Every coach has "that kid"—the 10-year-old who dominates everything. Here's the brutal truth: most quit before 16. We've confused early physical development with talent, creating systems that celebrate genetic lottery winners while overlooking future champions.

Three Key Points:

* Early physical dominance is often just advanced physical development

* Character and work ethic predict long-term success better than natural ability

* Talent identification programs consistently fail because they focus on the wrong things

That record-breaking 12-year-old? Probably just hit puberty first. The overlooked kid working twice as hard? They'll make the Olympic team.

Real talent isn't what you see at 10—it's working when no one's watching, bouncing back from failure, and choosing the difficult path consistently.

Self-reflection question: Are you developing the "talented" athletes or investing in the ones showing true character?

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After 30 years in elite sport, I've watched coaches worship spreadsheets more than athletes. The periodization obsession has created program deliverers instead of human developers—coaches who can't adapt when their beautiful plan meets messy reality.

Three Key Points:

* Periodization creates inflexible coaches who can't adapt to real athletes

* The best athletes succeed despite their training programs, not because of them

* Human beings aren't machines that respond predictably to predetermined inputs

Your athletes aren't lab rats—they're complex humans with emotions, stress, and biology that changes daily.

Self-reflection question: When did you last throw out your training plan because your athlete needed something different?

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Welcome to Sports Thoughts Story Time. As a species we humans are at our best when we’re connecting with each other through story-telling. Story telling allows us to share more than the facts: it’s our opportunity to share our feelings, our emotions, our wisdom and our learning with others. Stories allow us to share our successes, our failures, our joys and our fears. Stories help us to learn and grow. This space - Sports Thoughts Story Time is where I’ll share some of the stories I’ve experienced in a lifetime of sport.

This week - Finding Your Coaching Why and Why It Matters.

I do a lot of workshops, training sessions and learning events where we work with coaches through the concept of “why” - i.e. helping coaches discover their reason - their “why” for coaching.

This is important, because once your know your why - the what, the how and the when are relatively simple.

In this week’s Story Time, I share a story of working with a New Zealand Rugby Coach and how his why - his motivation for coaching - is the sort of why that can move mountains.

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It’s time sport took in a breath of fresh air…..

Why the Pathway Failed - simply the Pathway assumes that every child who starts playing sport wants to be an elite performer

Contrast this with reality: most kids just want to have fun, make friends, and enjoy the experience.

What the Pathway Gets Wrong: it turns sport into a selection and elimination process and it creates a narrow definition of "success" based solely on performance.

And perhaps worst of all, it undervalues the importance of the actual sporting experience to kids, to families and to the community

The Sports Experience Model (SEM)

The SEM as a fundamentally different approach for sport

It prioritizes creating quality experiences for all participants, not just the "talented few"

It measures success by engagement, enjoyment, and lifelong participation, not just medals

Wayne Goldsmith

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to Sports Thoughts Story Time. As a species we humans are at our best when we’re connecting with each other through story-telling. Story telling allows us to share more than the facts: it’s our opportunity to share our feelings, our emotions, our wisdom and our learning with others. Stories allow us to share our successes, our failures, our joys and our fears. Stories help us to learn and grow. This space - Sports Thoughts Story Time is where I’ll share some of the stories I’ve experienced in a lifetime of sport.

This week - Tennis and Crayons.

Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher. You hand out a big box of brighly coloured crayons and some paper to every student. They pick up a crayon from the box and just as they’re about to draw something silly and funny like a horsey or a rainbow or a puppy - you stop them and say, “OK. Everyone listen to me. You need to hold your crayon exactly as I do - so that when you become a brain surgeon, you’ll know how to hold your scalpel”.

Pretty dumb huh.

So ask yourself, why - when a 7 year old kicks a football for the first time, instead of just letting them kick and have fun with a ball, that we make them do drills, patterns, structures and systems?

Why do we treat every kid who jumps into a pool as if they’re going to be the next Michael Phelps?

Just let them play. Let them discover. Let them be kids.

In this week’s Story time I tell you about an experience with Tennis - or rather with a Management Group conducting a review for Tennis Australia - and how it led to me hearing some of the most insightful thoughts I’d ever heard about sport.

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to Sports Thoughts Story Time. As a species we humans are at our best when we’re connecting with each other through story-telling. Story telling allows us to share more than the facts: it’s our opportunity to share our feelings, our emotions, our wisdom and our learning with others. Stories allow us to share our successes, our failures, our joys and our fears. Stories help us to learn and grow. This space - Sports Thoughts Story Time is where I’ll share some of the stories I’ve experienced in a lifetime of sport.

This week - The Power of Choice.

In his famous book, psychiatrist *Viktor Frankl wrote that the greatest power any human can develop, is the power to choose how to respond to the things that happen to them - or that are happening around them.

This is a story about a young triathlete who had a broken leg - and how I taught him the power of choice.

Enjoy.

*Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/080701429X

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Five things you need to know about kids and early shows of talent:

* What parents say versus what they really mean about their "talented" child can be very different.

* The cold truth: There are no ten-year-old champions.

* Development isn't linear - the talented 10-year-old might simply be physically mature for their age

* What really matters: Is your child developing independence, resilience, and a healthy relationship with competition?

* Love, value and accept your kids for who they - regardless of their sports performance. Win or lose - it does not matter. Love them - make the experience of sport joyful - and they’ll do the rest.

Wayne Goldsmith

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Five things you need to know about Coaching, Teaching and Parenting “Inquisitiveness”:

* As athletes develop, one of the greatest attributes they can learn is that of Inquisitiveness.

* Inquisitiveness is an athlete asking - of themself - questions that begin with - “I wonder….” - e.g. I wonder what would happen if I…..”, “I wonder if I’d do it better if I….”

* Inquisitive athletes progress faster than those relying on natural ability as they become personally invested in - and take responsibility for their own athletic destiny. If it is to be - it is up to me!

* Five practical ways parents can develop inquisitiveness (ask better questions, model curiosity, celebrate learning, etc.)

* There are some specific “car ride home” conversation starters that develop this quality, e.g. ("What's something you figured out today?” and “What’s something new you tried today?”)

Wayne Goldsmith

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Five things you need to know about “THE CAR RIDE HOME”:

* The car ride home is one of the most critical moments in youth sports development and sports parenting.

* What's happening emotionally with your child after competition (complex feelings that are hard to process) - makes the car ride a very difficult experience for sporting parents to know what to say - and - just as importantly - what not to say.

* Common parent responses that backfire ("It's okay, you did your best" / "Don't worry about it") - although well intentioned, often only make you - the parent feel good.

* The championship approach: Say nothing, just listen; when they do speak, adopt a less-is-more approach.

* Have a car ride home strategy - BEFORE the car ride home - so you know what to say and do whether they win or lose.

Wayne Goldsmith

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Five things you need to know about the Talent Worship Trap:

* We all worship physical talent - and physical talent as an indicator of peak performance potential is over-rated.

* There’s a stark contrast between what spectators think drives success (talent, size, speed) versus what many elite athletes and coaches actually attribute their success to (hard work, commitment, resilience, values, consistency, determination, respect, honesty, integrity etc.)

* Talent worship creates a harmful illusion that success is predetermined at birth - when the reality is that the factors that can lead to success can be taught, can be coached, can be parented.

* What appears as "natural talent" is usually the result of specific choices made consistently over time by athletes who have learnt the “power of choice” - and who have figured out that it’s the choices they make that determine their athletic destiny.

* The great news….if you or your child or your athlete or your student have even been labelled - UN-TALENTED - who cares!!! You can learnt all you need to know to become as successful as you choose to be!!

Wayne Goldsmith

Sports Thoughts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.