Last week I ran a youth lacrosse camp here in Austin. I was the fun police! Not the negative kind, the Fun-po making sure every station was dialed in, the energy was high, and the kids were actually having a good time.
I had a group of high school and college athletes working the camp as junior coaches. Good kids. Passionate about the game. Ready to help. Their effort and attitude were not the problem.
Their language was.
I walked station to station and heard the same coaching mistakes on repeat:
- "Don't do that" - without specifying what not to do or what to do instead.
- "Good job" - without reinforcing exactly what the kid did right.
- "Go to the cone" - which cone? The yellow one? Third from the left? Nobody knows.
At a shooting station, I pulled one of the coaches aside and asked him directly: "What do you want them to do differently? Tell me exactly."
He thought for a second. "I want them to shoot the ball faster."
"Faster like what? Like a rocket. Then say that."
And that's when the light went on, not just for him, but for me. I was stuck in athlete brain mode, programming the perfect skill development camp and forgot these were kids! The coaches knew what good looked like. They just had never been taught how to say it in a way a young athlete could actually act on.
The Foundation: Attention Is the Currency of Learning
Before we get into the three dimensions, I need you to hold onto one idea.
Attention is the currency of learning.
When you're coaching any athlete, especially a young one, you are competing for something finite and incredibly valuable: their focus. And the way you win that competition is through what the research calls attentional focus, the type of focus an athlete adopts while performing a motor skill.
Here's the chain that matters:
Movement & Words → Thoughts → Action
If your words are vague, your athlete's mental picture of the movement is vague. If their picture is vague, their action is vague. And vague actions become habits, just not the ones you wanted.
This framework comes from Nick Winkelman's book The Language of Coaching, which I've leaned on heavily, including when I developed the coach training curriculum and certification for a company helping kids win at life called KidStrong. The 3D model is Winkelman's three dimensions for directing and cueing movement and what I've done over the years is translate it specifically for sport and for youth athletes.
The three dimensions: Description, Direction, and Distance/Duration.
Dimension 1: Description
Positions, then patterns. Set up, then execution.
Description tells an athlete what to do. And the best way to build a description is in two steps: establish the position first, then give them the movement that comes out of it.
A coaching cue has two components:
- Set-Up - hands and body position (the noun)
- Execution - the action verb
Here's what bad description sounds like:
"Get lower."
Lower than what? Lower how? That tells no one anything.
Here's the 3D version:
"Feet wide, chest tall - then drive forward."
Now the athlete has a position and a pattern. You've built a foundation before worrying about the house.
Another example. Bad coaching:
"Tackle better."
3D description:
"Eyes up, hips low - then wrap and drive."
You are not just motivating. You are installing software.
The Critical Insight: Vivid Beats Technical
Here's what the research keeps showing: the most effective cues are rarely technical. The language that actually changes how a kid moves is vivid, specific, and often analogical.
Think about the difference between "run in place" versus "knees up, stomp your feet." Same movement. The second one produces better motor output because the image is concrete and the intention is loaded.
For kids ages 5 through 12 - the sweet spot for youth sports - you can anchor your descriptions to things they already love:
- "Crouch down like a tiger, then POUNCE onto the box."
- "Hang on the bar like you've got Lego hands."
- "Move through the lane like a ninja - quick feet, quick eyes. Full hearts, can't lose."
Same technical intent. Packaged in a container the kid's brain is already wired to receive.
And if you coach older athletes, you don't get to opt out of this conversation. You just shift the reference. The tiger becomes "low center of gravity like a linebacker." The ninja becomes "controlled aggression, everything locked and loaded." The principle is the same. Vivid descriptions make athletes feel the movement before they execute it.
Dimension 2: Direction
Where do you want them going?
If description tells an athlete what to do, direction tells them where to go mentally, physically, and tactically.
This is where a massive amount of coaching breaks down. Because when athletes get distracted or aren't performing, we default to emotions instead of directions:
"Hustle!""Play harder!""Move!"
Those are not directions. Those are emotions. And emotions without direction produce effort without clarity, which produces anxiety, which kills performance.
Direction is the language of preposition: toward, away, through, over, around, past.
These are the words that move bodies.
Some sport examples:
Instead of...Say..."Hustle!""Close toward the ball carrier.""Move!""Cut through the middle.""Be aggressive.""Drive up through the bar."
Direction gives athletes an orientation. And orientation creates confidence, because the athlete doesn't just know what to do, they know where they're going.
Direction and Captains
This one connects directly to leadership development, so I want to name it.
When you're developing captains, athletes who have to coach their teammates in real time, the ability to give direction is one of the highest-leverage skills they can build. Because in a game, you don't have time for technical descriptions. You need to redirect focus instantly.
Ball side. Closeout. Through the gap.
One or two words. A preposition. A spatial cue. That's direction. And the captain who can deliver it clearly, calmly, and immediately is the captain who raises the performance of everyone around them.
Dimension 3: Distance and Duration
How far? How long? How many?
This dimension is the most underrated of the three, and its absence is what creates what I call effort anxiety.
Athletes panic when expectations are vague. The kid at the start of a drill who looks around waiting for someone to tell him when it's over — he goes half speed. The player who doesn't know how many reps are left tanks rep three to survive rep five. The youth athlete who shuts down early because she has no idea where the finish line is.
Clarity is kind. Remember that.
Bad coaching:
"Run harder."
3D coaching:
"Sprint to the cone and back.""Hold it for five seconds.""We're doing three reps."
One of the tools we used at KidStrong that was surprisingly powerful: "Go until I say freeze." That is the clearest possible standard for a six-year-old. And it works just as well for a sixteen-year-old once you've established that go means go and freeze means stop.
Beyond just mechanics, here's why this dimension matters: when you give athletes clear distances and durations, you move them from emotion-based effort to behavior-based execution. You give them a standard. And standards create accountability without punishment — because now there's something objective to measure against.
In leadership terms, there's a big difference between "give your best" and "give me two more reps." Both can motivate. Only one can be evaluated.
If you can measure it, you can manage it.
Putting All Three Together
Here's what coaching sounds like without 3D. Picture a defensive slide drill — lacrosse, basketball, whatever:
"Play defense better!"
That is a complete instruction to exactly no one.
Here's the same drill coached in all three dimensions:
"Feet wide, chest tall" - Description. Position, then pattern."Slide toward the ball" - Direction. Preposition. Spatial intent."Go to the sideline and back" - Distance. Clear standard.
Now the athlete knows how to set up, where to go, and how far to push. You've given them everything they need to succeed before they take a single step.
That's what confidence looks like before movement happens.
The X-Factor: Call to Adventure
Here's where the framework goes from technical tool to something deeper.
For young kids, great coaches turn the floor into lava, rope climbs into Everest, and balance beams into rickety bridges over canyons. They exaggerate the risk, they ham it up, and suddenly a kid who was hesitant is brave, because in the story, bravery is the only option.
For your athletes, the story just changes.
Instead of lava: "This is the final 30 seconds of the fourth quarter."
Instead of the mountain: "This rep decides whether you're a starter."
Instead of the hero's quest: "This is where champions separate from everyone else."
Same brain. Same dopamine. Same motivation system.
Your athletes are never too old for story. The need for meaning, challenge, and identity, the need to be the hero of something, does not age out of a human being. It just gets expressed differently.
I ask every athlete I work with: who's your favorite superhero? Because now I have a reference point. When they fail, I can point to the moment Spider-Man failed and how he turned that tragedy into something that made him rise. I can show them that failure is part of the story, not the end of it.
When you can tie a drill to an identity, when a rep means something beyond the rep, you have unlocked a motivational engine that no amount of yelling "hustle" will ever match.
Call them to adventure. Raise the stakes. Name the moment. Be the narrator of their best performance.
There Is No Failure! Only Feedback
One last thing.
When you use 3D Coaching, you create what I call a fast learning loop: Cue → Attempt → Feedback → Adjust → Repeat.
Every rep is data. Mistakes are information, not identity.
That is not a feel-good philosophy. That is elite performance psychology applied to youth development. Confidence is not built by protecting athletes from failure. It's built through a system of language precise enough that they always know what to try, how to try it, and how to evaluate what happened.
The Three Questions
Next time you're standing on a sideline, in a gym, or running a practice — and you're about to say "come on, hustle" — pause. Ask yourself three questions:
What does good look like? That's your Description.
Where do I want them going? That's your Direction.
How long, how far, how many? That's your Distance.
Three questions. Three dimensions. One athlete who just got a whole lot clearer.
Raise the Game
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