"You can't yell at kids anymore"

I will say there is far less you can say to kids in general now than when I started in 99. On average, kids will just quit more now.

You certainly can't say the kind of things that got said to me in my HS playing career in 90-93.

I don't say insults but I have cussed the situation. I mean, I just wonder why people didn't freak out about things they do now.

because of THIS




You used to be able to be direct and point out errors and DEMAND kids get right or else

You simply can't do that in today's world. You can be direct and point out errors today, but it REQUIRES endless stroking and coddling to buffer it.

Why? I honestly believe its because we have a bunch of boys being raised like moody little girls, thinking they need to be validated at every turn.

Long story short, everything you're seeing, all the opposition to leadership, all the fighting progress you encounter is borne out of unhealthy/incorrect processing of your environment

measure these kids' interpretation of any given event with this road map and you'll have your answer



If you're honestly equating "loud volume" to "aggressive reprimand", then have fun with your strawman

Coach, but what about his feeeeelingssss...

I think there are two different things going on in your coaching and teaching, there is yelling and then there is screaming. 

I too am very loud, and often told that I can be heard throughout campus during practice, I also am very loud in the classroom (as you are) I get excited and enjoy doing so. To me, this is yelling and is still acceptable. Moreover, you can yell and point out negatives when you do it. You can yell, "Johnny get your eyes out of the backfield and on the receiver you are covering or he will beat you." Heck, you can even add on there, "do it right or I will find someone who will."

Screaming on the other hand is yelling in a demeaning way, it tends to be in a way that tries to scare the player into changing his actions or behavior through the act of screaming (as if the coach is losing his control and will harm the player). Screaming often times comes with being demeaning and insulting- not in a sarcastic way either. 

Screaming is not really accepted in society anymore nor are the attitudes attached with it; that being written there are still plenty of screamers out there. Often times they justify it by claiming they are just, "toughening the kids up." Which I find weird because I have never been screamed at in such a way in all my life except when I played football.

I don't think this has anything to do with kids being tougher; rather societal norms stating people in authority shouldnt demean or attack others, and studies showing that people tend to no perform better when they are being screamed at

I agree with brophy and larrymoe in that more kids will quit today when yelled at. I don't know if toughness is the right word, but I will say there are more kids today who aren't capable of handling criticism, especially public criticism, effectively than in the past. I never recall ANYBODY quitting any sport when I grew up despite having multiple coaches who would yell at us and criticize us constantly.

For example, "Jesus Christ catch the BALL!!" was yelled in my direction more than a few times. I never had a thought of quitting because I had experienced that type of criticism all the time growing up from my parents, youth coaches, teachers, relatives, etc. I think there was a huge push for nurturing, support, and positive reinforcement through the last 20 years or so that has given us this culture now in certain places. Some kids don't grow up with criticism and shaming so they don't know how to cope when it happens later. I've heard many players after getting yelled at say "Coach __ doesn't like me," to which I ALWAYS respond, "If Coach __ really didn't like you or care about you he would just ignore you."

That said, I'm a part-time teller. I pick my kids/moments when I think it will be most effective, but my natural instinct isn't to yell. It's just not my personality and I don't believe in faking it.

I think you are onto something about kids being as tough now as they were years ago.  And I aplogize to everyone in advance that I'm probably going to make this a long post.  haha


I may think about it differently than you are while you say it, though.  When I think of it, I think that kids today have every single capability that kids did 15 years ago to soldier through a good screaming, ripping from an authority figure.  BUUUUUTTT.  Increasingly, every single day, month, year, they are being told more and more that they should never have to deal with such a thing happening to them.  As such, they never learn to react in the correct manner to being told that they have done wrong and they never learn how to use TOUGHNESS for anything.  
This may just be my area of the country, so forgive me if I'm way off for anybody else's area.  And when I say toughness, I don't mean a kid's ability to stand tough through constant berating from a parent OR ANYONE, because I'm NOT in any way saying that that is okay.  I don't know why I remember this, but once, I was about 12 years old, and I made a smart-@$$ remark to a teacher when I shouldn't have.  My mom was NOT worried AT ALL about my explanation of the story.  She actually took off work early the day after I told her of this punishment and came to the school and grabbed me from my path towards my bus and took me inside to find the teacher I had offended and told the teacher that this WOULD NOT happen again, forced me to apologize, and was actually in tears as we left because her son had done something so disrespectful.  

She could have taken my side.  She didn't.  haha.  Instead, she let me know that I still wasn't too old to worry about my dad getting home and the whipping that would ensue.  haha.  

She let me know very quickly that that was not accepted.  

In fact, when I got old enough to play at my high school (about 15 years ago), she had heard the stories of the coach who started the program back in the 70's grabbing players by the facemask and twisting it around so much that he was screaming at their face while ALSO screaming through their earhole, and her advice when I was heading off for the first day of practice (with a different coach since he had retired already at that point) was that if I had done something bad enough and so many times in a row to make a coach reprimand me in that way, I OUGHT NOT behave in that manner anymore if I didn't want the same thing to happen to me.  

A few years ago, I was finishing my degree with my semester of student teaching.  I gave a girl a "demerit."  It was a very simple thing.  It just meant she couldn't be a part of the fun day at the end of the 9 weeks and would instead sit in a "study hall" situation as her punishment.  She was furious.  I soon found out that her mother was furious, too.  I was at the parent/teacher conference and that mother told my supervising teacher that everything would be great for her daughter if I would stop picking on her.  I thought at this point I had the upper hand.  I told her mother exactly the way that she had acted disrespectfully to me (an authority figure) and I said that I had told her I was 25 years old at the time (not 13, like this girl) and would STILL not talk to an authority figure in that manner.  I thought the mother would, at that point, after hearing MY explanation of the events, be on my side and say that her daughter had told her a lie about how the whole thing went down.  I WAS WRONG haha.  She still was on her daughter's side.  


I recently was at a summer practice to prepare for the next football season.  Let's say we had 40 kids at the practice.  In our state, we are only allowed to have a few practices that involve thud hitting.  I had approximately 12-15 kids who were LB's to fill the three LB spots in our scrimmage at the end of practice.  This is June and practice starts in August in our state and we won't make decisions about starters until at least August 15.  I call all LB's to me, they form a group, I tell three of them randomly to play LB and the rest to get mixed in on offense so we can try to get a "best on best" situation for the scrimmage.  IMMEDIATELY, there's a kid that gets pulled into play guard on offense and starts doing every body signal possible to tell me that he's unhappy that he isn't playing LB first, in front of every other LB candidate, ASAP.   Because it is supposed to be a "DEFENSIVE" scrimmage, all he has to do at guard is look at a paper being held up in front of him to know which defensive player he's supposed to block, for the offensive play to be run properly.  He has choices.  He could decide that he would perform so well on offense that I have no choice but see how well he is doing his assignments on offense and then decide to put him in the starting rotation on defense since he acts like a guy who will do his assignment no matter what it takes.  

Instead, he waits until we are about 3 plays into scrimmage to see me and say, "Hey Brown, am I gonna play Linebacker today or what?" in exactly as snotty an attitude as you can imagine.  I have been making it a point to not snap until August--kids are learning a new program with a new head coach (recently hired), but I want desperately to snap at this terribly inappropriate situation and use it to explain that selfishness on defense drives me to the point of choking people.  I'm quite certain that I'll be called in to explain myself in the near future.   

So, to get back to the original post, I have found that you can act the same way you did many years ago, but now you have to worry about whether some parent, who doesn't love their child enough to teach them basic manners, will try to go to a school board meeting and act like you are a NAZI just because you punished her son/daughter in the most miniscule way possible.  

Now we have an age group of kids who are unable to realize what it means to be a TEAM player and they try to do other things to make it seem like they understand the situation fully!!!

Forgive me for playing devil's advocate, but why SHOULD kids stand around and endure verbal abuse? To "build character" or "show they're a man"? If I had a boss who did that to me, I'd walk out too. Why should kids put up with it?

You'd want your supervisor to tell you when you make a mistake (and, if necessary, be a resource to fix it) without them making you feel an inch tall. Treat your players how you would like to be treated. That's not some new age {censored}, that's been around since Adam.

There is a difference between yelling or talking loudly and being demeaning. I've been yelled at, did I like it, no, but I busted my butt so it wouldn't happen again. Now, if they had also been demeaning I might have cleaned their clock, but again I probably wouldn't. You have to be able to work with people with different personalities. I am afraid, when these kids that cant handle yelling or being corrected, will have a lot of hard lessons in life that they may not be able to overcome for a lack of fortitude.

The one thing that I have done in the past and am trying to do even more now is when I yell or correct a player I aways try to remember to tell them personally or the team in general...do you think us as coaches are correcting you because we want to hurt you or help you?

I have yet to hear anyone say "to hurt me/us". They may be thinking it but they don't say it. And....if they are thinking it then all the more reason to clarify why we as coaches said what we said or reacted the way we did.

Yesterday was working w/ a couple of soph. DL who are just awful. One of them has some potential but is lazy. I really started getting on them yesterday for not applying what we work on. Well, eventually they started improving their performance and then I praised them like crazy. I could tell that the praise and the improved results changed their demeanor towards me and the practice in general as the day finished. 

In the beginning I could tell they thought I was just being grumpy but by the end the light started to come on some.

And just for the record, I didn't praise them like crazy to "nurse their wounds" I was genuinely surprised/pleased that they improved greatly over a series of plays. That's the other thing that I think is HUGE., being GENUINE. IMO kids can tell the difference between a cranky bully and genuine passion. Genuine passion has a tone of "we're in this together" bullying on the other hand is just that.

JMO of course.

In a game early last season we were playing terrible in the first half. My DC and I said their play was embarrassing the standards of the program. Parents complained because some of the kids felt bad we were embarrassed. I had to meet with the AD AND superintendent about it.

Ironically some of the dads were acting like clowns embarrassing themselves in the stands all game. But that is ok I guess.

I like to be passionate about what I am doing and sometimes that means that I get loud. All of the players know that I truly care for them and I am trying to make them better. That doesn't mean that I put them down and ridicule them. I am probably harder on the "star" players than I am on the "JV" guy. Be honest with them at all times and sometimes we don't like what we hear but that is life. Nobody is perfect. At the end of the day it is all about loving them up. We all have days where we aren't at our best.

This is fantastic.

And true.

You can rip kids. I do, just how I'm wired. But I don't think it can be all you do. I'm gonna go nuts on a busted Coverage or poorly executed tackle, but I might meet you at the numbers after a pick six with a chest bump.

Our kids know that I'm a hard egg. Probably rubs some the wrong way but there is no one who will do more for them on or off the field. I want our kids to have the best of everything, gear, equipment, coaching, but in return I expect kids to do what they're taught. No excuses. I don't care if it's 7on7, spring ball, playoff game etc. I expect kids to do what they're taught and when they don't they're going to hear about it.

Every staff needs a guy that kids think might be a little nuts. Can't have a staff full though imo.