3. Colin McLaren: Reframing Success in Youth Sports

About this episode

Colin McLaren discusses the importance of reframing success in youth sports to focus on personal growth and joy rather than just performance.

On today’s episode of Youth Sports United, I sit down with Colin McLaren, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experiential Studies in Community and Sport at Cape Breton University, and the Associate Director of the Research Institute for Community, Sport, and Health. Colin and I discuss in detail the importance and lasting impact of creating positive sports experiences for our kids. We examine the benefits of embracing mistakes and how, as coaches and parents, demonstrating a growth mindset can teach our children resilience. We explore the connection between resilience and risk-taking and how enabling the latter helps kids extract more fulfillment, joy and fun from their athletic pursuits. We also discuss the importance of intentionality when communicating with our young athletes and how everyone benefits when we reframe what success looks like. As parents, it’s easy to get caught up measuring the return on our youth sports investment in terms of our kid’s performance and wins. But what if we reconsidered the equation and measured our return in terms of our children’s personal growth, their joy and instilling them with a life-long love of movement? Colin and I explore the…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Magennis

Guest: Colin McLaren

Topics covered

• youth sports
• resilience
• growth mindset
• positive experiences
• parenting
• coaching

Keywords

• youth sports
• resilience
• growth mindset
• parenting
• coaching
• positive experiences
• success

Sponsors

Bare Ware

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cape Breton University, Research Institute for Community, Sport, and Health

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