JP NERBUN – FOUNDER OF THRIVE ON CHALLENGE & AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK “THE SPORTS PARENT SOLUTION” – EPISODE 887

Website – thriveonchallenge.com

Email – jpnerbun@thriveonchallenge.com

Twitter – @JpNerbun

If you listen to and love the Hoop Heads Podcast, please consider giving us a small tip that will help in our quest to become the #1 basketball coaching podcast.

J.P. Nerbun is the founder of Thrive On Challenge, a mentor, writer, coach, and sports consultant. 

His brand new book is The Sports Parent Solution: Transforming Parents from Obstacles to Allies. The book is a guide for coaches on how to better engage with parents and help them become a part of your team culture. 

If you’re looking to improve your coaching please consider joining the Hoop Heads Mentorship Program.  We believe that having a mentor is the best way to maximize your potential and become a transformational coach. By matching you up with one of our experienced mentors you’ll develop a one on one relationship that will help your coaching, your team, your program, and your mindset.  The Hoop Heads Mentorship Program delivers mentoring services to basketball coaches at all levels through our team of experienced Head Coaches. Find out more at hoopheadspod.com or shoot me an email directly mike@hoopheadspod.com

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram @hoopheadspod for the latest updates on episodes, guests, and events from the Hoop Heads Pod.

Have your pen and paper ready as you listen to this episode with J.P. Nerbun from Thrive On Challenge and the author of the new book “The Sports Parent Solution: Transforming Parents from Obstacles to Allies”

What We Discuss with JP Nerbun

• “Helping coaches implement strategies and methods and systems to improve their culture is one of my roles.”
• “You made a difference in my life as a parent, you helped me to be a better parent for my son.”
• “I never really thought about how my leadership and the way that I was engaging with my athletes and building a culture with my team, how it could actually impact parents and their role as a leader within their own home.”
• “Our influence extends beyond the people within our team.”
• Understanding your why and your values as a coach
• “When we sit down with parents, it’s really important for us to communicate our why, our philosophy, but it’s also really important to show how we’re going to live that out, how we’re going to bring that to life.”
• Proactive communication
• Having parents participate in a practice to get a feel for the players’ experience
• “The whole parent experience event is about bringing the parents a little bit closer to the team, a part of that experience.”
• “The further and further we keep them away, the more likely they’re really only in their son or their daughter’s corner.”
• Valentine’s Dinners
• “We’re using sports as a way to help bring parents and teenagers or young men and women together closer.”
• The benefits of the parent-athlete-coach conference
• How to put together a quality weekly newspaper
• Bringing parents into the locker room for the post game talk
• The importance of administrative support
• Setting boundaries for communication with parents
• Offering observations, not judgements when it comes to parent behavior

Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!

We’re excited to partner with Dr. Dish, the world’s best shooting machine! Mention the Hoop Heads Podcast when you place your order and get $300 off a brand new state of the art Dr. Dish Shooting Machine!

Prepare like the pros with the all new FastDraw and FastScout. FastDraw has been the number one play diagramming software for coaches for years, and now with it’s integrated web platform, coaches have the ability to add video to plays and share them directly to their players Android and iPhones via their mobile app. Coaches can also create customized scouting reports,  upload and send game and practice film straight to the mobile app. Your players and staff have never been as prepared for games as they will after using FastDraw & FastScout. You’ll see quickly why FastModel Sports has the most compelling and intuitive basketball software out there! In addition to a great product, they also provide basketball coaching content and resources through their blog and playbank, which features over 8,000 free plays and drills from their online coaching community. For access to these plays and more information, visit fastmodelsports.com or follow them on Twitter @FastModel.  Use Promo code HHP15 to save 15%

Your first impression is everything when applying for a new coaching job.  A professional coaching portfolio is the tool that highlights your coaching achievements and philosophies and, most of all, helps separate you and your abilities from the other applicants.

The key to landing a new coaching job is to demonstrate to the hiring committee your attention to detail, level of preparedness, and your professionalism.  Not only does a coaching portfolio allow you to exhibit these qualities, it also allows you to present your personal philosophies on coaching, leadership, and program development in an organized manner.

The Coaching Portfolio Guide is an instructional, membership-based website that helps you develop a personalized portfolio.  Each section of the portfolio guide provides detailed instructions on how to organize your portfolio in a professional manner.  The guide also provides sample documents for each section of your portfolio that you can copy, modify, and add to your personal portfolio.

THANKS, JP NERBUN

If you enjoyed this episode with JP Nerbun let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shoutout on Twitter:

Click here to thank JP Nerbun on Twitter

Click here to let Mike & Jason know about your number one takeaway from this episode!

And if you want us to answer your questions on one of our upcoming weekly NBA episodes, drop us a line at mike@hoopheadspod.com.

TRANSCRIPT FOR JP NERBUN – FOUNDER OF THRIVE ON CHALLENGE & AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK “THE SPORTS PARENT SOLUTION” – EPISODE 887

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here this morning without my co-host Jason Sunkle, but I am pleased to be joined for I believe the fourth time, JP Nerbun, author of the new book, The Sports Parent Solution. JP, welcome back.

[00:00:15] JP Nerbun: Hey Mike, awesome you’re back. Four times. That’s, that’s got to be a record almost or something.

[00:00:19] Mike Klinzing: Close. Yeah, it’s getting there. It’s close. So excited to have you on. We are going to discuss your new book talking about how coaches can better interact and bring parents into the fold and make them allies as opposed to something that you have to deal with and manage. Instead, we want to make those parents somebody that can be advocates for our program as opposed to adversaries.

So let’s start JP by just giving people a quick rundown on your background and then we’ll dive into the book.

[00:00:52] JP Nerbun: Yeah, Mike, I’m a leadership coach and a culture consultant. Those are kind of two distinct roles. Culture consultant for the last seven years. I’ve studied culture. And organizational and team culture.

And I’ve tried to develop tools and strategies learning from some of the best organizations and teams out there that other coaches, college level, high school level, youth level can implement to improve their culture. So helping coaches implement those strategies and methods and systems in place to improve their culture is one of my roles.

And our role is just that leadership coach role, which I’m just walking with coaches in their journey, helping them to take new perspectives, expand perspectives, and just work through some of the difficult decisions and complexities of leadership. Alright, so let’s

[00:01:39] Mike Klinzing: Alright, so let’s dive into your latest book, “The Sports Parent Solution.”

And as I read the book, the overwhelming theme that comes through to me that runs throughout the entire book is oftentimes as coaches, we look at parents as something that we have to overcome, that we have to deal with, that we view them as a problem, we view them as people that are going to bring interference to what we’re trying to do.

And instead, what your book tries to do is to sort of flip that script and say, no, that’s the wrong approach. The right approach is to bring parents into the program, invite them to become more a part of it, look for ways to engage them so that they become advocates for what you’re trying to do as opposed to adversaries that you have to overcome.

So, talk a little about the why behind the book and then we’ll dive into some of the specific techniques and things that coaches can do to really bring parents into the fold.

[00:02:41] JP Nerbun: Yeah, as I was going through writing my last book, The Culture System, there was a lot of stuff around parents and so much so that I recognized I needed to cut a lot, all of it out really, and leave it for another book because it was just getting that lengthy.

The parents are such a big component of it, but felt like I needed to write another book. So I had in mind and already the outline kind of built for this newest book, The Parents Solution. But a week after I’d published The Culture System, I actually got a text message from a parent that I’d even talked about in the book The Culture System as this problematic parent, this parent that challenged me and essentially almost ran me off the road with their car.

It was this really dramatic and painful moment for me as a coach, but like a week after that this dad hadn’t read that book, but just random texts, just essentially the core of this message was thank you. Thank you for being my son’s coach. No, we didn’t get along all the time. He doesn’t really apologize for running me off the road with his car, but just like, Hey, you made such a difference in my kid’s life.

And then he said something also that really struck me. He said, You made a difference in my life as a parent, you helped me to be a better parent for my son during his teenage years because you showed me what kind and firm tough discipline was and so that really left an imprint on me that I was like, man, I understand how we need to work with parents to support the athletes, right?  I always knew that. I never really thought about how my leadership and the way that I was engaging with my athletes and building a culture with my team, how it could actually impact parents and their role as a leader within their own home. And so it’s not to add the burden of leadership to coaches, but it’s just to maybe excite us in the fact that our impact, our influence extends beyond the people within our team.

And we need to remember that. So that’s one of the big reasons I wrote the book.

[00:04:45] Mike Klinzing: I know that the first couple chapters of the book talk about sort of what you described in the culture system, where as a coach, you have to first work on yourself and make sure that you are ready and able and willing to be a transformational leader. And so that’s something that I know we covered when we talked about the book last time and people can go into that with the culture system.

So let’s go ahead and just jump right to the coaching philosophy part of it and making sure as a coach that you a understand your own philosophy and then that you communicate that clearly to parents so that they have an expectation and understanding of how you’re going to be.

So, just talk a little bit about knowing your coaching philosophy.

[00:05:32] JP Nerbun: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s knowing our philosophy, knowing our system, right? Because those are two distinct things. Our philosophy is our mission, why we coach, it’s our values, what’s really important to us is a vision. What type of program are we trying to create here?

And it’s also some of our maybe core beliefs or core standards, non negotiables that we carry across our program. Those are much influenced by our philosophy, but our systems, our way of doing things, it’s how are we building our culture and I’m really obviously big in intentionality and us making sure that we have our entire system, our strategies, the methods, our procedures, the processes the way that we do things, the way that we run our program from how we recruit, to how we communicate playing time, to how we decide playing time, to how we discipline, to how we run team meetings, to how we do player development, all should be connected really back to our why as a coach and our values.

So when we sit down with parents, it’s really important for us to communicate our why, our philosophy, but it’s also really important to show how we’re going to live that out, how we’re going to bring that to life. And so this is where we need to be clear on the philosophy aspect, but also how we plan to build a culture that year and consistently.

So this is for a lot of our coaches, in that early meeting with parents, it’s spending time going into, Hey, this is how we decide playing time and communicate it. This is how we invest in the player development. We have these one on one meetings every so often with the player to check in.

We’re having these conversations. These are the questions we’re asking here. Here’s how we’re developing leadership. We’re running a leadership council group. All these little different things that we’re doing so often. I think parents don’t really understand why we do them, how we do them.

And when we bring them into that. They see our level of intentionality. It’s actually pretty inspiring for them and it’s pretty impressive. They usually are pretty impressed by it. So, that’s one big first step is just to know that we’re communicating the philosophy as well as our system.

[00:07:30] Mike Klinzing: There’s a great story that you have in the book about the value of being transparent and making sure that your parents understand the what and the why behind what you’re doing where coach. Had a player who didn’t do the things that they were supposed to do during warmups, goofing around, not focused, and terrible body language.

And then coach, so as a result of that, coach doesn’t play the player. Next morning, mom shows up at school with the kid. Tell me a little bit about what happened there and why it’s so important to be transparent.

[00:08:08] JP Nerbun: Yeah. I mean, that coach is a young enough coach. I think he’s probably in his late twenties.

And he was really sweating it here as he gets to the school and he sees this mother and the son sitting outside there. I mean, the coach had made the decision to not start that player, not play the player because the standard was, Hey, if you don’t come focused and ready to warm up, you could get dropped from the starting lineup.

Right. But this coach had also communicated that to the parents as well along the journey. And so it was also communicated after the game. This coach, I believe, sent an email or a message just saying, Hey, just want to let you be aware of what happened tonight. You don’t need to do anything on your end, but just wanting you as a parent to know why your son didn’t play today.

And that parent just came in with the son and was really just like this, he needs to apologize to you as a coach for how he embarrassed you and the team. And so it was really like one of these things where typically that becomes a moment where it’s a blowout for a lot of coaches. Coach makes a hard decision, drops the player, but it’s not communicated well beforehand as far as what the standard is in the program.

So it seems like, Oh, he’s picking on my son or my daughter. And then it’s not communicated afterwards as far as what happens. So the player, the parent only hears the player side of the story, but because the coach communicated upstream and downstream, the parent was able to not only buy in and accept the decision, but it reinforced the decision the coach made.

[00:09:34] Mike Klinzing: That proactive communication is something that I talk to so many coaches about is just, hey, if you can get ahead of things and you can build that relationship with the parent before there’s an issue, and you can make sure that they understand what that standard is so that when they’re able to see it in their own kid and As a coach, when you bring it to them and say, hey, here’s the standard, we all knew this was the standard, the standard wasn’t being met, it makes it much easier to have that difficult conversation if you’ve already built that relationship in advance.

And I know in the book that you talk about some different ways that you can sort of bring parents in terms of team building activities. One of the ones that I liked that I hadn’t heard before, or at least not in this forum, is to have parents come in and kind of go through a practice and have the players run the practice.

And to me, I thought, wow, that’s kind of an interesting idea when you think about all the parents who feel like they have such a wealth of knowledge about what goes on. And we all sit in the stands and look, I’m guilty of it at times with my own kids, right? I sit in the stands. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that?

And I love the line in the book where you talked about how Hey, maybe parents will understand that it’s not maybe as easy to remember the plays as they think it is when a kid messes up and like, Hey, how can this kid not know what they’re supposed to do? And so it just gives parents a taste of kind of what the kids get to do and have to go through.  And so just talk a little bit about why that’s so effective.

[00:11:07] JP Nerbun: It’s one of my favorite things to plan with coaches. I was actually just an hour before this was working with a coach that I’ve been doing this with for four or five years. And we’ve been running this parent experience event. There’s so much to it that is tailored each year to based upon kind of what part of the program are we really trying to help the parents see?

I mean, this coach, for instance, I mean, he’s this year, he’s going to bring the parents in. They’re going to have some donuts, some coffee. You know, players are going to be shooting around and the parents are going to be all ready to go and they’re going to actually hop in the practice. I think he might just have the dads there this year for this high school basketball team, but the dads are actually to be involved in the practice.

It’s going to be run the first 90 minutes will be a normal practice where, but the dads will be helping be passers. There’ll be rebounders. They might even break off and do a couple of shooting drills and they join in with the players. They’re going to have a coach take parents to try to run a play that they might install with the other team.

So they’re just getting to have to help them to have that entire experience. We’ve had entire practices. The players just run the entire practice. They designed the practice, run it. But this coach this year wanted to give them more of an experience of that high intensity environment. The type of communication we’re trying to coach our athletes on, not just general encouragement, but specific reminders and notifications on certain success criteria they set for each drill so that coach is doing that. And then they’ll have a scrimmage between the dads and the sons at the end of it. And they’re going to bring them in for an exercise clinic in 30 minutes.

He’s going to lay out his entire, the way they run offense, defense. How he plans to install it this year and develop it, why they do what they do. And he’s just really laying it all out for them. They’ll also take some moments to take the sons and the dads and take photos so that each dad gets a photo of their son, they’re all sweaty and they got a basketball, but they’re in front of the team logo, stuff like that.

So they really want to create this environment where parents get to experience and see and feel what it’s like to be a part of that team because the team culture is really special. This is year two of the program for this coach here. He started a new program and it really is a special culture that he wants those dads to like maybe experience.

And I think in a day, those dads will walk out. They’re going, man, I don’t know if I was ever a part of a team like that. That was unique. That was special. You know that and what that coach is doing with my son is special. So the whole parent experience event is about bringing the parents a little bit closer to the team, a part of that experience.

And the more often we can do that, the more likely that those fathers or even the mothers are going to be able to cheer on the team and cheer on other kids on the team. Cheer with the other parents because they’re going to have relationships and they’re going to have that connection to the team.

Whereas I think so often we, the further and further we keep them away, the more likely they’re really only in their son or their daughter’s corner.

[00:14:08] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think that’s a hundred percent right. And I think that the other thing that I liked that you talked about in the book, you had a lot of things about engaging the dads, obviously that parent player practice was geared towards the fathers, but you had the Valentine’s Day dinner with, with moms and in this case, their sons, but obviously it could work any different combination of how you wanted to do it. But just talk a little about that. I’ve heard of other coaches sort of doing that or, or helping kids to be able to facilitate.

You mentioned in there just helping, especially young men figure out just. What do, how do I behave on a date? What does that look like? Well, if I’m with my mom, I can kind of go through and, and learn sort of the ins and outs, but just talk a little bit about why that’s been so valuable.

[00:14:50] JP Nerbun: Yeah. I mean, these type of events are really trying to focus on parent appreciation.

And the Valentine’s dinner was one that was I learned from a coach named Tim Trendle out of Chicago area and we’ve replicated with so many other coaches, but what’s valuable there is like is to take these young men, get them dressed up. And then they write these poems to their mom and they have to stand in front of a room and read them and it’s just a really powerful, special day to take a pause in the basketball season, which Valentine’s Day is in February.

So it’s kind of like in this period where you’re kind of worn down. And what I think was really impactful is that sometimes we don’t recognize this, but the parents are actually pretty disconnected with their kids. They don’t see them that often. Maybe the communication is great. They’re teenage boys.

Or teenage girls and their relationships always not strong. They’re not great communicators. And so what we actually do is we use sports and I talk a lot about this in different ways to do this throughout the book, but we’re using sports as a way to help bring parents and teenagers or young men and women together closer.

And that really is powerful because you just think about the stress of parenting and these different points where we feel kind of isolated from our kids. Man, What if sports actually helped us to grow closer together? And we do some other things like the parent appreciation night as well too, which are just other ways to get athletes to be reflecting on their parents, what makes them special, what they appreciate about them, to be grateful.

And just those types of events really are amazing because of what they do for those relationships. And it’s the most important relationship in a young person’s life is that with their parent, right?

[00:16:27] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. And I think that when you start talking about that, right, you want sports as a parent, we all start out maybe with this grand philosophy of what we want sports to do for our kid in the day to day heat of what’s going on Especially as they go up levels of seriousness We tend to sort of burrow down into the details and we get bogged down by all these things that can make sports Stressful for both parents and for athletes, but I think it’s important kind of what you’re saying is when you utilized sports as a parent to help you to build your relationship with your kid and to sort of remember why you got them into sports in the first place.

It’s kind of hard to do. I think about that a lot as a teacher. There’s times where a class is driving you crazy. Kids are bugging you doing this and that and it’s the same thing as a coach, right? You sometimes forget. You get caught up in the very moment of what’s in front of you and you forget about that bigger picture.

Like, who am I impacting? How am I having an impact? And I think as parents, and then obviously as coaches, if we can help facilitate that for ourselves, for our parents, for our athletes, then we’ve really done something. And I think when I went through and read the book, obviously I am reflecting upon my own experiences, both as a coach and as a parent.

And one of the things that I really liked that I thought was something that to me would make the experience so much better for me as a parent, but also for my athletes. And then for I would think the coaches of my kids’ teams was the parent athlete coach conference because so often you’ll hear, Hey, you’re writing I met with my coach.

This is an athlete talking. I met with my coach and they went over my role and we talked about this and that and kind of what the season is going to look like. And then often as the parent, you’re left out of that conversation. And so you end up speculating. And then if you have a coach who maybe doesn’t communicate even to that degree, then you’re left with this void where you’re always kind of trying to interpret what did the coach mean here?

When this happened, what does that mean for the greater picture and all that? There’s just so much room for misinterpretation. And so, I really like the idea of the parent athlete coach conference. Tell me a little bit about how a coach could set something like that up and what you see as being the benefits.

[00:18:52] JP Nerbun: Yeah, so the benefit of some sort of conference where you bring the athlete, parent and coach together is that you establish a partnership and you create open lines of communication. So the benefits are multifaceted. If an athlete’s struggling with mental health, now you have conversations and the parent isn’t afraid to reach out, and the coach isn’t afraid to reach out to the parent when they see things going on that are of concern.

If there’s things going on with the athlete’s attitude or effort in practice, the coach just feels a little bit more open to communicate to the parents. The parents are more likely to communicate things of concern they’re noticing at home. There’s so many things that helps to fix the transparency issue around roles and playing time and all that stuff.

It’s a great opportunity for the coach just to come in and ask questions of the athlete. around what they’re for the athlete to share with the parent and the coach, what their goals are for the season, what they’re trying to work on, what they’re trying to improve. We really want the athlete to be the driver of the majority of this conversation.

And then there’s a more opportunity for the coach to shift that conversation to the parent and say, Hey, why do you want your son or daughter to play this sport? What do you hope they get out of it? What are your biggest concerns for your son or daughter in the next year or few years of their life?

And then to really when you do it in that type of setting early in the year, you’re actually able to kind of co-create some boundaries or some objectives or some reasons why that we want, they want their kid to be involved in sports. And oftentimes it’s about building resilience and it’s about having a positive attitude.

Being part of a team. So then when you go a couple months down the line and the players going through some adversity and they’re not getting the playing time they want, or they the team’s going through a losing stretch, it’s like, Hey, remember what we talked about back in October, November, right?

This is one of these opportunities. It’s just a great opportunity for them to grow in their character. So that conversation becomes the foundation for some potentially hard conversations that have to happen later on down the line, but we can just remind them back to what they said was most important to them as a parent in their athlete’s experience.

Some ways to do that, I mean, I’ve seen coaches with more time invested commitment. They’re doing actual home visits where they’re going to the homes of new athletes coming into their home at the high school level, collegiate level, same thing there’s something about going into someone’s home that is significant.

We’re also seeing just, Hey, here’s the first two weeks of the season. Optional to sign up if you would like to have a Parent athlete coach conference. Here’s the times you can sign up to just fill in some times. And I’ve seen people do it in the old kind of the parent teacher conference format of like, Hey, I’m staying late one day.

It’s three hours. And you can sign up for those 15 minute blocks in between that and parents just kind of roll in and roll out with their, with their sons or daughters. And maybe the coaches have some other shooting or practices or some sort of other event going on in the gym. So, you’ve seen a lot of different ways that people effectively can get this done, whether it’s in one day, a couple of weeks, or over the course of the summer.

[00:21:49] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it again comes back to being proactive. And having those conversations, as you said, if you can do that early in the season before you even played a game, now you’ve set some expectations. You’ve worked together on a plan. You’ve worked together on the why behind. The athlete being involved in that team and ultimately, as you said, if things don’t go the way that everybody expects, there’s an opportunity to go back and revisit that and say, Hey, okay, let’s look at what our thought process was back in November.

Now we’re here in January. How can we apply what we talked about in November? How can we apply that here in January? And it also goes if things are going well, right? Hey, we’re accomplishing some of these things that we talked about back in November. And so, I just think, again, looking at it from the parent perspective is the more communication that I can get from my coach, the less I have to fill in the blanks of what I think is going on.

And often we know, and like I said, I’m guilty of this at times. And I’m a person who kind of, I think, has a fairly decent understanding of what my role should be as a parent. And I’ve obviously coached a lot. And so even for me, sometimes that’s difficult when there isn’t as much communication. And yet I look at parents who maybe don’t have the same level of experience that I do and think, man, how are they, how are they managing these situations when they don’t have nearly the experience level that I have?

And so I just think that proactive communication to me is so important. It’s a theme that obviously you touch on throughout the book. I know one of the things that coaches use all the time to communicate with their families and I would say not necessarily most coaches, but there are a lot of coaches that send out that weekly parent email.

And I thought you did a really good job in the book of laying out some of the items that a coach should, could include in A weekly email to their parents, just to be able to better serve and communicate to those parents what’s going on in a inside and outside the program. So I don’t know if you want to share a couple of those things that are part of what you think of as a quality weekly email that’s going to actually provide benefit to those parents who are reading it.

[00:24:05] JP Nerbun: Yeah, whatever you do, it’s going to go beyond just where we got to be and what we have to bring, it’s got to go beyond just the schedule for the week, right? There needs to connect back to the things that you said were really important. And so sometimes it’s celebrating a few players.

Maybe you have a weekly hardest worker or some sort of something connected to your core values, some sort of award there. But if you do that you’re really trying to give evidence, specific evidence that says, Hey Johnny or this player, she did this throughout the week. And she was elected by the leadership council as the player of the week or the hardest worker of the week or whatever it is.

So it’s just something to celebrate, celebrate the good that’s going on in your program. That’s a big component of it. I like to see something like that in there. We like to see a bit of effort of like a little scouting report on upcoming opponents. And just helping to give people some context about, Hey, we’re going to this opponent.

They’re really good at the press. So we’re working on the press this week. You get a little tactical insight. You look at previous opponents in previous games. It helps to reframe the story. So you might be, Oh man, you lost to this team that was like two and eight, but well, they just actually got their best two players back from football.

And they’re actually going to be rolling here pretty good. And either way, you’re able to maybe kind of reframe that story in a way of like tough loss or a great win, but this is what we’re working or this is what we’re learning from it. And so  it’s honestly kind of like, I feel for a lot of high school coaches.

It’s an opportunity to have that press conference you got the intent to tell the story of things. So always like to include that there as well as an opportunity just to thank parents the parents that have been helping out. And we have sometimes at our college teams, the captain or someone on the leadership council, they might write a blurb about things they’re doing during the week or how things are going for the team.

If you do stuff around character development, leadership development during the week, letting the parents know what types of things you’re focusing on there, or just the message for the team that week if it’s a message around resilience or message around competition, or if you got some sort of team building activity or some speakers or some community service that you got going on, like, why are we doing this?

What are we hoping to teach these young people. So you’re allowing the parents to hear the messages there so they can kind of reinforce those throughout the team or throughout the week with their son or their daughter.

[00:26:32] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I love the idea of giving the kids an opportunity to share something within that because one is a good practice for kids to be able to write something that’s actually going to be consumed by And then I think it also helps for parents to hear from athletes on the team and especially athletes maybe that aren’t their own kids so they get a perspective because clearly you’re spending more time talking to your own.

son or daughter and getting their perspective on it, but you don’t often get a chance. I know I don’t. I’m not sitting down very often and talking with the other kids on the team to be able to get their perspective on, Hey, how do you think things are going or this or that? And so I think to be able to hear that from all those athletes that can be a part of that newsletter, to me, that’s something that I think is tremendously, tremendously valuable.

Another thing that I liked that you have in the book that I guess I know that. There are some coaches that I’ve coached with in the past that when I read this section, I’m like, yeah, I don’t think that coach would go for that. And then I’m with, then there’s been other coaches that I’ve worked with that I, yeah, I could see this coach totally buying into this particular aspect of what you talked about in the book.

And that is inviting parents to come in. And I, one of the things was talk, talking about them coming into practice, right. And the coaches have different feelings about a. We want to invite parents in. Hey, we don’t want any parents in. It’s a closed practice and coaches have different philosophies on that and you can maybe touch on that in a second.

But I also thought that it was interesting talking about the pregame meetings and the postgame talk and sometimes having parents in and you had some quotes in the book from parents who were invited into those particular events, lack of a better way of saying it, and just how impactful they felt it was to be in the locker room after A big victory and sort of share that experience with their athletes.

So talk about just the coaches you’ve worked with and how they feel or how they approach thinking about bringing parents into those things where typically we think of that being right. The locker room is sort of this sacred place where it’s The coaches, the team, the players, it’s sort of our place and we don’t want outsiders in there.

Not that a parent is completely outsider, but just talk about how do coaches approach that when you discuss those ideas with them?

[00:28:55] JP Nerbun: Yeah. I have an ice hockey coach I work with and a couple of parents were, he had heard them chirping or talking from the stands. Kind of communicating things against what he was trying to teach.

And so they had this big, long road trip and they’re a Canadian team. They went down to North Dakota and they traveled there and they’re playing over the weekend. And he said, you know what, it’s Friday night, let’s just do our film session in this big meeting room and let’s invite the parents in just so they can hear a little bit about what we’re trying to focus on and some of our language.

And then I did a little X’s and O’s clinic for the parents there. So it was just one moment just to bring them in of like, Hey, this is what we’re trying to work on the game. So parents could actually reinforce the right thing. So that’s one approach there I’ve seen at the youth level Hey, we worked on, I mean, I try to do with my daughter’s team.

It’s not necessarily part of the meeting, but I try to bring the players over and finish our circle at the end by the sideline where the parents are standing to pick up the kids and say, Hey, we worked on these things in practice this week. You know, this is what we’re going to really be working on in the game tomorrow.

And then I’ll follow up with a message to parents and like, Hey, we’re really, we’re working on these things. So if you’re shouting for things, these are the types of things we want to be shouting for. But probably the most powerful thing is just, yeah, I’d say after a big win or a tough loss. Just inviting the parents to come on in and being there that emotional moment.

The coaches that I’ve had that had and challenged to do that in the past, it’s been very scary for them, but the benefits have been immense because one team last year, they won the conference championship in Wisconsin. It was this great moment. The parents just stood in the back.

And the coaches delivered this message around their pride and how hard the guys work. And it wasn’t just for the scoreboard. It was about how they came together late in the season. The parents got to hear that message and it was a really good message to hear. The other coach I had do that, that did it last year, they lost a really tough match kind of in their season a little bit early, but they had a great year.

They worked hard. They’d grown and improved so much. And the parents were able to hear his message. And then he actually did something I didn’t encourage him to do, but he did it. Anyways, he just turned to parents and said, Hey, any parent have anything else to add? And yeah, a couple of our parents stepped up and chimed in and just said how proud they were of those boys and how hard they went worked and how much they enjoyed watching them play that season.

And it just became this really, really powerful moment in both contexts to maybe help get some of the messaging right around how we want to process that win or that loss. About what was most important, as well as just, once again, just not every day, but it’s just one opportunity to bring the parents a little bit closer to this so they feel like they’re part of that experience.

[00:31:35] Mike Klinzing: I can see the power in that, and I can also see, like I said, that some coaches would be resistant to sort of breaking that locker room, just seal and making sure that when you bring the parents in that you’re getting that result and that communication and that ability to bring them in and have them be a part of it and experience that with them.

I can see where when you do that, that it can have a huge emotional connection for those parents. Cause it’s just a place that we don’t often get to be. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the locker room with any of my kids and their coaches pregame, post game at any point. And so the opportunity to kind of sit in and you hear it secondhand from your athlete.

And we all know that if you ever played a game of telephone, that the story that you get coming out may not be exactly the story that you see when you’re in there. And so I think that here’s definitely power and benefit to that. The last section of the book, you talk a little bit about just how, as a coach, that you have to enforce your boundaries when you want to communicate with parents.

But occasionally there’s that parent that just doesn’t quite recognize or understand

[00:33:05] JP Nerbun: Yeah, I mean, I think before the season gets going, really sit down with your administrators and have a conversation around your procedures, your processes, and how you’re going to enforce those boundaries because at certain points, like we had a situation last year, were an athletic director that we support, he had a coach get some really bullying, abusive messages from a parent.

And so that administrator said, listen, you no longer have the right to meet with us and you no longer have the right or the privilege to watch your child play. And so until the end of the season, you’ve lost that privilege. So it’s great to have administrative support and what that looks like in every context is different.

And I go into that in depth in the book, but if I was just to give coaches kind of one suggestion in these meetings is if there’s parent behaviors where it’s their behavior in the stands, you’re sensing stuff at home. Car ride home. The second a kid comes out of the locker room, they’re just getting absolutely drilled.

You know, whatever. You just hear there’s a parent issue whether it’s with the athlete or they’re undermining you as a coach, just calling the meeting, sitting down. And then my first thing would be to share it as an observation, not as a judgment. Hey, I’m noticing this, or I’m seeing this, and this is kind of what seems to be the effect.

What do you think? And just ask that question. So that shared observation and then try to understand, like, you should walk away from this conversation, learning, not just the parent learning, like I think when we offer feedback, like we should also learn, like we’re open, we’re listening. So what does the parent see?

Sometimes just sharing that observation and sharing it lightly, the parents like, Oh man, I fall in the worst habits, dah, dah, dah, dah.  We’ve had that happen with a lot of situations with parents and coaches. Other times they may not see it. They might be defensive, but if we share it as an observation rather than a judgment, then sometimes it doesn’t land as hard.

And so you ask questions, you try to help bring self awareness. And then at certain points, you might just need to say, Hey, share your perspective and lean in there and share some feedback. And those can be hard and difficult conversations and what the boundaries and are, as far as consequences, if they continue those behaviors depend on everyone’s circumstances, but it’s worth leaning in and having those hard conversations, but you can’t do those.

You can’t have that conversation if you haven’t done all the other stuff or some of the other stuff that we’ve talked about when it comes to that parent athlete coach conference, the establishing the culture as far as communicating your philosophy, your system, and bringing them into the, some of the team experiences.

When you’ve done all that, you’ve built relationship, you’ve built up credit. Now you can actually step in and have that conversation that you would never have had a year prior, right? Because you’ve built up the credit. Now you can go in there and you can take that deposit.

[00:35:51] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Before we get out, JP, I want to give you a chance to share how people can find the book, how they can reach out and connect with you. And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[00:36:02] JP Nerbun: Yeah, man, the Sports Parents Solution, you can search it from Amazon or you can head over to my website, tocculture.com click on the top link, there’ll be books and you can just find it there. So yeah, Sports Parents Solution.

[00:36:15] Mike Klinzing: JP, I cannot  thank you enough for taking the time to jump on with us this morning. I would highly recommend anybody who’s listening, who’s part of our audience, go out and pick up the Sports Parents Solution.

If you are a coach, you’re going to find a bunch of valuable tips in there that can help you to build the kind of culture that you want and to be able to engage your parents and bring them into your program so that they become advocates for what you’re trying to do, which is where we all want to be.

So again, JP, thanks and to everyone out there thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.

​