Soft (life) skills, once trained and modeled by iconic coaches, have been neglected in youth sports.

The failure to train soft skills deprives athletes of the competencies for life-long success beyond sports.

Many organizations are popping up to emphasize the importance of soft skills to young athletes and coaches.

Soft skills are personal and interpersonal competencies essential for successful living, including athletics. They are life skills that used to be a cornerstone of sports coaching. Not so much anymore...

Many athletic leaders fail to follow in the footsteps of legendary coaches like Pro football’s Paul Brown, college basketball’s John Wooden, college football’s Nick Saban, and Major League manager Walter Alston. Those coaching icons achieved much of their success and fame for training soft skills in their athletes, along with hard skills (technical sports-playing techniques).

The failure of coaches to train and model life skills has contributed to what has become a toxic amateur sports culture, discussed in my post "Exploring the Neglect of Athletes Being Human and its Impact." Attend an amateur sporting event, and you’ll often witness poorly behaving coaches and athletes. Some youth coaches encourage athletes to trash-talk their opponents and other unsportsmanlike behaviors, believing it helps their competitiveness.

Awareness of all this has motivated institutional efforts to provide antidotes to a poisonous youth sports culture. One such example is Positive Athlete ( A), an organization that preaches the importance of soft skills and virtue to young athletes and coaches

We’ll explore A after a brief examination of what life skills represent.

Soft Skills Explained

Soft skills are trained attributes for lifelong effectiveness that demonstrate high........

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