The Sideline Parent: How Your Emotions Affect Your Athlete's Performance
The Sideline Parent: How Your Emotions Affect Your Athlete's Performance
Take a moment to remember the sights and sounds of an AAU game. The screech of sneakers as players stop and go on the hardwood. Kids yelling. Whistles blowing. It's a place where anyone can be easily overstimulated.
The intensity is high, and so are the expectations — executing the plays, meeting the coach's standards, living up to your own. And in those charged moments, there's one thing a parent does that makes it harder, not easier:
We coach from the stands.
"Pass it!" "Get open!" "Shoot it!"
Sound familiar? It does to me — because that was my husband during our son's basketball games. When our son was out of position on offense, he'd try to redirect him from the bleachers. What we ended up with wasn't a more confident kid. It was a confused one, carrying the exact same confidence into the next play that he walked in with.
Here's the thing, though: my husband wasn't yelling because he's a bad dad. He was yelling because he was feeling something. The nerves. The desire for our son to do well. The helplessness of watching from a seat where you can't do a single thing to help. The yelling was never really about the play. It was about what he was carrying in that moment — and it had to go somewhere.
That's the part we miss. Our kids feel that emotional charge before they ever process the words.
They can't hear "shoot it" as information. They hear the tension underneath it. They feel that the person who loves them most is suddenly tight, urgent, and disappointed — and now they're playing to manage our emotions instead of their own game.
Here's what we all have in common: we want our kids to thrive. We are their biggest cheerleaders. It's just that some of the ways we cheer don't actually help.
When we critique from the sideline on top of the coaching coming from their bench, it's like having one person in one ear speaking one language and another person in the other ear speaking a completely different language — loudly, at the same time.
Before you push back on what I'm about to share, sit with two honest questions:
When I yell from the sideline, what am I actually feeling — and who is it really for? And has it ever helped my athlete play better?
Now here are three things we found that genuinely support our athlete:
Set one focus before the game. Ask them: what's the one thing you want to work on today? A single focus matters, because when you try to fix everything at once, everything gets a sliver of attention — and when it doesn't go well, it chips away at their confidence for the rest of the game.
Let them work through their mistakes. Resist handing them the answer before they've found it themselves. When athletes learn to work through a mistake, they learn two things at once: that they can do hard things, and that they can trust their own decisions.
After the game, ask about the work — not the score. Win or lose, ask how they feel about the thing they set out to work on. This one is key. If your first question is whether they won, you're teaching them that their worth is tied to the outcome instead of to who they're becoming.
When we do these things, something shifts. The answer to those two questions you asked yourself finally becomes a yes.
And that's what lets our athletes thrive — which, again, is all any of us ever wanted for them.
Lorraine Eloms | Top Speed Athletics & Mental Performance and Life Coaching, helping young athletes develop the mental and emotional tools to compete, grow, and thrive.
