Building Resilient Kids: The Real Game of Youth Sports

0:00Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Steve D 'Agostino. He is the founder of Dags Basketball, of Maximize Basketball. Steve is a high-performance basketball coach and trainer. He works with kids all the way as young as kindergarten up to NBA players and everyone in between. He is a big part of the renaissance that has happened in my local community. This is the best part about this podcast. Steve lives here in Albany, New York. His business is based here in Albany, New York, and he has been a major part of the sports renaissance that is happening in our area.

0:44We are consistently sending high-level basketball players to Division I schools like North Carolina, Syracuse. We currently have four local kids in the NBA, and so much of that has to do with Steve and his training, And I wanted to bring him in because he has a particular mindset, methodology, thought process that I find to be, it's refreshing. It is a refreshing way of approaching this. I'm a former high school basketball referee. I did some college basketball as well. I played sports in college. You know, I've seen the brilliance of youth sports as well as some of the nightmares that can come with youth sports.

1:36And currently I coach my kids in both baseball and basketball as well. And what I wanted to get into with Steve was how, as parents or as coaches of youth athletes, do we align our mindset so that we can help them become what they want to be? And it's an important framing, and so much of this comes out of Steve's mindset. I love this episode. Whether you have kids and youth sports or not, you are going to enjoy this because of concepts that Steve talks about, like creating chaotic drills and the importance of training yourself for chaotic moments. Now, you can have kids or not have kids. You can have kids in sports or not have kids in sports.

2:19And the idea of inserting yourself into chaotic situations, preparing yourself for chaotic situations so that when they happen out of the blue, you are ready for them and can perform inside of them is wonderful and powerful. So with all that preamble, let's get on to Steve D 'Agostino. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

2:47Steve, appreciate you making the time today, my man. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. You know, it's not very often that I get to interview someone from my hometown. You know We're both Capital Region guys, and it's pretty cool that we're not sitting too far apart and getting to have this conversation. One of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is, and I brought this up on the show before so the audience has heard me talk about it, but I coach my own kids in sports, and I was a basketball referee at a fairly high level both at the high school and the college levels for 12 years.

3:24and I've just seen, it feels to me like every year the relationship between the adults and the kids becomes more toxic. And you've accumulated an incredible following, not just in our local community with your coaching program, but nationally as well, and you're working with incredibly high-level players. And what that tells me is the way you are talking about the relationship between coaches and kids, the way that you're addressing that relationship, how you're speaking to these young athletes is really resonating. So I'd love to start with, you know, where did your core philosophies come from?

4:06Like we can get into exactly what they are, but what were the, what were the inputs into your life, into your career that helped you develop those and to be such a positive influence on kids? Yeah, 100%. So I've been lucky. So my dad was a high school coach forever before I was even born. And then he coached youth. He coached my brother all the way up and then was an assistant on our high school teams. And then once we graduated high school, he went back to being a varsity head coach. And so I've always had a good perspective from him on the youth basketball landscape, the high school basketball landscape.

4:43And then my brother went on to be a college coach locally at UAlbany, Hudson Valley, and then down in Florida at an NAIA school. So I got the insight, right, for like the college stuff through him. And then just in my own career, having, you know, played elite AAU on the Nike circuit and then division two basketball and then overseas for six years, I went through all that as a player. And when I transitioned to being a trainer and a player development coach, typically what happens is these development coaches are in one level. Right. You'll see their college MBA or their youth high school. And I have two businesses, one Dags Basketball, who has we do kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade.

5:24And then my national brand Maximize Basketball. That's where we focus on our MBA clients, all of our national camps and clinics. And so I literally get every single level that I get to work with. And so I'm able to see, you know, obviously, like you're saying, with the adults and all the craziness of youth basketball, the high school recruiting college landscape, and then the professional aspect as well, too. And so there's so many different variables that go in it. And I'm sure we'll get into a lot of them. But I've been lucky enough that I have experience in all the different levels. Yeah. why you know one of the things that got me out of reffing basketball and i can i'll actually explain to you maybe you'll find this funny because you'll know the the teams but um i was 12 years in the in the in reffing i've been to college camps i'd done division three i'd done clinics at division two level i'd gone all the way to glens falls and done um uh semi-finals for state championship games for for high school uh loved it loved every second of it um And the last two or three years that I was reffing, I noticed, and this was probably 2010 to 2013, I noticed a severe shift in the overall attitude that people had.

6:48It went from winning, but in this kind of the way that I was raised up and through it. There's always the competitive nature. There's always kind of that, you know, you have your rivals in your local communities, etc. But it became much more combative, much more individualistic, much more the parents yelling from the stands. And I had an experience. I was at Rensselaer High School for a freshman basketball game. Now, most of you listening to this will not know Rensselaer High School, but it is a Class C school in our area.

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8:26area which means it's fairly small and uh it's a freshman basketball game it's like a four o 'clock game this is one of those pickup games you get as a ref and whatever and it ends up being a 30 point loss for rensselor high school no big deal this stuff all happens it's all part of the game i'm walking off the court after the game and a parent walking through the crowd catches me with their shoulder and spins me around and I turn and I look at this guy now one I'm six foot four 200 pounds and this dude makes me look like a smurf and he's looking at me like if you take one step towards me I'm gonna take you out and then he says this is your fault 30 point game in a freshman and on a freshman towards the end of the season right and and it was like at that moment I lost all love for reffing basketball it just killed it for me because that accumulation of events.

9:17And my question for you is where did that transition start to happen? I'd like to, I'd like to kind of talk about the, some of these, the root issues that we're seeing and some of the negatives, and then we can kind of layer in where we feel the solutions are and working with our kids and, and finding performance in our lives. Like what have you seen that, that maybe started to make that transition? Cause it, it happened. I mean, this is not like, oh, the previous generation blah blah blah kind of crap there is absolutely a different attitude in the way parents and and not so much coaches but especially parents interact with this game yeah 100 i think at the youth level it's different now and i'm a player development coach so i do a lot of like the training and so i can see that parents are a lot more invested in their kids youth sports now than uh maybe they were 20 30 years ago and i'm not saying like emotionally invested as far where it's like, hey, you want your kid to play sports and be well, but like the time and money that goes into it, and those both lead into stress, right?

10:21So like, hey, I'm investing this time, I'm investing this money. And then also now everything is on social media. So like, you'll have, you know, if you're a parent, you go on social media, just take AAU season, you know, your kids on one team, and then you go on social media, and all these other teams are posting their championship, and I'll put it in quotes, right? Like t shirts and pictures. And Now you're like, man, I wish my kid was on that team and this. So there's all this like fear of missing out and trying to keep up with the Joneses. And it really takes away with like the best thing about youth sports is that it teaches kids how to be accountable, how to handle adversity, how to be part of a team, how to sacrifice.

10:57And like you were saying, we've lost a lot of that for like this manipulation of like trying to win games or having to be on the best team. And it leads to a ton of stress. and that stress is mostly there because of the adults, and then it gets taken out on whether it's a coach taking it out on the players, whether it's a parent taking it out on a coach, whether it's the parent or the coach taking it out on the refs. It's just it manifests in all this chaos, and it's like, yo, just let the kids play. Yeah. There's a local, you probably even know him, Danny Barbero, who's a local baseball trainer and performance coach.

11:39And my kids play baseball as well. And one of the parents of our team asked a question, with no honest question about performance at the age of 11. And he's a particular guy, but he looks at her and he goes, he's fucking 11. Yeah. And it was like, it like took her, and this is nothing against her because her question was honest and it was not meant to be persuaded. But it literally, you could see that hit her like, oh yeah, they're just 11. So I guess my question is, at what point should, as a parent, if you have a kid who is dedicated to a sport and has made a commitment to being good, when do you think that age is that you shift into fifth gear with them?

12:25And when does that moment happen? Yeah, so I think when they're younger. So I would say like, just take basketball, for instance, like typically these kids will be on teams starting in like third grade. Right. And then like from third grade to seventh grade, I think it's very much like the parent kind of like leading the way a little bit. Like, hey, you're going to be on this team and you're going to go to this and this might help. This camp might help you and you're leading the way. But when they get into like eighth, ninth, tenth grade, dude, the kids are going to tell you by their action. I can't tell you the amount of kids that come into our gym locally and you could tell they don't want to be there.

13:01And so, you know, like, and it's extra work. So, so I get it, but, but, you know, at some point the kid is going to lead the way and you're going to be spending all this time and money and the kid's not even going to want to be there. My thought is, uh, and there was actually a study. I was listening to, um, Malcolm Gladwell podcast and, um, there was a study. They studied like, uh, elite runners in the UK when they were, I think like 15 and what they did by the time they got up to 22 and like the smallest smallest percentage of those elite runners at 15 ended up being elite at 22 and we sit here and there's all these like elite middle school teams and they're traveling all over the country and it's like dude you can you can literally pick out the one or two kids like Andre Jackson's in the NBA for the Milwaukee Bucks he was in fifth grade you're like whoa that guy moves different you know what I mean Kevin Herter when he was in seventh grade like yo that kid's got a chance you know and and so what we do is it's the intention behind it it's okay I'm gonna invest all this because I want my kid to be great and and they want to play college sports and they're going to go play college basketball or college baseball that shouldn't be the intention because all of that is just a byproduct of how productive the kid is when they're on varsity right and so if the intention was I'm going to invest in my kid say basketball training because they're going to learn how to be dedicated to something, be disciplined, wake up early, go hard in training sessions, fight through adversity, struggle, learn how to come out on top.

14:28And then whatever they end up doing in high school, college and beyond, this is going to help them there. That's how my philosophy has always been when we're training people. So like when they come in eighth, ninth grade, and they're talking about college, like, you know, we lose all the crazies because we're not on the same page. That's not what we're looking to do. Yeah. I know one of the things that I preach to my kids constantly is like, it's attitude and effort. That's what we're learning. At fourth grade, baseball. At fifth grade, basketball. It's attitude and effort. We're learning skills.

15:01We're learning how to show up. We're learning how to be proud of our performance. I literally don't give a shit if you miss all 10 shots you take today. It's meaningless. I mean, honestly, and I've been accused of this, I want to win, but I literally don't care if we win or not. Like in my brain, walking away from the field. And what's been interesting is the feedback that I've gotten from parents is like, you don't push them to win enough. And I'm like, you don't want that. Like if I push them to win, you wouldn't like that side of what this looks like. Because in fifth grade, these kids, half of them just learned to tie their shoes.

15:37you know it's like when the kid when you got to run out in the field and tie a kid's shoe yeah we should not be concerned about winning yeah 100 you know so there's like so I coach my daughter's fifth grade team I also coached third grade the third grade is like you know they they're just learned whatever but like fifth grade I've had them now for a couple years and so I am the same way as you like we're gonna compete to win but I don't care whether we win or lose I actually prefer, like, we lose, man, over two years, we probably lost seven games by, like, one possession. And part of the problem with our team is we're not focused.

16:11Like, we come and practice, and it's not, like, we're on them, but they have a hard time. And you're not going to win close games if you're not focused. And so I actually like it because they're learning now, like, hey, you don't like losing by one point, two points, three points. We missed 10 foul shots. We didn't run this play and execute. And so it's helping us, right? Fight through adversity, lose, and now come back and practice and work on those things. And so I'm the same way as you. I do this for a living. So I could be as crazy as you need me to be. But in fifth grade, the biggest thing is not that we win games.

16:45It's not that we run a million plays. We have one play that we run. It's that your kid, by the time they're in eighth or ninth grade, if they want to do basketball, that then they're ready to be in the gym all the time and compete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I do think, unfortunately for a lot of these kids, it's so much luck of the draw. You know, you call it dad ball, right? Like we call it in baseball, we call it dad ball a lot. And you can see, literally, you see the teams that, you know, hit the jackpot because there's a dad who actually gets it, maybe played at a high level, understands, you know, has the perspective of, like, what we're doing here at this level, at this, like, fourth, fifth, sixth grade level.

17:23and then you got these dads that maybe never played on their varsity team or, you know, whatever, didn't get to where they thought they should be and now they're taking it out on the kids. And that experience is very difficult. You know, I guess just kind of wrapping up maybe the youth side of this, if you're a parent and your kid is on a team, you know, maybe you have good perspective, you understand, let's say, it's a rational parent, but you're on a team where that head coach, that dad, whatever, who, God bless him, putting his time in, but just doesn't get it, right, is the win at all costs, over-indexing on these five kids that in fifth grade just are a little more athletic right now kind of thing.

18:05Like, do you recommend them looking for other teams? How do you address that? Because I do think this team hopping so young that happens in all these sports is not necessarily a positive. It seems to happen way too much. So how would you approach that as a parent if you were coming in and you just knew this coach just doesn't get it? He's too aggressive. He's yelling. It's the win at all costs kind of stuff. Yeah. Obviously, that's never a good thing. You don't want to rail on volunteers because they are giving their time. And I've always said, if you're going to complain about the volunteer coach, then you go coach.

18:41Go do it. You know what I mean? And so that stinks. But kids, if they're going to play sports and it's going to be competitive, They're going to have to deal with all different types of coaches. And so, you know, you get a coach that maybe is not your style for a year. It's a good thing for your kid. Yeah, it's a good thing. And so how can you support your kid? And like, maybe they don't get they don't like it and yell that and that coach is a yeller. Then how do you support them to get through it? And then once they get through it, they'll be able to deal with people like that, you know? And so and then as far as like finding another team, like, you know, the team hopping is crazy, especially in basketball.

19:17I'm sure it's similar in baseball. Yeah, it is. Not having the continuity of players and coaches and all that is not a good thing for development. But if you are lucky enough to have options, then you've got to balance it. What happens now is parents want the perfect situation. They want the best coach. They want their kid to play a ton. They want their kid to be the best player on the team. And that's not the case. You're almost never going to have that, right? And so you have to sacrifice in some areas. So if you're going to prioritize the coaching over everything, then you can't all of a sudden come back and be like, well, my kid's playing half the game.

19:53Yeah, but he could have played on this team where the coaching might not have been as good and they would have played the whole game. But you prioritize coaching. And so there's no perfect scenario. And so the parents have to really, hey, what do I prioritize? And if they're not in a great situation, maybe their kid's not playing a ton. Great. Support him through it. you know, and then he should be stronger. She should be stronger because of that. And they got through it. I love that response. Um, because I think one of the things I've seen, particularly with, you know, this, this, this generation or the past couple, past couple of generations, they couldn't survive the way we were coached.

20:30I mean, I had a football coach pick me up by my face mask and shoulder press me into a fence because I got a personal foul. Right. And this is the crazy part. This is what I tell my kids. I'm flying through the air, literally slamming into a fence. I step up and I'm like, I deserved that. Like that was my mentality was not even that he was wrong for doing today. He'd be in jail and be a national news story. Right. I mean, this was just a Tuesday, you know, afternoon game or whatever. And you know, my point in saying that That is, I love that answer because I feel like we don't take, as parents, we don't take the ownership of, I'm going to help my kid work through this tough situation.

21:14Instead, it's, I'm going to bitch to the league, I'm going to bitch to the coach, and then if none of that works, I'm going to take my kid out of this program and stick them in another program and expect that to be better. And what the kid learns is, if I don't like what's going on, mom and dad will come in and solve all my problems for me. And, you know, so, so I guess operating with high, you know, uh, we'll call them high performers at the levels that they're at or kids striving for high performance at the levels that they're at and seeing that full spectrum. Can you start to pull out maybe a few of the, the core, I'd love to stay on mindset, right?

21:52Like the core mindsets that these types of kids tend to have versus those who, who fall away over time. Yep. So, so we can get into the talent levels later because obviously the more talented you are, the, you know, the more opportunities you're going to have. But I would say this, and we, this is kind of like what I've come to realize with this generation. And this is, if everybody had this mindset of, this is what you're trying to build in your kids, right? With youth sports. If you can get your kid to be competitive and resilient, you've done your job. Doesn't matter how many games you've won, what sport you're playing.

22:31You know this, when they get to college and beyond for life, if they're competitive and they're resilient, they're going to have a good chance to succeed. Right? And so like for our development and our training, how do we put them in situations where they have to be competitive? Wins, losses, right? Go as hard as you can and then put them in adversity so they learn that failing is a good thing and they're going to build up that resilience within themselves, then go let them play whatever sport you want. Start a business. You're competitive. You're resilient. You're going to figure it out. That's really what the mindset should be for you sports and beyond.

23:09How do you manage the competitiveness without over-indexing on the winning, right? Because I see some kids who are hyper competitive, but they also do not understand how to handle a loss, right? If they're crying on the basketball court on a Tuesday night in the middle of the season, because you lost a game and they're in fifth grade and like, you love the competitiveness. You love the fact that they care, but they've so over-indexed on winning. You know, how do you address that? Yeah. Clarity and fifth grade, sixth grade may be too young for them to completely understand it, but they'll get it.

23:45Competitiveness is not the result. It's the action. Okay, what does that mean? You're focused. You're engaged. You're giving 100 % effort. You're being physical. You're trying to do everything that you need to do to win the game. The result is separate from that, right? You could be more talented and not compete in a game and still win. That's not a good thing, right? So them understanding that that result of winning is separate from the action of being competitive. Yeah. How do you train resilience into a kid or coach resilience into a kid? I think you put them into challenging situations, right?

24:24And so like, you know, we'll do it with, you know, in our area, we've been lucky. We've had a ton of really good like shooters come out of this area. You know, Joe Gerard was at Syracuse and Clemson, Kevin Herter in the NBA. Joe Cremo was at Villanova. And so what we do is we try to get them in a situation, let's say they come in and we're doing shooting stuff, where they're not going to win every drill. I think, and you know this with coaching, you want every drill a lot of times to be clean and you want your kids to do it really well. And part of what I've started to embrace is chaotic drills.

24:57We're like, yo, you're going to lose. It's going to be messy, but you've got to figure out a way to get through it. And so that inherently putting them through more adversity and everything that they do, then they tend to start figuring out, okay, I haven't beaten this shooting drill seven days in a row. And then on the eighth day, they get it, boom, you did it. So we put that into all of our development stuff. I love that. I love the idea of the chaotic drills. You know, it's funny how, like, so I played basketball in high school, but only because I was, like, the punching bag for the guys that were actually good.

25:38I was, like, the 12th man that just showed up with the jersey, and the starters just beat the shit out of me in practice, you know, and that was my role. But in football, you see this a lot in football. I was more of a football and baseball player. And in football, this is, like, a given. Like, you're going to get knocked down. Like, you're going to be bleeding. You're going to be bruised. But in a lot of the other sports, I've seen the contact side of the game that, like you said, I hadn't framed it in my head as chaotic drills. I love that. I'm going to put more thought into that idea. I think that's a good life lesson.

26:15I think handling chaos is a life skill, not just a sports skill, and I really think that's wonderful. um so let's say you have a kid who who who's never been exposed to this before right they hit eighth ninth grade they have some talent they may have some drive to be good but they have been sheltered or they have been maybe kind of moved around to places where they could be successful without real challenges how do you introduce them to them is just throw it to the fire do you have like a like a methodology that you take them through like how do you get them introduced to this chaotic nature because to me it feels fairly unique yeah I I think um it's it depends on the kid right and really how you know uh opposed to contact and all that they are you know um but we throw them right to the fire I mean most of the time there's no especially when they're in eighth ninth grade younger kids yeah okay you ease them into it but most of our drills are, you know, when we're doing, let's just say, like finishing drills, which is like layups around the basket and stuff, we'll work on some like on air, meaning it's just like reps one on zero, but most of them are live.

27:25They're one-on-one. It's a defender pushing you out. It's a rebounding drill where again, two guys or two girls are pushing against each other. And so the more they're exposed to that contact, the more comfortable they get in it. But you can't talk your way through that. You have to experience it. That's my biggest thing too, with like, with youth kids and high school kids and all that, right? I always hear a coach like, well, I told them. Yeah, but when you were a kid, you didn't listen to any adults. You learned from experience, right? And so, yeah, as coaches, we want to keep telling them and telling them.