Sports don't teach lessons. Coaches do. And sometimes the lesson isn't even spoken to the kid at all. It's the conversation they weren't supposed to hear.
Does the intent of your words match their impact?
Are you withholding praise simply because that's what coaches are supposed to do?
Most of us don't praise enough. And when we do get around to it, we're careless with it, rewarding the performance and skipping the process. There's science behind why this is happening and what it's actually doing to the kids on your team. Let's get into it.
Why Coaches Withhold Praise
Start with the problem of silence.
I see this in coaches, myself included on bad days. We don't say anything when an athlete does something right. The majority of the time they're doing correct things in practice and in games. We spot something wrong, we step in and correct it. Otherwise we'd be talking the entire practice. I get it. But what are we saying when a kid makes a big change? Or even a small one? Do we stay silent because that's just what's supposed to happen?
Three things are usually running underneath that silence.
Holding onto the past. You've got an idea of who a kid is, who an athlete is, and then they do something outside of that label you've assigned them. So you don't acknowledge it. You're waiting for the other shoe to drop. They let you down once in a big game, and now every rep gets filtered through that old resentment.
Being your own worst critic. If the voice in your head as a coach is mostly critical, that's the only voice you know how to use with your team. Whether you realize it or not, that's going to seep into your default communication.
Fear. Fear that praise makes a kid soft. Fear of being second-guessed by other coaches. Fear of going out on a limb for a guy because if he messes up, you look like a bad coach. We call this discipline. It's fear wearing a whistle.
It's easy to coach the good athletes. They're well-coordinated, they've got great attitudes, they've got goldfish memory after a mistake. But the kids who need praise the most are usually the ones battling those same three blocks we have as coaches: a past story they're carrying, a brutal internal critic, and a fear of what happens if they actually prove that story wrong. Kids who never hear what they're doing right quietly decide their effort doesn't matter. Why try? I'm just going to mess it up anyway.
Quick gut check: when's the last time you caught a kid doing something right and said it out loud, instead of nodding and moving on?
One of my go-to lines at practice is "Teamwork, call it when I see it." I'm obnoxious about it on purpose, because I want my guys to start seeing it, then start saying it, then before long they're intentionally looking for ways to be good teammates.
I think of Baker Mayfield in that ESPN pregame shot at Oklahoma. Jumping around, hyped, headband on, full main character energy. Then he glances down, sees his offensive lineman's shoe untied, drops down and ties it, and goes right back to being locked in. That's the standard. I've watched my own guys do the exact same thing for each other. It's hilarious, and it's exactly the behavior I want to praise and reinforce.
A Quick Detour Into NLP
Before we get into the trap hiding behind praise, I want to introduce a concept my buddy Luke Summers and I dug into a while back: neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. It's a tool Tony Robbins leans heavily on, and it's one we leaned into a lot writing child development and SEL programs together.
The core idea is simple even though the name sounds clinical: the words we hear repeated about ourselves don't just describe us, they become us. Your brain doesn't always distinguish between "this is what someone said about me" and "this is what's true about me." Said enough times, in the right way, language stops being commentary and starts being identity. And this cuts both ways.
That matters enormously for us as coaches. It means praise isn't just a nice gesture. It's literally one of the tools we have for shaping what an athlete believes about who they are, not just how they perform. But there are different types of praise, and they don't all work the same way.
Three Types of Praise
Self-talk. This is an athlete saying out loud what they believe about themselves. On the field, we mostly only hear the negative version of this. Rarely do kids volunteer what they like about their own game. As coaches, we need to hand them the tools to flip that. I pair words with posture. Superman pose. Positive words combined with a physical gesture get sticky in a way words alone don't, because the brain registers the language and the physical state together. Look at the All Blacks stepping into the haka. What's your version of that for your team? It might feel small or silly. It's not.
Direct talk. This is praise straight to a kid's face. "You're talented." "Great game." Here's the surprising part: of the three types, this is the least effective at actually changing someone's deep self-belief. That doesn't mean skip it. It still matters, it still needs to happen, and it models for your team how they should talk to each other. But if it's the only tool in your kit, you're leaving the most powerful one on the table.
Earshot praise. This is the big one. This is when a kid overhears you talking positively about them to someone else, not said to them directly, said about them, and they just happen to catch it. It's even more powerful when it comes from an authority figure, because the kid's brain reads it as: this wasn't said for my benefit, so it must actually be true.
I had this play out in real life recently. We brought a group of middle schoolers out to practice with our JV high schoolers, and the middle schoolers balled out. One of our coaches, trying to motivate the high schoolers, said something like "these middle schoolers are out here passing, catching, and throwing, and you guys can't stop them." He wasn't talking to the middle schoolers. But they heard every word. They walked away believing they'd put on a clinic against high schoolers, and they carried that belief right into their season. Completely unintentional. Completely effective.
Here's the part that should make every coach uncomfortable: this works exactly the same way in reverse. If you tell another adult that a kid is shy, or not very athletic, or worse, you're not describing them. You're imprinting that belief directly onto their identity, just pointed in the wrong direction. The kid didn't ask to overhear it. Their brain doesn't have a filter built in to protect them from it.
So before you say anything about a kid to another adult, a sideline comment, a complaint to a parent, a casual aside to an assistant coach, ask yourself: is this kid in earshot? Because if they are, you're not venting. You're programming.
The Trap Hiding Inside Praise Itself
Even when praise is delivered well, there's still a trap waiting. It's not about how you praise. It's about what you're praising.
Tim Fletcher, who works in trauma recovery, talks about performance-based confidence. A kid learns that approval only shows up when they perform. I had Jim Davis on the podcast and he talked about exactly this from his playing days: make a play, come off the field, get a high five. Make a mistake, come off the field, get ignored. Over time, the brain locks in a rule: my value is something I earn over and over, with no finish line. And when that's the rule, confidence collapses the second the praise stops coming. It always does eventually.
If every bit of praise you give is tied exclusively to performance, the goal, the tackle, the highlight, you're using a genuinely powerful tool to wire in a fragile belief: I only matter when I produce.
The fix isn't less praise. It's praise that's specific to what they did, layered with something that has nothing to do with performance at all. The message that this kid is valued as a person, win or lose.
I think about the one time I got real praise from my high school football coach. I blocked a punt. He told me he knew I could do it the whole time, that I'd been busting my ass on special teams all season and finally broke through. That wasn't praise for the block. That was praise for the process that made the block possible. Still sticks with me.
What This Looks Like at Practice
Three things you can actually do with this.
Engineer earshot praise on purpose. Don't wait for it to happen by accident. Tell another coach, in the hallway, loud enough for the kid to catch it without it being staged: "That kid's communication on defense is the best on the team." You're not complimenting the kid. You're installing a belief.
Praise the process out loud, not just the outcome. "I saw you reset after that mistake" matters more long-term than "great goal," because the ability to reset shows up every practice, not just the good ones. If we only praise outcomes, there are long stretches where kids are drowning in their own negative self-talk, waiting for an opportunity to be noticed. And every athletic career ends eventually. If their confidence is only built on outcomes, it ends with nothing underneath it.
Say the quiet part directly. "I'm proud of how you played today, and I'd be proud of you on a day you didn't play well too. You're an amazing teammate. This team's lucky to have you." That sentence separates worth from performance, explicitly, so the kid doesn't have to guess. This one takes reps. It takes tone, target, and timing, the same three T's we talk about for leadership communication generally.
Where This Leaves Us
Praise withheld stunts performance. Praise that's only conditional stunts identity. There's a hierarchy here. Self-talk plants a seed. Direct talk is good but limited. Earshot praise, used carefully, might be the most powerful tool you have as a coach. Used carelessly, it's also the most dangerous.
Here's the one thing to take into your next practice: find a moment to say something good about a kid to another adult, knowing that kid can hear it. And just as important, watch what you say about kids when you think they can't.
Sports don't teach lessons. Coaches do. Sometimes the lesson isn't even spoken to the kid at all. It's the conversation they weren't supposed to hear.
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