

And he will.

Yeah, it's that longevity piece, right?

You want to be able to make it through to the other side and then be healthy on the end, on the backside.

Yeah.

Well, and especially this younger generation, they feel entitled to happiness, you know, they feel entitled to having lives of joy, peace, happiness and high performance and wealth.

They feel it.

They're like, we deserve all that, you know, and my generation, I'm almost 50, and on my generation, we're like, like, oh, this stupid kid is so entitled.

I'm like, that's actually a pretty good thing because they're like, we're gonna get it.

And they're so.

They're going through their midlife Crisis at like, 22 because they don't have it.

You know, that's wild.

I mean, I think one of me personally, you know, I've been fortunate to work and become friends with a lot of folks in the human performance space.

So my kids, while young, I've had the opportunity to tap in some pretty great resources, some of which we've had on this podcast.

But I think the biggest one for them personally was that mental performance coach at a younger age.

And it was really not so much about the mental performance side and getting better at the game.

It was more about just getting them to open up and talk to somebody.

Right.

Somebody that wasn't me or mom.

And kind of.

So it was almost rapping like therapy and talking about their feelings, but wrapping it in sports, something they loved, and they took to that extremely, extremely well.

So I think that.

That, you know, just the mental performance piece that is becoming significantly more, not only just popular, but crucial to success in longevity and health is wonderful to see.

It's awesome.

And I hope it permeates down to, like, the lowest level, because I think, you know, that's the next, like ridgeline, if you will.

We've kind of figured out the physical performance thing, right.

We've got all these strength coaches, but the next ridgeline is that like six inches between your ears, you know, that brain, that cognitive function and, and how do we get that to, to stay healthy and be healthy and how does that impact your sport?

Well, and to give you another ridgeline beyond that, I think that there is more and more, at least in the voice, in the psychology world, there's more and more recognition that it goes beyond the mind.

It goes into the body, it goes into the nervous system, it goes into the energetic system, it goes into these deeper things because these kids are holding a lot of this in their bodies and.

Right.

And we're telling them it's one of the problems.

Like people will, they'll even call me a mental skills coach at times.

I'm like, I'm not.

I mean I got introduced as a talk.

He's a mental skills coach.

I'm not a mental skills coach.

Because that only goes so what the brain does what the cognitive mind, as you put it, the cognitive mind is an interpretation machine.

It's all it is.

The ego interprets the quantum field, translates it into a third dimensional reality, some sort of narrative structure.

And we try to help kids with that narrative.

Here's a good story, you know, they just want the story that I'm a good player, you know, and we're trying to help them create a good, solid narrative.

But man, if we get down into the reason that all that anxiety exists, we get into like knots in the stomach, we get into tightness in their chest, they get into aches in their sore plexus, lumps their throats.

And then we start actually helping them work.

That's what I do with athletes is I help them work into their bodies.

Well, I do that with executives as well.

Helping work into their body, how their bodies are holding all this.

And once they get there, man, you can create radical, radical shifts.

Yeah, I think it's great to have these kids work through those things at a younger age with somebody kind of guiding them along.

It's going to make them more successful humans.

They're going to be able to work through these problems much better.

Longer in life or later in life.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And they say too, I personally not delusional, I put my kids in sports.

Why?

So they can learn life skills.

Right.

So they can learn social skills.

So I think, like Eric just said to learning the mental piece early is a great life skill.

And part of Sport.

I will say this.

I think organized sports as a structure is not healthy for kids under.

I mean, well, and the research is clear.

I mean, organized sports is traumatic for kids.

Right?

That's been really clear for a long time.

I mean, that kids under 12, they're not.

They're where they're at in their.

Their ego identity development.

They're not ready for that type of organized structure.

They're not ready to lose and win.

They're not ready for competition.

There are life skills available in those spaces that are really helpful.

But this is why parent education has to become a part of the process.

It has to high level.

You know, this is why I wrote Hero.

That's why I wrote all this stuff.

We're not actually using our understanding of child development to help help curb some of that trauma.

Like, I understand that if my kids are going to go into organized sports at five or six or seven years old, it's hurting them.

So I might as well at least be responsible enough to find out what the child development research says and then educate myself on how to behave in this space in a way that mitigates some of that trauma.

Yeah, you don't want to make it worse.

Yeah, you don't want to make it worse.

And of course, that's what we do.

We make it worse.

And there's a lot of standard egoic responses to everything that happens, which is why we write books like the Car Ride Home.

Because there is.

Everybody knows what that means because there's a standard thing we do in the car.

And for some reason, clubs don't make it a massive emphasis to get to teach parents about that, which we should.

The amount of potential that has been destroyed in the car is ridiculous.

You know what I mean?

Absolutely.

I mean, I grew up with that.

You know, it was.

The car ride was going one of two ways.

It was going to be a great car ride home.

I was going to sit in the front seat.

It was gonna be a bad car ride home.

I sit in the backseat.

Yeah.

You know, and I think you touched on it earlier.

And I learned a lot about myself, you know, initially becoming a dad.

Right.

But then I learned even more coaching some of my kids.

And then, you know, I hear this voice in the back of my head and I'm like, man, that sounds a lot like my father, you know, well, my dad had a great childhood.

My father was awesome.

You know, he did what was appropriate at the time.

And now that we've got a little bit more research on it, maybe it wasn't the best way.

So I think you get into it in your book about some of the reflection exercises.

But for me, the biggest thing that I've done is transition the car ride home from the immediately diving into the game, where the kid has no chance to just take a breath, to, hey, bud, you want to talk about your game?

And it's a yes or no question if he doesn't want to talk.

All right, cool.

What else you want to talk about?

You want to put what song you want on?

Right?

And letting them kind of guide that discussion has really changed the dynamic of our car rides home substantially.

And to expand on what Eric's saying, too.

Is that what you mean when in the car ride home book where you talk about the difference between the connection and the correction and how parents can use that connection instead of correction during the car ride home?

Yeah, that was like kind of a pithy thing that Travis came up with, because he was like, we were talking about the principal, but I was just using psychology language, you know, and he's like, connection before correction.

You said like that.

I go, hey, that's good.

Write that down.

You know, because the, you know, the idea is, you know, we try to see.

Because parents are always asking us, like, when we do talks or whatever, they're always asking us, like, what do we do?

Give me something to do.

And he just said connection before correction.

The idea is that everything in your language, especially in the car ride home, should be shaped towards creating connection between you and your child, Period.

That's it.

But again, this takes an understanding of what child development is.

It takes some understanding of what the parental role is that a lot of people think.

They actually legitimately think that parents job is to teach their children these things.

And it's not.

Your primary job as a parent is to hold space.

You're the lighthouse.

You're the same job a lighthouse has for the ship captains out there in the water is a job a parent has.

That's the main job.

Yes.

Teaching becomes a part of it.

You know, your dad's like, every once in a while you're like, hey, son, let me show you this.

Let me help you with that.

But for the most part, your job is to be the light that illuminates for them, that you are the safe space for them.

So that connections, everything.

And so when they had a bad game and they get in the car, that what they need is to be able to anchor in, you know, to go, am I?

They're essentially asking subconsciously, even if there's some middle school kid.

And they don't want to like to talk to you, you know, they just, they're still looking to go, am I okay?

And so that connection process, if it's connection over correction every single time, do not even attempt to correct until that connection is established.

Then what happens is then they answer that question, yes, I'm safe, yes, I'm okay.

And then pretty naturally, especially I found as my kids have gotten older, if you just let the space open, eventually they just go, hey.

And they start asking questions or they start talking about their process or they start.

And then, you know, and then you're kind of invited in to be able to give a little correction once in a while.

But I, I treat that space very sacred and I don't go there.

Even though my son, it's funny because I coach his team, I still, we draw a very, very strong delineation between coaching and dad.

And the second we get in the car, coach hat comes off immediately, you know, and usually I ask him and I've gotten to this thing I told him at the beginning of this, I said, listen, I'm going to check in with you a lot.

So we get in the car and I look at him and I typically go, is that too much?

How you feeling?

And he'll go, and sometimes he'll go, yeah, that was a little too much.

I'll go, okay, which part?

You know, you know, reestablish the connection, you know.

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Yeah.

And that's got to be big and feel good for you, too, that he can open up and kind of say that, right?

Like, a lot of children were shut down right when their parents get on them.

But it's nice to have that relationship where your child feels comfortable to actually say, yeah, that was too much, you know, so.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, at least it points me in the right direction that maybe I'm doing it right, you know, because I was nervous about it from the beginning, and I resisted for two years because.

But then these dads that were volunteering that didn't know what they were doing, they kind of found out that, oh, this Guy's coach for 20 years.

And they're like, hey, man, you know, they had a formal poker game and, all right, we're gonna play poker.

And they're just like, all right, man, we need you to come help us.

And I'm like.

I said, well, I gotta check with Maverick first.

I gotta ask him.

And they're like, okay.

So I talked about.

He goes, so they want me to come coach.

And he's just like.

Like, yes.

I go, are you sure?

He goes, yes.

I go, okay, hold on, hold on.

Let's talk about what this is going to mean, you know, but we've seemed to manage it well, you know, But I'm.

But, man, I'm telling you, I.

If I saw it doing damage, I'd leave instantly, you know, because.

I mean, because my job is to.

I am the lighthouse, and I'm going to maintain that position no matter what.

And if that thing is not a safe, illuminating space for him, then, man, you know, I'm not doing my job, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I think.

And Chuck's heard me say this a couple times now, is that I'm a big believer in the whole principle about being caught, not taught.

I don't know if you've heard that where it's.

I have.

Yeah.

And I think it pairs well with your.

That we're not really teachers.

Right.

It's more on setting the example and being that lighthouse where it's you know, I can try to teach my kids a thousand things and they're gonna listen to 90% that's gonna go in one ear, out the other.

Maybe the 10% will stick.

But, but they see me doing something, whether that's, they see me working out, so they're curious and they want to work out too.

Or they see me eating more vegetables, or they see me, you know, taking a breath and kind of focusing on my mental health or what have you, they're going to be a little more apt to, hey, ask some questions, hey, I look up to him, let me try to do these things.

You see it all the time.

And I know it's probably the same way on the sidelines at a soccer game as it is in a hockey rink where these parents, some of them are over the top, right?

And they're yelling all game.

And you can't.

I, you know, I see the yelling from the stands and I, that's in public.

So I can't imagine what life is like on that car ride home.

Other ways.

Is there a cue or something that some of these parents can kind of use some self reflection and you know, help regulate their own emotions before talking about performance or before talking about things?

Yeah, you know, it's a tricky one because any cue or skill that a parent learns is going to be adopted into whatever level of consciousness they can occupy.

Right.

Because if they have, you know, like I'll give an example from a soccer game.

This is a couple years ago.

This is before, right before I started coaching my kids team.

I just went to one of his games and I kind of pull up a little bit late and I'm walking up and then a bunch of parents are kind of standing in a circle and I go, and they're talking to each other quietly.

I go, what's up?

And they go, there's this dad over here and he was a dad from the other team and the game had just started and this guy was sitting in his little chair there and he was out of his mind.

I mean, and he's that example of that guy.

Because, you know, it's like that 10 are just kind of way outside the boundaries, you know, and then there's a 10 of like the enlightened ones that are meditating over under the tree kind of thing.

And then you got like the 80 in the middle that were all kind of mildly toxic, you know, but we're not that guy, so we're okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, like so it's that bell shaped curve kind of thing.

But that guy, no matter if I teach him a skill or not, it's not gonna, it's not gonna do anything if I say, hey man, you know, you should learn how to take a deep breath and walk away.

The thing, the problem is that's just going to create this tension between whatever this monster is that comes out inside of them.

So there, there's an element of a deeper kind of educational process that has to happen.

And what essentially has to happen is that in clubs and in teams, there has to become a cultural norm, which essentially is like, I always tell people about, like the Mandalorian thing, you know, this is the way, like, there has to be something where a guy like that, where it is so embedded within the culture that is not how we operate, that he couldn't, he wouldn't be able to do something like that without experiencing even just an obvious sense of like, shame.

Like, I can't operate this way.

Like, hey, youth sports, our club, just FYI, that can't happen.

Like, it simply doesn't happen.

And there's.

And that's a known thing, but because no one dedicates the resources to creating those types of cultures, you know, then it's never going to happen.

So I can't teach that guy anything.

He's a lost soul.

And unfortunately his kids, the ones can pay the price.

Now, that entire team was paying the price because he wasn't just screaming at his kid, he was screaming at every single kid on that team.

And if I was the coach on that team, I would have come over and taken his head right off.

Right, it was that bad.

But I actually just went down and sat next to him, put my noise canceling headphones in and just hoped maybe just sitting next to him I could have an effect on him in a positive way.

But it was one of those things where I actually feel really compassionate for him because I came from that place where I had that monster inside me.

And I know the therapeutic work it took for me to get to the place where I could be a healthy person and healthy father.

And sports is such a triggering thing.

It's so extremely triggering for coaches and for parents because the thing you love most in the world is out there now and all your unme needs and all your own trauma and stuff just shows up there.

So that poor guy is just kind of flayed open for the world to see and the industry doesn't take any responsibility to do anything about it.

We just kind of shame him and we all kind of.

We all make little 15 second tick tock videos and put it online so we can try to shame the out of this poor guy who.

When the truth is that guy, he loves his kid and he has no idea why he is the way he is.

And he probably doesn't even recognize it as a negative thing.

He just doesn't even know.

He can't see the it's like a zombie kind of thing.

The truth is it needs compassion.

But it's time for the industry to step in and go, you know what, we got to stop whining about this and do something about it.

And all it takes is you dedicate.

I keep talking to club directors about this.

Like there needs to.

Who's your parent?

I'll say, who's your parent liaison?

And they're like, who?

Who's the one in charge in your club?

Who's in charge of parent education, parent relationships and shielding all the coaches from the dozens and dozens of emails and is dealing with the parental issues.

Who's doing it?

We don't have one of those.

Why not?

That's the most important thing in your entire club by far.

Why do you not have that?

That should be a full time paid position with a highly qualified individual.

We don't have the money for that.

Can you raise money?

Well, I guess.

I mean, we had one guy take it seriously and he did one auction, he went nuts, found an amazing auctioneer, raised 175 grand to fund that position and now they got a guy in place.

That's awesome.

Well, it's not quite maybe the way it should be, but it's getting there.

You know, it's one of those things where we're making a cultural shift, but everybody, like, it's weird because the industry itself is so resistant and if the industry doesn't take responsibility, the parents are never going to.

Because as you guys know, parenting is just the hardest thing.

Right.

But the second that somebody.

But if I walked into a club and I start shaming my kid or I started doing that and then.

And there was a director or there was apparently Asian that gave me a call the next day and said, hey, wonder if we could grab a coffee.

Just want to talk to you about our club culture and how we kind of operate here.

But they were trained and they were therapeutically trained and they knew how to work in that process.

Or they send an email and they start to create relationships.

Man, you can kind of change the world, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I mean, it's huge.

I mean, I just did, you know, a little anecdote is like.

I read a text message that a friend of mine shared on social media the other day that he got.

He works in the NHL space, and it was from a recruiter, a scout, and he said, hey, man, you know, I'm watching this kid on the ice, and he has all the talent in the world.

World.

His parents are lunatics, and I would not take this kid on my team, no matter how skilled he is, because I am not dealing with that, that those parents.

And I think that's great.

Right?

It sucks for the kid.

And all those clubs, like you said before, kind of did him a disservice by not jumping in.

But, yeah, I mean, they play a huge role well.

And if clubs from the highest levels, especially, I know in hockey, there's a little bit of an academy system, almost European style with the soccer teams.

Like, if clubs took a responsibility to do this better, in the end, it would be a financial benefit for them because the amount of clubs, I mean, we're down here.

We have the Seattle Sounders in our professional soccer team in Seattle, and they have an academy system, and there's huge incentives for them to develop their own players.

But the problem is the vast majority of the players that come through the academy never end up being players that they can use or sell.

You know, I mean, clubs make money from selling players.

Well, you can't sell that kid.

Why?

Because every one of those kids is so traumatized that the vast majority of them never meet their potential, and they don't even come close.

And no one asks the question why a smart business person would just look at it and go, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I got 100 kids here, and I only made money off of one or two.

The Sounders have, like, seven players in the last, like, probably 10 years that have been, like, financial contributors, either helping the first team or making money through selling them.

Seven out of hundreds and hundreds of kids, and they're one of the best academies.

That's one of the most successful academy systems in the league, which is pretty remarkable because for me, the way I look at business is I just go, okay, that's great.

Seven kids.

And we all want to go, yay.

Look how great they are.

But I'm going, I see 90 kids over here that are.

What's happened there?

Yeah.

Wasn't that kid supposed to be the greatest kid ever?

And that kid and that kid and that kid and that kid.

And I'm just looking at it, and I really study.

I studied the draft bust.

I study the, you know, I remember a couple years ago I had the privilege to talk to the performance director for the Washington Commanders in the NFL.

And this is before they drafted Jaden Daniels, their quarterback.

And there was like seven quarterbacks.

It was, this is the quarterback class.

It was like, who's going to be the stars?

And I said, who are you guys going to draft?

He goes, we don't know.

I said, I'm guessing you guys have no idea how to really make the choice.

He goes, no, we, nobody really know.

We just don't know.

And it's not because there are ways to know and there are ways to understand, but they don't know how to ask the right questions.

They're not asked.

Nobody's asking the right questions.

And so for me, if I'm running a hockey club or I'm running a youth sports club, first thing I do is establish a really high level culture of mental and emotional health.

So that first and foremost all those kids like that kid and I had, by the way, when I was coaching club soccer, there was kids I did not take because of their parents.

And it's unfortunate because if there was a mechanism in place, I would have said I'll take him, but we got it.

But I would go to the parents, hey, you know, I'll take you and welcome to the club.

We have a really, really, really healthy culture here.

So we're going to get you guys plugged into the parent culture.

Parenthood.

We have a whole parent education system.

We have parent groups that meet to talk about how to be healthy with our kids.

We have, we even have a life coach that works for the club that helps everybody with this so that the kids the healthiest experience possible.

We're really glad to have you here.

Wouldn't that be great?

That would be amazing.

Yeah.

And in the end it would be financially beneficial as well.

But, but for some reason that short term thinking is so dominant in club, in youth sports, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Especially like again the professionalism of clubs all over.

I see it in baseball and soccer and especially hockey.

It's that wanting to win.

Right.

And now there's a relatively new thing in club hockey called where there's national ranking rankings for eight year old.

For eight year olds.

Right.

So a lot of parents and coaches think that's a reflection on how great their kid is and how great they're doing as a parent.

And especially coaches too, they hang their hat on at the end of the day on how many wins they got.

But me as a hockey coach and I own CV3 hockey development.

And my philosophy is, look, did they get a little bit better every time they were on the ice?

Did they develop?

Did they have fun?

Right?

It's not a reflection on me.

Did they win?

Right?

And me personally, too, as with my children in the sport, I want to see them get a little bit better every day.

I want to see them grow again.

Social skills, mental skills, enjoy the time on the ice.

Because the time they come home and they say, I'm not having fun anymore, and it becomes a job to them, that's a big problem.

So I guess how can coaches and parents maybe balance winning with overall holistic player development?

There's a problem with that because it's not a question of balancing winning.

Like, this is a.

This is more of an integration than a balance.

Meaning.

Meaning child development.

If holistic development and child development, if it's integrated with competitive thinking, winning and losing, then the question.

There's a hierarchical question here.

Which one do we take?

Right?

It's just a hierarchy.

Because if it's holistic in child development, and it's based on the developmental stage that a kid is in, right?

From 0 to 12 are the developmental years of a child.

The only thing that matters in those years is that the child has an unconscious sense of safety and love, period.

So that in those years, that is the priority above all things.

And winning and losing is an inherent threat to that, which is why it's traumatic for kids to do it.

So the hierarchy is different there than it is once they get 13, 14, 15, they move into adolescence.

They become.

Their identities become solidified, and they start to develop an esteem kind of basic thing.

They're asking a deeper, a better question about, like, what can I be good at at?

And what does that have to do with my place in the world?

Instead of young, which is when they're young, it's just, am I okay?

Am I safe?

Am I loved?

I am.

My place in the world is in their love, period.

That is literally what child fundamentals to child development.

And unfortunately, those developmental years that are most fragile years, but our most important years, that becomes the foundation.

And then we transition to adolescence, and then we.

If we do the first ones right, that the second ones present that ability to go to, you know, like.

Like the old indigenous traditions, now you're the man.

You can go on the hunt, you know, and you can go and you can find and you can hunt and you can kill.

That warrior can start to emerge inside in somebody.

But we do not do a very good job of recognizing those developmental Stages.

So we have to let winning and losing go completely in the developmental years.

It literally, the healthiest way to develop an athlete is to let go of that completely.

Like you make a player feel.

No.

No sense of pressure when it comes to winning and losing whatsoever.

That is 100% developmental thinking.

Thinking.

That's it.

Now, how do you do that?

Well, again, that's a culture thing, right?

Because from individual to individual, like I on my team, I tell the kids every single practice, guys, I don't care if we want to lose.

I am not in any way, shape or form, and I give no feedback according to winning and losing.

Zero.

It's a hundred percent about what are we doing, how are we playing, how are we learning how to play this game?

And if a kid fails trying to do the thing that is correct, I just, hey, we're good.

And there's games where we've won where you would have thought we lost, and there's games where we've lost or you would have thought we'd won.

Because I'm just going, hey, that was it.

That was what we wanted to do.

We're getting better, we're getting better, we're getting better.

And I try to lift it as much as I possibly can, but I don't know what's happening in those cars on the way home.

I don't know where.

I mean, I've been on the sideline as a parent.

I've heard some of these parents talk.

Their thoughts is winning and losing, period.

And we have a pretty healthy parent group.

We really do.

We have a relatively healthy parent group compared to what I've experienced in my coaching career.

Career.

But, you know, the truth is, again, if the culture is established and this is the way, you know, you come in, this is the way, like, you walk through the door and it's on the wall.

Winning and losing is a result.

It is the fruit on a tree.

We develop the roots here, period.

And that is in the thinking and it's in the education and it's in the messaging and it's in the social media.

And it's everything about it.

It.

This is what we are, right?

Then it permeates outward and it creates really, really perpetual growth.

And then we can, you know, winning and losing is just a result.

Man, that stuff just happens.

It just happens.

You and especially you guys, probably.

Okay, I.

And I'm have to apologize.

I don't know hockey very well.

I didn't play hockey.

I watch hockey.

We have the Seattle crack in here, and I watch hockey.

But I can't claim to know it that well, but I do understand youth sports, team sports, and you know, like the entire culture, the whole development of it.

Like when it comes to soccer, you know, the game, the game itself, literally, there's a certain way to play it and it takes years and years and years to get yourself into the place where the game gets easy.

And then winning and losing is just a result.

You can play bad soccer and win at young ages.

All you got to do is kick the ball forward.

If you got one kid that can kick a ball hard, you can win games.

That's it.

You got a fast kid and a kid who can kick and you can win.

Toss in one kid who's learned how to dribble and you're good and you can win games all day long without ever actually learning how to play the game.

So.

And that's the thing, I mean, that's so dominant.

Every single practice we scrimmage against, we're the C team, we scrimmage against the B team and they beat us most of the time.

We dominate possession.

Our guys are getting better.

The other coaches are like, oh, you guys are getting really, really good.

But they usually win.

Why?

They got five kids who are fast and can kick the crap out of the ball.

We don't have that.

But man, my guys are getting better and better and better and better.

And that's the thing.

And they all realize that.

My kids realize that.

They realize like, whoa, we're learning how to play this game and this game is moving around.

And that's the idea, is that, you know, we have to let winning go completely.

I mean, and if we free our kids from that, man, especially at ages 8, 9, 10, man, when they don't feel that pressure, they can just play.

It's the creativity, right, that gives them the creativity to go out there and have fun.

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I saw a thing the other day, I think it was on another podcast.

It was this gentleman by the name of Josh Levine.

He's at one of the hockey academies, I think Fortis Academy.

And they were talking about, you know, how we're now slapping the elite logo on everything, right?

Everything's elite, right?

Elite.

And he, you know, he had, he just bluntly said like 8 year olds aren't elite.

They suck at everything, right?

They're eight, they're supposed to suck at everything.

They're not elite, right?

There's no such thing as an elite eight year old, an elite nine year old, right?

In and it's just wild to me, right?

And I think that, you know, the culture within the culture needs to shift, right?

Oh, you would have loved my rant at practice last night because I had this one kid on my team is just constantly looking for affirmation and he said, did I do that good?

Did I do that good?

And finally I put him on the bench like we were in the scrimmage and I went in the.

Hey, go sit down.

And I yelled to the sideline, to the players on the sideline.

And there was a bunch of parents there.

I said, guys, I said, hey, stop asking me to tell you you're good.

None of you are good.

This.

There was hundreds of players on the field because we're sharing the field.

I said, there's not one single good soccer player out here.

Not one.

And I just yelled, there's one good player in the world.

He plays for Inter Miami, and no one else is good.

You know, we're all just on a spectrum.

You got to let that go, because that's.

I constantly tell them there's no good and bad in soccer.

There's trained and there's untrained.

What are we doing here?

And I.

My players all yell, trading.

That's kind of become our thing.

Thing.

That's to what we're doing.

We are training.

We are not good.

We.

I. I tell you guys are all terrible.

You guys are terrible soccer players.

But we try to make.

Because we know we can get more money out of you if we let you hold on to that story.

You know, we put you at this level, and we make you believe it.

We put the right clothes on you, we sell you the expensive gear, and we do all this kind of stuff.

So you can say that I'm good, and then.

And all that does is prevent us from actually getting better, which is why, you know, some guy is coming out of Sierra Leone when, you know, he.

When he shared a room with his 12 brothers and sisters growing up, you know, and he doesn't even have any shoes.

And he's playing in the English Premier League.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

I mean, baseball.

It permeates the baseball culture, too.

You know, it just.

Raphael Devers, who used to play for the Red Sox, was, you know, the story.

Growing up, he never had shoes.

Yeah.

He didn't have his first pair of cleats until he played in the major leagues.

Yeah.

Well, I saw an interview with Alex Rodriguez the other day, and he was talking about how if he'd grown up today, in today's game, he never would have made it, because there's no way he could have afforded.

His mom couldn't have afforded to help him play.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think there are small pockets that are getting better at that, and there's some of these nonprofits and these things, like, looking to try to change the game, and I think we need to empower them more.

I think there was one on the other day that's providing, you know, it's a company that started to provide rental equipment, like season based rental equipment for hockey players and at an extremely affordable price.

Price.

Because it's not an affordable sport where, you know, skates are $1,000.

Right.

And like that's obscene.

Right.

And sticks are three, $400.

And it's just such an expensive sport.

And it's not just hockey.

Right.

I mean, I look at, you know, I talk to friends who have daughters that do dance and gymnastics and they're like, Yeah, I spent $300 on this piece of fabric.

Just wore one time.

Yeah, it's just wild.

Right?

How can you be elite if you don't wear thousand dollar skates?

Exactly.

At eight years old?

Yeah, right, right.

I do love the rinks and I don't know if you've ever seen it or if they have similar things in soccer fields and stuff, but there are ranks that have like signs.

It's like, hey, that no scholarships are being handed out today.

The scouts aren't here.

This game's supposed to be fun.

So like, remember that?

And there's banners like plastered, some of these.

Well, somebody's making a killing off those signs.

Now.

I should have thought of that because like, I see that every time I go to a game now we got, we have a game I'm coaching tomorrow over on Bainbridge island.

And, and people are like, they get them with the little spikes and they spike them in the ground, you know.

No, there are no scouts here.

No one is going to get a scholarship today though.

Now, unfortunately, of course, that's not parent education.

No, again, we're doing this thing, we're doing this kind of.

We're going to parentify parents and we're going to tell them we're going to kind of give them this little quasi, you know, you know, kind of cutesy, shameful thing.

And that's what frustrates me is that we, you know, again, we have this kind of, you know, it's a little bit crude, but we have this kind of mental masturbation thing where we just, you know, these little clips on TikTok or on Instagram and we look at it, we send it to five friends and you know, isn't this person terrible or isn't this great?

What a great reminder.

And we don't really absorb the information.

I used to have a saying, you know, when it's part of our, you know, when I, when we started this with 3A, we'd say transformation is greater than education.

We have to have transformative tools available so that we can change.

We have to let our kids show us this.

This is really important stuff, man.

Man.

Because the amount of time and energy.

I talked to.

I had a client who was a player for the Seattle Sounders, and he was on the national team and he was really confused.

Like, I don't know why I have so much anxiety.

I have so much anxiety.

And he goes, because my parents were really good people.

So he said, they were really good people.

I knew his dad, his dad's a doctor.

He's a really, really good guy.

And he's like, but I have.

I hate soccer so much and I have so much anxiety.

And I remember having a great conversation with his father.

I ran into him somewhere.

I can't remember it was.

But.

But he.

I said, I told him, I said, you know what he said?

I told him what he said.

And he goes, oh, yeah.

He goes, well, I was one of those dads.

I go, what do you mean?

He goes, well.

He goes, we're good people.

He goes, but we don't.

He goes, it was everything, him and his brother, that was our whole lives.

And all our conversations were around soccer, like everything.

It was our.

It was our world socially, everything.

So only conversations we ever had were about soccer.

And you can tell he had a little sadness in his voice because he realized I spent my kids entire childhood talking to them about the game of soccer, and we'd hardly diversified it at all.

And we were a tournament.

It was all tournaments, it was all play.

And everything became about that feedback loop, which is really easy for the dads.

The moms tend to have an easier time going, wait a minute, we got to get some of that stuff out of the way.

Not all of them, of course, but some of them.

But he was like, you could tell he had a lot of regret around it, even though his player, his son is a millionaire soccer player.

But he could tell that he's not happy.

Yeah.

And he wasn't happy.

And I think he kind of realizing he lost some really important years there.

Would you say that the parents and the coaches are.

It's not necessarily their fault that what's going on?

And they're just like, maybe we could say victims of what the industry has become and they're just falling into that trap 100.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would say that.

Now, it's interesting, of course, that that's a both end kind of situation.

Right.

Because it's not your average parent, like that psycho dad at that game that I was talking about.

It wasn't his fault, but it is his responsibility.

It's everybody's responsibility.

So when we ask who's liable for this?

Right.

Who's really liable?

I believe that the ones that are making money off of this are the ones that are most responsible.

Right.

In the end, those parents are being pulled into a space and they're doing something because everyone else is doing it and they're getting activated with no understanding of why.

And they're going through this stuff and the industry is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and making money and people have jobs and they do all this kind of stuff.

So in the end, and they're responsible for it, you know, because you could say, well, it's like that old conversation around guns and social media and all that stuff.

It was like, well, are the tech companies responsible?

Because they, you still have to use it.

Yeah, but, you know, but there is, where's the, where is all the money going?

Where's the time?

Where's the energy going?

You know, is a gun manufacturer responsible if someone, some kid walks into a school and starts shooting?

Well, no, but.

Yes.

Right.

And so there's a, there's a lot of complexity here, right?

And you guys, we can all see that, right?

There's a lot of complexity as to who is responsible.

But at the same time, if we took a responsibility as a company, as a, as an industry, we are, it's a company, if we're going, okay, so let's take responsibility for this.

Not only is it in the end, smart business, I don't know, it is one of those things where you can't force them to do it.

But that's why even when I talk to directors, I'm saying, listen, man, let's look at this from a business standpoint.

Not just a moral standpoint, let's look at, from a business standpoint, if we could refocus this entire thing and turn this into a really, really healthy, healthy.

On a cultural level, 10 years from now, when a parent steps in here, they can feel that culture wrap around them.

In the end, this, we're going to be producing twice, two to three times as many high quality players, but with sustainable, sustainable identities, identity structures built within these players that can take the hits.

Like when I work with pro athletes, I've worked with quite a few college players that we then have gone into the pros.

You know, I'm kind of a bridge guy.

You know, someone comes to me because, like, I'm struggling to get to that level and then I help them get to that level kind of thing.

And, and I always tell them, hey, just a heads up, the key to having a good professional career is to be able to excuse my French.

But each shit for three years, you know, if you can eat shit for three years, you can make it.

But then what?

Now let me help you understand what that is, what that means and how that works.

Because that means the breaking down of your ego.

That means the loss of your story, this narrative structure you have in your brain that you're a good player that's about to go away.

Bye bye.

Yeah, right.

And even if you play well, you think like, one of my guys just was a rookie in MLS and he won MLS next pro, which is the second level, second team level.

He won the mvp and he's like, got a first team deal.

And he's like, well, I guess I'm done.

He literally texted me.

He goes, I guess the eating didn't have to last three years.

I go, whoa.

I go, brother, you're just getting started.

He's just like, you don't even know, you know what I mean?

He's about to go to the first team level where some Argentinian dude's gonna take his job, you know what I mean?

And, and he doesn't even know it, so.

But it's the breaking down of the ego.

It's the breaking of all that kind of stuff.

If we can get to the point where we can give that to our kids, we can give that healthy thing to our parents, we can let some of those things break down on a cultural level, man, in the end, we will have much more sustainable players, players that aren't busts, because for most players, the next level is going to break them because it's so fragile.

Their story that they're good, which is why that 8 year old, that's elite, he's not going to make it past 13.

Yeah, 70% of them quit at 13.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's huge in hockey, right?

That's about the age they start hitting once they, once the game changes to a lot more physical.

Game.

Game, yeah.

That is.

USA Hockey has put out, you know, publications that that's their biggest age drop off when the game turns a little bit more physical and you learn a little bit more about yourself.

And some of these kids are like, man, I don't like this anymore.

This is.

Yes, hurts.

You know, they never felt safe in the first place and now they don't.

But I'm always fascinated by, you know, I'm fascinated by those guys that he was supposed to be this my Business partner.

Travis Snyder was a, was pick number eight in the MLB draft.

He's a first round pick and he.

And when he went into the bigs, he got the bigs fast.

And he was 20 years old and he was the youngest field player in the entire league.

And he was supposed to be everything.

He was supposed to be Mike Trout plus, you know, and the trauma just immediately surfaced, the destruction of the story, you know, so the first time he got sent down, it literally obliterated his identity, you know, and that's actually the more common story than the guy that makes it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Now you've talked about it a bit like the ten year plan, I guess we'll call it it.

Do you have us, you know, and you've been in this a long time.

Do you have a success story?

Have you seen a club kind of blow it all up like a new director come in and say, you know what, we're starting from ground zero and we're gonna, we'll get there, right?

Honestly, not yet.

Not yet.

You know, we're three years into this project and we're just starting to see clubs that are coming in and they're going, okay, we're in, we're doing it.

And so there is a.

We're in a process where at the same time we are bringing this material and we're creating it.

Like right now we're building an LMS system, you know, that is going to be a, you know, paywall system where clubs come on board and they bring their entire, all their coaches and all their parents behind this wall.

And there's just huge amounts of education content, really well organized.

We're building that right now.

We're almost.

We'll probably be done by February and have it ready to rock for the world.

But we're kind of studying the project at the same time we're going for it.

You know what I mean?

Because we know how to help parents and we know how to help coaches and we know how to educate people and we know how to get on stages, we know how to get in meetings, we know how to get in conferences, we know how to get on podcasts, we know how to work with people one on one.

We know how to do that.

What we don't know how to do and that's.

We're always talking about.

The problem we're actually trying to solve is the problem we're actually trying to solve is to get clubs to go.

We are on.

We're in this for the long haul, right?

We can get them to go.

I will try it for six months.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

But to get them to go, no, no, we're doing this.

That's a.

That tends to be driven by suffering for the most part, to be honest with you.

I mean, the one club I've seen, there's a club down here, baseball club, club called Elevate.

Wade Perkins is the director and he's one of the.

I've never seen anybody go as far as he's gone in making cultural change in his club and making it healthier, dedicating real serious resources.

He's the one that raised all that money, that's bringing people in, he's doing that.

But the main driver, of course, was one way, it's a really good, courageous man.

But two, when I first spoke to him, he got on the phone with me, he goes, there was a club near them that had two kids commit suicide that month.

And his.

And he had a profound fear that it was going to happen in his club.

And he was just like, dude.

He goes, I can't let this happen on my watch.

And so the driver tends to be suffering.

You know, you get that high level athlete, that goalkeeper at Stanford that committed suicide.

These players, this kid, the player for Dallas Cowboys the other day, this tends to drive something.

And unfortunately, you know, Carl Jung says no one comes to consciousness without suffering.

It tends to be the driver for everything.

But, you know, what we're trying to do is create as much as we can, study it, understand it, try to solve this bigger problem of actual cultural trans transformation.

And who's really kind of, who's the wizard of Oz behind the curtain kind of running this thing.

And I think, you know, it's just tricky, man, because we're talking about system systematic problems that really go deep.

These roots go really, really deep.

And they go all the way up to the apparel companies and the equipment companies that are driving this thing.

I mean, Nike and these companies make millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars.

The more toxic it gets, which is unfortunate, you know what I mean?

Like that's.

And they like to pay lip service to mental health issues, but they don't.

They're not actually behind the scenes.

Nike's not back here going, how do we solve these problems?

Problems, no.

And they could financially, Absolutely.

They can make a huge difference, I think.

And you know, the image that keeps popping up in my brain is like the Flex Seal commercial where he slaps a piece of Flex Seal on the big water jug that's leaking and that's what we're doing, like, those signs are just pieces of flex seal.

Like, yeah.

And how do we, how does 3A athletics keep from becoming flex seal?

And that's a really, really big thing.

Because even when we started, when Travis and Mike and I started this, like I was telling.

Because Travis, I think, saw that, hey, we're going to solve this problem.

We're going to, we're going to, to fix the water, you know, the hole in the water bottle.

And I was like, trav, like.

And I was telling him again, Chad, that's not the problem.

Like, it's kind of like Billy Bean.

I remember in Moneyball and Billy Bean's like, you know, what's.

We're.

You're not even looking at the problem.

What's the problem?

They're trying to replace Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon.

He's like, no.

He goes, you know, there's rich teams, there's poor teams and there's 50ft of crap and there's us.

He goes, an unfair game.

That's the problem we're actually trying to solve.

That's what we're trying to solve.

There is a cultural, there's a toxicity at the heart of it all.

That takes child development completely throws it out the window for the sake of making huge amounts of money.

And a lot of it is driven by people that just want to have a job in sports because they enjoy it.

You know what I mean?

It's not like some.

Your average athletic director at a club is making tons of money, but he's got a job and he's got meaning, he's got purpose.

And we, if we all just be quiet and make this thing happen, we can have jobs doing things we like.

But that's the problem is, is that, that we all kind of existing in the entry and we become cogs to inner toxic industry and we just kind of pay it lip service.

But there are courageous ones out there.

There are, there are courageous ones out there that are saying that, you know what?

We have to change this thing.

We have to change this thing.

And usually, of course, it's suffering that drives it, but there are people doing it.

So, yeah, I mean, I'd love to get your thoughts on.

And I think it's, you know, you've seen some college coaches, I don't think any, you know, anybody except for college coaches, at least at the football level, resign over some of these nils deals.

Like, what are your thoughts on the.

Because as far as I know, there's no like age limit or minimum age on Nil deals.

Right.

You can get a 13 year old kid getting an idea deal for something.

But you know, what are your thoughts on this?

You know, how is that going to kind of beat against that culture shift, right, where now we're financially motivating these kids that we've called elite.

They turned out to be elite and now they're the face of Gatorade or whatever.

And.

Right.

So like, and then, you know, he's going to be 24 and homeless because he has never dealt with his problems or failure and but you know, he didn't learn how to manage the money that he made when he was 13.

Right.

Well, that's the thing is.

So I'm a believer that everything, you know, that herd of cattle that's running really fast towards the edge of the cliff, part of what you see as it does that is things like that.

Right.

That actually is just an actual driver of suffering.

Suffering.

Like the younger they get, the more of those nil deals.

I mean, the wild.

If college, college sports is just the wild west now and it's just more, it's getting more and more and more.

It used to be something that maintains some form of purity, but now it's just getting more and more and more and more toxic.

Yeah.

And the more toxic it gets, the more suffering happens.

The more suffering happens, the more things kind of break down.

The more things break down, the more we have a chance to build.

Which so in the end, unfortunately, that can be a helpful thing.

You know, it's like a lot of clients I have when they go through something incredibly hard, I'm like, well, for our purposes, that might be useful.

So it's like, because we need things to break down.

Ultimately it's the ego that breaks down.

But what will happen is, is that you'll get a kid.

What you'll have is a celebrity's kid.

You know, we'll get an nil deal.

You know, you'll have somebody, you know, he's the son of some elite, some hall of famer or something like that.

Right.

And then he'll get an nil at nine years old or something like that.

And then that trauma, you know, we have a good example right now.

Arch Manning is a great example.

He's a quarterback at Texas.

He's a really good example of a guy who is doing nil deals.

Deals.

You know, in the last two years he was made.

He's already made millions of dollars.

And then it turns out you have to be able to play football.

And he actually, a client of mine is one of the agents in that, at Excel, where he's represented.

And they.

And I've heard some things about how intense the anxiety is and how hard it is for him.

And he's.

I think he's finally working so with some mental health professionals to help him shoulder all that.

But you're taking someone who probably had the potential everybody thought he had, but because that weight that put in now, that now play it out for a second.

If he doesn't become the player, he has to carry that the rest of his life with the last name Manning.

I mean, and that is really intense, man.

That is some serious trauma placed on a kid.

And so that's the kind of stuff, though, in the end, can show us, you know, can help us, but what will happen.

You know, most guys like him, we write him off within a year.

It's like he never existed.

All those draft busts never existed.

But his last name is Manning.

Can't.

I will do that.

You know what I mean?

So there's going to be this shining example of this kind of suffering guy and.

And, you know, they'll make a Netflix special about them kind of thing which is, you know, which can be helpful as well, because we get these behind the scenes, like the Beckham.

The Beckham thing on.

On Netflix or the Michael Jordan thing.

We get behind the scenes looks at how toxic all these athletes really were and how hurt they really were.

You know, we get to see, you know, how OCD David Beckham was because his dad did so much damage to him.

You know, it's like, you know, that can be helpful as well.

But in the end, I think most of our pain has a redemptive kind of gift inside of it, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

I thought the Beckham one was fantastic.

I had no, you know, I watched it with zero kind of background on him, and I was blown away at, you know, just how incredible a player he was.

Oh, he's absolutely incredible.

Well, the fact that he was able to survive.

Yeah.

What the way his father brought him up, become the players meant to be, and then be able to handle that level of fame and be a sane human being.

But it's fascinating because you can see it as a grown man, he's my age and he, he's that.

That.

You can see that ocd, you can see a lot of the high level anxiety.

You can see all that stuff is just sitting with him and my heart kind of goes out to him and I'm like, man, he's a remarkable human being.

But That, I mean, still, it's a lot to carry, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, to keep with the soccer things and, you know, anecdotally, but I think we should really model everything off Ted Lasso.

I mean, fantastic.

That's why it was such a smash hit.

It's one of the greatest TV shows I've ever seen, because all they did was just go, what if we just love.

Put a bunch of love and compassion into the sports space and everybody can relate?

It's why.

You know those Disney movies, Inside Out?

You guys watch that?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a hockey thing, right?

Yeah.

The Inside out was just really, really close look at child development within a sports context.

It was just looking at it and looking at normal human child development and normal processes that go through it.

And it's been.

Those kind of films get made and Ted Lasso gets made because there's so much suffering.

Everybody can relate to it so deeply.

And so now the question is, well, why don't we do that?

Yeah, what are we gonna.

What are we gonna do about it?

Yeah, what are we gonna do about it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I tell you, the average.

Your average pro soccer player, I know a lot of them.

You have a pro soccer player, if they had a coach to treat him that way and knew nothing about that, game over, the guy that knows everything, you know, they take it in a heartbeat.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm a firm believer in that, you know?

Yeah.

I love it.

I love that show.

I think every coach should.

It should be mandatory if you doing before every coach.

I think we just hit the tip of the iceberg in the complexity of youth sports in over an hour.

So is there anything that we didn't mention during the discussion today that you think it's important for maybe coaches or parents or older athletes to know?

Yeah, you know what?

Maybe one thing.

I don't want to come off with this really hyper negative kind of perspective on it, because I really do have a redemptive kind of arc to all this.

You know, I think that all this struggle that we're starting to see, it's becoming more and more apparent because the way media functions and the way it's so visual now we can see it all.

And I think that all has a really highly redemptive process.

And if there's anybody out there listening, going, what can I.

What should I do individually?

The truth is, like, we should all do our work.

And I'm a huge believer that a therapeutic process for every single person right I think if there's any lesson that Ted Lasso teaches is that everybody needs therapy.

Remember how they bring the therapist in and all the players start going because they realize.

They started to realize that the theme was, I think everybody needs this.

I think everybody needs to do our work internally.

I think everybody needs to mature.

Everybody needs to move beyond, like, the shallow questions of how do we win or how do we lose into why do I need to win or lose so bad?

Why?

And start to ask deeper questions of ourselves.

So I want to.

I do believe that all this struggle that we're engaging as a highly redemptive thing.

And I've heard the stories.

I've heard great stories of really huge transformation.

I've heard people pick up Hero, read that book and like, dude, this changed my life.

That's how this business started traveling.

Travis read it.

He's like.

He asked me.

I had it just sitting on Amazon.

I just made it and put it on Amazon.

Amazon.

I don't market myself.

So I just like, oh, it's there.

And he's like, what are you doing with this?

I go, nothing.

He goes, I think we should sell these.

I go, okay, sure.

He goes, I'll build the business.

You do the content stuff, and we'll just figure it out.

I'm like, yeah, great, let's do it right.

But I've seen people pick that up and have their lives changed.

Not just their sporting relationship, but be able to reclaim some of the beauty in their relationships with their kids in these games.

Games.

Because there is a greatness here.

There is.

There's something great in the sports if we can embrace it.

But unfortunately, we have to let go of kind of the egoic stuff, all the winning and losing and trophies and all that.

If we can let go of that, we can find something really, really pure.

And that's why we appreciate the Ted Lassos or that movie, the Sandlot.

We all want that.

Absolutely.

It's in there.

It is.

It's in there.

But we have to let go.

Yeah.

My kids are both elite athletes.

Okay?

Okay.

Now, they're not elite in their skill.

They're not elite, all that.

They don't have any skill.

Okay?

They are highly athletic kids, especially my daughter.

Okay?

She is just not normal.

But all games of them are still just play.

That's all it is.

My daughter walks around the house with a volleyball against the walls, against the walls, against the thing with her head dead.

Pops under me.

I go pop it back to her, and we keep going.

And my son has soccer balls and just dribbles all over the place.

And it's because I've never required him to do anything of it.

Right.

It's just a game.

And that's.

And if we can maintain that, man, there is something beautiful about it because they don't see me smiling in the background, but I am, you know, that's awesome.

I mean, we shared a lot today.

This was awesome.

And, you know, I'm sold.

So, like, yeah, I know you don't market yourself as much as you probably should, but for those folks listening that are sold, like, like Chuck and I are, how do.

What's the best way to get in touch with you?

Whether that's, you know, you personally, if that's an option or through or two three A or.

Or what's the best way they can reach out?

Well, our website's, you know, it's three athletics.com is where Travis and I and all our materials are.

So if there's like club directors out there going, hey, I want to get this in my club or whatever, you can contact us through 3athletics.com and then mine's just Seth AllenTaylor a l a n sethalantaylor.com and I do live coaching.

I don't work with a lot of youth athletes.

Every once in a while I do, but I work with, you know, high performers, executives and college and pro athletes as well.

So.

But yeah, but I'm always open to anybody.

Just shoot questions, find me on Facebook, you know, find me on Instagram.

But, you know, 3A athletics, we're kind of out there, you know, you'll see us around, you know, in the social media spaces and that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think it's.

I think what you're doing is awesome.

I mean, you're making an attempt to change the sports culture for the good.

You're succeeding.

And I think that given your passion, you're going to stick with it.

And I can't wait to see, you know, I can't wait to see where it goes, you know, I wish.

Yeah.

Yeah, me too, man.

There's one question we kind of ask all our guests and very interested in your answer.

What's your definition of, of development?

And that can be mental, physical, spiritual combination.

You know, what's your.

If you had to sum up development, what is it to Seth?

Yeah, I was sum up with one question.

Everyone.

Every.

The ultimate developmental question is why am I here?

And that is the only question that matters for anyone.

And if we focus all of our effort on that question, on answering that Question.

That is what development is.

And some of that, our vocations, sports, you know, podcasting, life coaching, whatever.

Those vocations are just the context for answering that question.

Question.

And yes, if that sounds spiritual.

It is.

Yes, it is.

It's psychospiritual.

It has to do with our minds, our bodies, our souls.

But that's the question.

That's a developmentist.

It's great.

I mean, you brought it back to Simon Sinek.

Let's start with why, right?

That's all that matters.

I mean, to me, my why is my kids, right?

So everything I do is because of my kids.

This was great, Seth.

I mean, this was awesome.

We could, you know, we're at what, an hour 13?

We could have probably gone another couple hours.

It's great.

Like I said, it was choose your own adventure.

We started with like one.

One question on the list, and then we just.

It snowballed.

It was awesome.

And I appreciate you guys having me on.

I really do.

No problem.

It was great.

And I hope 3A athletics and yourself get that change that you were talking about earlier and be the change, and hopefully we can see that in the future.

So thanks again.

I got about 40 years trying to make it happen.

There you go.

It'd be the change you want to see in the world, right?

That's it.

Yeah, man.

Thank you.

All right, thanks a lot.

That so.

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