Mclovin
Cheer Parent
- Mar 24, 2010
- 2,756
- 3,235
I respectfully disagree with this.
That is why I took my daughter out of her old gym. I believe that everybody needs to be treated a bit differently. This by no means is to be misinterpreted as showing favoritism. Some children can handle being "yelled at" by the coaches. For some children, it could possibly help them by driving them to improve to prove that they can do a particular skill.
My daughter is not one of those children. If you yell at her, it breaks her spirit. It embarrasses her. Cheer is supposed to be fun. I pay the coaches to coach her, not yell at her.
To what I put in bold above...sounds like you and your child should just focus on rec sports then. Because competitive sports, regardless of what sport that is, is meant to be "competitive". While I agree that any competitive sport should be "fun" for the kids, it is also meant to teach them much more than just having fun. It teaches discipline, commitment, accountability, and also how to work hard and push through difficulties, how to learn skills above and beyond what they ever possibly imagined they could learn. In order to accomplish all of the above, you cannot take the approach of "just have fun". It is not even remotely possible to be 100% positive 100% of the time. Anyone who says you can is only fooling themselves. A coach is not perfect, we are going to make mistakes or say things we wish we hadn't said in the heat of a moment. We are going to yell sometimes.
I do agree, however, that a coach should find the age group they work best with personality wise. A hardcore coach who tends to yell a lot and expects constant focus and effort should probably NOT coach a mini team, or even a youth team. You wouldn't take a high school chemistry teacher and ask them to teach kindergarten or vice versa. I believe the same to be true with coaching.
One last thing...I have two daughters in cheer, and both have very different personalities. I have always had more of that hardcore, no excuses, kind of personality, even with my own children. My oldest could take it, even as young as 6 years old. If she wasn't practicing to my expectations, we would stay late, come in extra, I would yell, scream, etc. etc. until I got the results I was looking for. It worked for her. The more you tick her off, the better she gets. My youngest not so much. You scream at her and she breaks down and cries and it doesn't get better. The more pressure you put on her, the more she clams up and gets worse. She'll go into "mental block" mode. Both of them have achieved great things in cheer. Both are on our gym's worlds team and have multiple NCA titles under their belts. But while I never accepted mediocrity from either of them, I did have to approach situations much differently with one versus the other.