How To Coach Girls by Mia Wenjen and Alison Foley. Did you know that 70% of all kids quit organized sports by the age of 13, with girls quitting at 6x the rate of boys?
Alison Foley, Boston College’s Women’s Head Soccer Coach, and Mia Wenjen, parenting blogger at PragmaticMom.com, help coaches — both parent volunteer and professional — crack the code of how to keep girls in sports.
As a mother of two daughters who played a lot of sports, Mia provides personal accounts to illustrate issues discussed throughout the book. Alison, also a mother of a young female athlete, has hands on advice from coaching young women professionally for more than two decades.
Volunteer parents and experienced coaches alike will find invaluable advice on creating a successful team that motivates girls to stay in sports beyond the middle school years. Twenty-two chapters cover major issues, including how to pick captains, the importance of growth mindset, issues around body image and puberty, as well as the challenges of coaching your own daughter.
In addition, fifteen professional coaches from a range of sports, including former Olympian athletes, give their advice on what girls need from a coach to allow them to flourish in sports, and most importantly, have fun. This is a hands-on manual to help coaches keep girls in sports!
PickyKidPix is a coxswain at CRI and is highly motivated to improve so that she can cox in college. I was a coxswain at Radcliffe, back in the day when they had a Freshman program, and the minimum weight for women’s coxs was 100 pounds. Now it’s 110 pounds. Things have changed in college women’s rowing…
I’ve become well versed in teen concussions after my oldest, Grasshopper and Sensei, had four concussions over a period of fifteen months from club volleyball. Also, PickyKidPix had a soccer teammate with two severe concussions; her older sister had a concussion so bad that she had to quit soccer altogether. I’ve teamed up with that…
When PickyKidPix did martial arts with her siblings a few years, Chun Kuk Do, it did not come naturally to her. That’s weird because she’s very athletic. Now, after doing kickboxing and boxing with her, I realize it was the martial art style that didn’t quite suit her. She’s not good at memorizing sequences of…
Coaching girls soccer players is different from boys, the Boston Breakers argue in their Kickstarter project, Beautiful.
Do cheaters ever win? Teaching kids lessons about sportsmanship and fair play and why it’s so important.