In the last 10 years, youth sports have grown by 55%, which means nearly 130 million children across the nation participate in an athletic activity.
Former NFL quarterback Drew Brees, who’s coached his four children — Baylen, 17, Bowen, 15, Callen, 13, and Rylen, 11 — believes youth sports can teach children many important life skills. He shared four of those with Parents.com.
The Power of Teamwork
“This is where I think youth sports is so vital in our society, in our communities — it teaches you how to work with others,” Brees told Parents. “Everyone plays a role in the success of the team, and that applies to every aspect of life, no matter what you go on and do. You’re not going to necessarily always play the role that you want on the team, and yet, everyone’s counting on you to do your job to help the team be successful.”
Building Coping Mechanisms
Children are not going to play great every time they step on the field or court. Sports teach them the value of perseverance and overcoming adversity.
“Overcoming all those things and having to work through them, you develop coping mechanisms. You develop ways to talk to yourself, ways to kind of move on,” Brees said. “These are all things that apply to every aspect of life, and it’s really hard to replicate that or teach that anywhere else.”
The Need to be Prepared
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Brees doesn’t mean just be prepared for a certain play or to make sure your children have all their gear. He means to be prepared in all aspects of the game. That includes recovery.
“As a professional athlete, every week you’re having to recover. It’s really a race to recover from Sunday to Sunday,” he explained. “The more aware you are of your body and how it responds to different things, and then how to get it back to peak performance and peak level, that’s vital. That’s our job.”
Diversification Matters
Brees does not recommend children play just one sport year-round, and for good reason.
Studies show that almost 70% of children drop their favorite sport before they turn 13.
“It’s going to cause burnout, and honestly, it just causes resentment,” Brees explained. “You begin to fall out of love with the sport that you should just be dying to want to play.”
Brees encouraged parents to allow their kids to play as many sports as they can to allow for optimal growth and development for the total athlete.
“The more competitive situations you can be in, the more teams that you can be a part of, the more situations that you can encounter, the more that you learn,” he shared. “And so many of these sports are complementary with one another. You’re not doing the same movement over and over again. You’re doing all these multiple athletic movements that just kind of log into your memory bank and become part of the myelin sheath around your nervous system that just help you continue to play for a very, very long time.
“The studies show, overwhelmingly, that you become a better total athlete and a more long-term athlete by playing multiple sports as opposed to specializing too soon,” Brees added.
The NFL Hall of Fame quarterback calls coaching his children “one of my greatest joys in life,” but he does work to make sure he doesn’t put too much pressure on them.
“At times, I have to overly police myself with my overzealousness during a game,” he said, per PEOPLE. “Basically what I tell them is, ‘I don’t care about the result of today. All I want to see, I want to see effort. I want to see great effort. And it’s just such a blessing to be able to play, to be able to be with your friends, to be able to play this sport. And I just wanna see effort. I wanna see you having fun.'”
Whether it’s teamwork, resilience, preparation or the value of playing multiple sports, Brees’s lessons reflect what youth sports at their best can offer the millions of kids who play them: not just athletic development but life skills that last well beyond the final whistle.
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