Celia Slater explains how coaches can communicate with parents to establish a healthy team culture and behaviors that positively reflect the program.
Learn more about Celia Slater.
Video Transcript
How I would recommend that coaches handle communication with their sport parents is not to avoid the parents at all, to really bring them in. That meeting that you have with them and how you communicate with them, creating the boundaries that are acceptable or unacceptable, I think is critical. If I’m just looking at it from my own standpoint and how coaches create expectations, is the words that you say have to match what you do. How do you build into your practices? How do you build into your interactions with the parents? How do you build in all these things that support what you say?
So to me, it’s really about creating a structure for the parents to be involved, because they’re going to be, and letting them have a role and really helping them understand the bigger picture. Then talking about positivity and talking about sportsmanship and talking about what we want to represent from our team. When people talk about our team, what do we want them to say? I think that’s really critical that somehow you get the buy-in from those parents and get them involved in that way, in a positive way, but also letting them know what behaviors are not tolerated.
