New Book Offers Lessons For Student Athletes
An interesting new book should have widespread appeal for young athletes looking to make it onto their high school teams or club and AAU teams, or even college, but it has a twist as the author hones in on helping student-athletes learn how to think about and shape how others see them, and learn ways to define who they are and even create a brand that others will look up to perhaps not just for their goals and wins, but how they carry themselves.
Coco Gauff was a prime example of that Thursday in her U.S. Open match when she double faulted dozens of points and publicly struggled to execute in front of thousands of fans and millions watching on TV. Her emotions, tears, facial expressions were by no means intentional, they were just raw emotion, but there was something very intentional about how she kept at it, and how she talked about that moment in the post game interviews. She thanked a friend for giving her the rings she was wearing on her fingers and the cool leather jacket she wore, saying how “if I go down, at least I can have fun doing it.” It was an honest and rare thing for a pro athlete to say but it struck me as very real and yet intentional - she knows young athletes watch her, young Black girls who think maybe they too could be a tennis player, even young male athletes who want to be pro someday….In that moment, she told those kids that it’s okay to get beat, to acknowledge you might lose, but there’s a way to embrace that and at least enjoy the ride.
The book, “The Other Playbook,” includes tools to help athletes lead with intention and become the best they can be in sports and beyond, and to help them understand how to view every coach and teammate not just as comrades on the field, but actually as customers, perhaps “recommendations” or at least potential ones.
Author Amit Chitre has spent a long time coaching business and educational leaders about how to communicate in a crisis and how to communicate with intention, and this books applies a lot of those lessons. Chitre, himself a parent of athletes, no doubt saw the importance of helping kids with athletic dreams in a way they rarely get, particularly in the era of social media. The book, which is more of resource, comes out on the heels of our own study of student athletes and parents who’ve played in club, travel and elite sports and whose expectations have fallen short and whose experiences in many cases have led them to not just leave the team but leave the sport entirely, over disputes with coaches, anger over playing time, and for about 30%, the result was a poor health outcome. (Go here to read that study on “Irony of Youth Sports).
The irony for young athletes is it’s not ever really about how good you are and how many points you rack up - because in the end we are more than our career and our fame and the money we make….we can’t control a lot of that. Injury alone can halt athletic success. But we can control how we carry ourselves and present ourselves…
To check out “The Other Playbook" go here.