The Myth of One Size Fits All Coaching
Why old school tactics fail our kids.
My son Michael is 18 years old. He is an Eagle Scout. He reads everything. He has kept the same tight circle of friends since elementary school, and he would do anything for them. At the end of the day, he still tucks himself under my arm on the couch, all five feet eight inches and 160 pounds of him—and waits for me to rub his feet. He has done this since he was small. I do not think he will ever stop, and honestly, I hope he never does.
Michael moves through life at his own pace. Slowly. Deliberately. He has an internal compass that has absolutely nothing to do with what anyone else thinks he should be doing or how fast he should do it. My husband Bob and I have a saying about Michael that we often repeat to each other, sometimes with frustration and always with love: he is the laziest smart person we have ever met.
There is no hustle in him. No urgency. No sense that the clock is ticking and he needs to move faster. Getting him out of the house in the morning is a major project. The shower situation alone could fill a whole chapter.
And yet, to know Michael is to love him. Underneath the slowness, the quiet, and the complete indifference to other people’s timelines, there is a person of extraordinary depth. He feels everything. He notices everything. He carries far more than he ever shows.
I want to be honest here, because I am not a naive parent. I am not writing this to defend a perfect kid. Michael can be genuinely frustrating to coach. He is extremely quiet. He rarely communicates to his coach that he has actually heard the feedback. He does not rush. He refuses to perform an urgency he does not feel.
There are two coaches on his tennis team, and the head coach has a completely different approach. This essay is about the assistant coach.
My husband and I are not new to sports parenting. Our daughter, Lily, played three varsity sports each year of high school and was a consistent starter. We have spent years sitting on the sidelines and freezing in bleachers. We know exactly what good coaching looks like. This assistant coach coached Lily in basketball, so we have watched him use these same tactics before. He talks about the kids behind their backs. He focuses almost entirely on winning. He rarely operates from a place of genuine investment in the person standing in front of him. We know exactly what we are watching.
Michael did not even pick up a racket until his sophomore year of high school. Most of the kids he competed against had been playing for years. Yet, Michael attended tennis camp twice a week all summer, playing challenge match after challenge match to earn his varsity spot. He did all of that slowly, in the exact way Michael does everything—and he earned a second-doubles varsity position. He shows up to every single practice and works hard in his own distinct way. It does not always look like what other people expect, but it is consistent and real.
Last week, Michael played a match that stretched past the two-hour mark. His partner was struggling with knee pain, unable to play at his usual level. Michael quietly stepped up, carrying most of the weight of the match. They won the first two sets, but by the third, things began to fall apart. The opposing team mounted a comeback, pushing the match into a grueling tiebreaker.
The assistant coach was standing nearby. From where I was standing, I could see him clearly. He was mocking Michael. He was literally imitating the way my son moves, muttering comments under his breath that he assumed Michael couldn’t hear.
But Michael heard every single word.
He didn’t tell me until we were sitting at the dinner table later that night. He heard everything, because Michael always does. He said almost nothing on the court in that moment—because that is just who he is; he processes deeply and responds deliberately, but it all registered. He told me how awful he felt for his partner, because the coach was also muttering about the boy, claiming he was “always whining” and that “everything always hurts him.”
Michael wasn’t just playing a two-hour tiebreaker; he was carrying the heavy emotional weight of two teenagers on his shoulders.
Then he told me the part that stopped me completely. He looked at me and said he felt like losing on purpose. Not because he didn’t care about winning. Michael loves to win. He wants to win for himself and for his team, many of whom are his closest friends. This is not a kid lacking competitive drive. But the coach’s cruel tactics had tainted the experience and robbed the meaning from the game. It made performing for that man feel pointless. Worse than pointless—it made losing feel like the only quiet rebellion that made sense.
He didn’t lose on purpose. He would never do that. Not because of the coach, but because of his partner and his teammates. Because Michael is the kind of person who will push through almost anything for someone he actually loves. The coach did not keep him in that match. His teammate did. Think about what that means for a moment.
And this week, the week after that match, Michael was named athlete of the week.
As a school psychologist and aspiring mental health clinician, I understand where this coaching philosophy comes from. It is old. It is deeply woven into sports culture. Shame them a little. Make them uncomfortable. Put a fire under them. Make them want to prove you wrong.
For some kids, in some contexts, with a coach they already trust and feel respected by, a well-timed challenge can work. I will give the old school that much. But the research is clear about what shame-based coaching actually does to most kids. Studies show that when we tie an athlete’s self-worth to their performance, introducing shame doesn't motivate them—it actively drives anxiety and burnout. It heaps on psychological stress while quietly stripping away any real sense of personal accomplishment.
On the flip side, the science shows exactly what happens when coaches choose respect over ridicule. Studies call this 'autonomy-supportive' coaching, but it really just means building an environment on encouragement, honest communication, and basic human dignity. When kids get that, they develop real resilience and a deep, lasting optimism. Shame doesn’t build athletes. The data tells us this unequivocally
But here is what clinical research cannot fully capture, and a career of sitting across from children has taught me directly: every single child is wired differently.
My daughter, Lily, would be mortified if a coach embarrassed her publicly. But she would channel every single bit of that mortification into something fierce. She would come back harder. For her, a specific type of abrasive challenge serves as fuel.
Michael is built completely differently. He is deeply empathetic. He feels his own experience and everyone else’s at the same time. He processes quietly, completely, and keeps most of the internal storm hidden from view. Since the first grade, he has always needed to know that his teachers genuinely liked him. Not a performance of care, they had to actually mean it. Once he knew a teacher truly cared about him, he would do absolutely anything for them. He would work harder than anyone expected and show up in ways that surprised everyone.
Without that authentic relationship? He gives back exactly what he receives.
The coach gave him mockery. Michael gave him silence, alongside the quiet, rational thought that losing might actually feel better than performing for someone who did not respect him. That isn’t a lack of drive. It is a highly intuitive nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do: protect itself from an attack.
I am not arguing for soft coaching. I am not saying athletes should never be pushed, challenged, or asked to do more than they believe they are capable of achieving. I am saying that the challenge must come from a baseline of a relationship. It has to come from a coach who has taken the time to understand how each athlete is wired. It must arrive with the athlete’s dignity entirely intact. Without that foundation, the challenge does not land as motivation. It lands as an emotional attack.
We are no longer living in a world where one-size-fits-all coaching is acceptable. Kids today know when an emotional line has been crossed. They possess the language for it. They have self-awareness. They know when someone does not actually respect them, even when that person is standing on the same court wearing the school colors.
Michael knew. He heard every word. He said nothing. He went out and carried a grueling, two-hour tiebreaker for his team—not for his coach, but for his friends. Then he came home, ate dinner, and told his mother what happened.
And his mother happens to have 30 years of experience working with kids, a counseling degree in progress, and a Substack. So, she wrote it down.
My son earned athlete of the week this week. He did that for himself. For his partner. For his friends who were cheering from the sidelines. He did not do it for the coach who mocked him from the sidelines.
That should tell us everything we need to know.