sports confidence

In our first article, we defined athletic confidence, and discussed many forms of interference when building confidence in sports, including excessive praise, lack of competence, fear of failure and poor adult mentorship. One additional hidden factor, coined “The Outlier Effect” by author Malcolm Gladwell, can be one of the most devastating confidence crushers, through no fault of your athletes at all. One of our biggest problems in youth sports, and early education for that matter, is that we have institutionalized and streamlined our registration protocols into yearlong time blocks. We organize children chronologically instead of developmentally. While this certainly makes it [...]