Positive Coaching Alliance is making the call for change

Gary Massey has seen youth basketball coaches wrestle each other to the ground during a dispute.

During his tenure as president of the Stallions Baseball Club, a Valley City-based youth organization, he’s seen coaches refuse to leave the field after getting ejected, and some who have no problem swearing in front of kids.

Mark Shapiro also witnessed some troubling things when he started coaching his son’s baseball team, which led to plenty of online searches — and later the formation of the Cleveland chapter of Positive Coaching Alliance.

The nonprofit, which launched in 1998 and will soon expand to 14 chapters nationally, holds workshops, and provides online courses, tips and tools for youth sports organizations, coaches and participants. The Cleveland chapter debuted two years ago, a few years after Shapiro, the president of the Cleveland Indians, reached out to Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson.

“I can almost quote it verbatim: ‘I’ve been in pro sports my entire life, and my education the last year with my son’s baseball experience has not been positive,’ ” Thompson said of Shapiro’s initial email.

When his schedule allows, Shapiro helps to coach his 12-year-old son Caden’s baseball team, along with his 10-year-old daughter Sierra’s basketball club. When Shapiro’s oldest first started playing sports, it was an eye-opening experience even for someone who grew up around the game as the son of prominent sports agent Ron Shapiro.

“You look at sports your whole life, and then you have kids and you kind of get thrown into youth sports,” Shapiro said. “Some of what you see is good, and a lot of what you see is really upsetting. The biggest takeaway was how uneven the experience was.”

When youth sports are “done right,” they have the potential to be “the greatest shaper of character and values,” the Tribe president said.

“But when they’re executed with the wrong intentions,” Shapiro said, “which are usually driven by adults and not kids, what they do is usually turn kids away. And they don’t come back.”

Changing the culture

Shapiro joined Positive Coaching Alliance’s national advisory board — a cast with such marquee names as Phil Jackson, Steve Young, Doc Rivers, Steve Kerr and Larry Brown — after corresponding with Thompson.

As he “was disappointed more and more” with the youth sports experience, Shapiro became determined to bring a PCA chapter to Cleveland.

In June 2013, Jim Bucci became the chapter’s executive director. The organization is small — Bucci is joined in PCA’s two-person Crocker Park office by partnership manager Nick Cipkus — but it received some major seed funding from the Indians, Cleveland Cavaliers and DDR Corp. The three organizations, with former Cavs GM Chris Grant and former DDR CEO Daniel Hurwitz playing major roles, committed $120,000 each ($40,000 per year for three years) to get the nonprofit off the ground.

Another sizable chunk of the Cleveland chapter’s funding comes from the one- and three-year partnerships it offers to high schools and youth sports organizations, Bucci said. The typical partnership is for one year and three workshops, at a cost of about $2,500.

The Cleveland chapter performed 36 workshops — which feature PCA-certified instructors, including Shapiro, as speakers — in 2014. This year, Bucci expects that number to top 100. Bucci said the organization has 35 partners, including 15 high schools, in the Cleveland and Akron areas.

But the partnerships, PCA’s leaders stress, offer much more than the in-person training of coaches and athletes that is included in the workshops.

“We deliver services like most nonprofits,” said Thompson, PCA’s founder. “But our real goal is to change the culture of sports. Our customers are leaders of schools, athletic programs and sports organizations. We want to help them change the culture of their sports programs.”

The current model, Thompson said, is an “entertainment sports culture” — basically, the drive to produce highlights worthy of “SportsCenter,” not better athletes and better people. Thompson believes the latter two elements are crucial components of a “development zone culture,” which involves relationship-building, guidelines and anti-bullying tactics.

In addition to the workshops, coaches are sent emails with tips on ways to talk to a team and to parents, and organizations can receive help with such tasks as writing job descriptions for potential coaches and creating parent-coach agreement letters. Positive Coaching Alliance also has a free online resource — pcadevzone.org — that provides advice for every imaginable role in youth sports (even that of the referee).

“Kids take cues from ESPN and ‘SportsCenter’ a lot,” Bucci said. “Pro sports and youth sports should be two completely different things. Youth sports should be about mastery of the game, learning life lessons and playing with your friends.”

‘A lot of hard work’

Massey, the president of the Stallions Baseball Club, which fields 15 to 18 travel teams ranging from ages 8 to 18 each year, agrees with Bucci’s assessment.

The 38-year-old father of two (with a third on the way) has coached his oldest son, Gary III, since the 12-year-old Tre’ was 4. The club was one of the Cleveland PCA’s first partners, and Massey said the relationship has given his group a much-needed support system — one that “validates our culture and what we wanted to achieve as an organization.”

Being a youth sports coach “isn’t a sexy job,” Massey said. “It’s a lot of hard work.”

Having an outside resource available to coaches and parents can make all the difference.

“We’re still not perfect,” Massey said. “Outside of our organization, I think it’s an epidemic. Whether it’s the parent-coach or parent-athlete relationship, it’s a huge challenge. Part of the reason I’m so passionate about PCA is it’s a huge opportunity for us to step outside the box and understand what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to develop kids to the best of our ability.”

Massey talked with the PCA not long after it formed in Cleveland in 2013, and he soon received an email from Shapiro, who now chairs the Cleveland chapter’s board.

“He reached out to me out of nowhere,” Massey said. “I’ve gotten to know him the last couple years. He’s an outstanding guy, and he’s all about the right things.”

When it comes to youth sports, Shapiro doesn’t want the focus to be on wins and losses, nor future college scholarships and seven-figure salaries.

“This is a way to ensure that they have the most positive experience,” he said of the PCA’s work. “This is a way to ensure they stay engaged. The skill piece is easier to find and, frankly, it’s less important at the youngest ages because they’re going to be turned off if this piece isn’t taken care of.”

Asked if he’s seen kids quit sports because of parents, Shapiro said, “Absolutely — especially in a game like baseball that’s failure-based.”

He said he reminds parents what’s really important, and that it’s not “about getting to some destination,” such as a long-term career in athletics.

And even though he’s running the day-to-day operations of a Major League Baseball team, Shapiro plans to be involved as much as possible with his kids’ activities. Sierra plays basketball and soccer — two sports about which her dad knows “nothing.”

But he still helps out, because what he can’t provide in terms of technical expertise, he can make up for in more essential ways.

“What’s important is praising the effort,” Shapiro said. “What’s important is focusing on what it means to be a good teammate and lift your teammates up. What’s important is focusing on how they handle adversity, setbacks and challenges, and have that be the delineator of a what a successful season is, what a successful game is.”

And if those elements are in place, something else often happens, too.

“Usually they end up winning,” Shapiro said.

Source: “Positive Coaching Alliance Is Making the Call for Change.” Crain’s Cleveland Business. N.p., 17 May 2015. Web. 17 May 2015.