Changing the Game

And so this is something as parents and as coaches that we can add to the mix, right, "What do you need from us on the sideline, what would you like from us there? So in my book I talk about the seven Cs of a high-performing state of mind, but I just want to give you a couple of things that you can do here today.

And so one of the most important things is make it safe to stumble, make it safe to fail, make it safe to mess up. In the US we call these the helicopter parents, who every time a kid is struggling, suddenly they swoop down and pluck them out of the situation. In Canada they call them the snow plough parents, they just push it all out of the way. We have to make it safe for our kids to make mistakes. Use sport as a development zone, as a place where failure is part of learning.

Now, one of the most important places that we have to make it safe is the ride home after games. Now, our children tell us in research when they're asked when they leave sport, "What is your worst memory of sport", they often say it's this, the ride home, some research here out of Australia how because as coaches and as parents often times we don't take into account their emotional state. So I have a quick video here for you. This is from an HBO documentary. It was on Netflix for a while here, and I know I've met some people here who have seen it, and it was called "Trophy Kids".

And this is an actual documentary of what the ride home looks like for too many kids. Did you tell the coach to put you out of the game? I was sitting right next to him. Are you sure, because I was there right next to you? Inaudible as many times as I could be. Dude, you're not getting it done. Let me explain something to you. If you do something wrong, do I tell you?

I correct it or I tell you so you can correct it. How do you know what to correct if you don't even know why he pulled you out of the game? What did I tell you about that? Are you scared of him or something? So why don't you go ask him, like right now? You know we're going to have this conversation after the game.

You know it's coming. This is part of you becoming a young man. If someone does something, are you just going to take it? So if I was to walk up to you and just slap you inside your face, what are you going to do, just turn around and be like, "I don't know why that guy did that. You act like you're 10 or 9 or 8. Dude, you're just going through the motions.

If you're going to be selfish - you know what, you have other brothers and sisters. We'll take you from that school and give them a chance and put them in a private school. I don't understand it. Every time I come back in the car I always feel like I'm in trouble or I did something wrong. You've had more personal training than any of those kids out there, okay?

Back to the drawing board, back up to getting up early on Saturday morning, okay, because it doesn't make any sense. You have me driving back and forth from this school, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, for you to go out and do absolutely nothing. I don't understand why you don't get it. Has anyone seen that by chance? Do you remember how it ended? Do you remember how it ended for this kid? Yes, he quit, so he quit football. Yes, he left, he moved out and went and lived with his mum. His parents are separated. And so I posted this little clip on our Facebook page a year and a half ago and it was an interesting dialogue back and forth between what's the dad doing versus hey, that's a dad with high expectations, and I agree with that, but just not there.

That's not the appropriate place. Then this guy writes in and he says, "I was the cameraman. I was sitting in the front seat. The dad was an NFL draft pick American football player, got arrested, didn't make the league, so his son was going to make it in his place.

Now, if your kids bring up the game on the way home, by all means have the conversation, but if you notice that you're always the one who brings it up, you're always the one who's broaching the topic, they probably don't want to talk about it. It's probably not a good fit there. Now, this is really hard, right, because we've got them locked in the car, we're going to make this a teachable moment, and kids say, "No, it's not really a great teachable moment. I'm like, "Okay", you know, "whatever". I coached the game and next week we have practice and he loves practice with his buddies and then game number 2 rolls around, there's a game before us and there's all these tall people yelling and screaming and he walks out, he's like, "Dad, I'm not playing.

He's fine, he found like a lizard or a cricket and he's totally happy. So we get in the car after the game and I'm mad and I'm like "So, TJ" and all of a sudden wham, I get karate chopped across the chest by my wife sitting next to me. And I was like, "What was that for?

Didn't you write a book about this? And then number 2 is just carrying an unconditional love and we can show that to our kids through five simple words, "I love watching you play", "I love watching you compete", "I honour the fact that you're out there". If you have to add a few more, "What would you like for lunch? When we tell our kids we love watching them play, we let them know that our love for them is not based on whether they won or lost, which of course it isn't. And I get more phone calls and more emails about this than anything else and it always kind of starts with, "I thought that was silly" or "I thought that was simple", "and that changed my life, it saved my relationship with my son" or "my daughter" or someone who says, "I just called my year-old and told her that for the first time and we were crying on the phone.

It gives them ownership. It promotes enjoyment, it helps them want to go out there and get better. If it's something that you're doing, keep doing it. If it's something that's far from what you're doing, change it. At first your kids might be like, "Who are you and what did you do with my dad?

Tell them "I love watching you play". And if you take nothing from tonight but you start doing that, it will make a massive difference. So where do we go from here? What we're doing in Changing the Game Project, what we're doing with other organisations around the world is that we're trying to make a movement.

We're trying to make a movement and we're not worried about the people who've lost the plot, right? And as sporting organisations we do a poor job of telling them how to help. So that's what we try to do. And if we pay attention to them, we can create a movement. So my last movement, which is a tribute to the state of Oregon that I live in, is how do we make a movement in three minutes or less. If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen start to finish in under 3 minutes and dissect some lessons.

First of course a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous, but what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. You must be easy to follow. Now, here comes the first follower with a crucial roll. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow. Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore, it's about them plural. Notice how he's calling to his friends to join in. See, it takes guts to be a first follower.

You stand out and you brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire. Now, here's the second follower. This is a turning point. It's proof the first has done well. Now it's not a lone nut and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news. A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers because new followers emulate followers, not the leader.

Now, here come two more people, then three more immediately. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point and now we have a movement. As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join in now. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, and they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry.

And over the next minute you'll see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd because eventually they'd be ridiculed for not joining. And ladies and gentlemen, that is how a movement is made. So let's recap what we've learned. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you. Be public, be easy to follow. But the biggest lesson here, did you catch it? Yes, it started with the shirtless guy and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened.

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There's no movement without the first follower. See, we're told that we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement if you really care is to courageously follow and show others how to follow. When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in. That's how we roll in Oregon, in case you want to come visit. The city of Perth, Western Australia could be one of the movement makers, right, by not worrying about all the people who won't jump on board but by finding those first few followers and nurturing them.

Whether you're a coach in an association or just a community club, whether you're a director of sport, look for those bright spots, look for those first followers and embrace them and pour into them because pretty soon those followers attract more followers. Don't worry about all the ones still sitting down. Worry about the fellow dancers. That's how you make a movement. And we're starting to see progress in the organisations that we've worked with all over the world. The amount of people in this room today is plenty of people to change the face of youth sport in Western Australia and be an example for the rest of your country.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead, "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; it's the only thing that ever has". So be the change that you want to see. Start in your association. Start in your club. Start in your family, just by leaving them alone on the ride home and telling them you love watching them play and you can be a model for the rest of the world. That was cool, hey? A couple of take-outs for me before I introduce our next keynote speaker. John spoke about the author, about the retraction of the 10, hour principle and how no-one listens to the retraction.

I'd like to retract the earlier Fremantle-West Coast joke because it wasn't funny and it was mean spirited. He also talked about how with sport it goes so fast - when our kids are involved in sport, it goes so fast. That's true of every single sport that we do with our kids apart from swimming lessons. Your average minute swimming lesson at a municipal pool in real-time takes four and a half weeks, I reckon. They take a very long time those swimming lessons. We spoke about the Scroop sic effect.

We had an AFL umpire called Greg Scroop, didn't we, and he had a bit of an effect on some of the games. On the safe to stumble message, it looked like Ian Thorpe was falling into the pool. We still found a way to get him into the Olympic team in Australia. And you probably recognised some people you know in the drunk guys video at the end. Some of them were in this room I reckon. Now, our next speaker is Clark Wight. Clark is a conscious parent and advocate, educator and presenter.

I'll let him explain to you what that is. But more importantly, Clark achieved something incredible in Perth today. He managed to talk his way out of A city of Perth parking ticket. Please make him welcome, Clark White. Does anyone want their son or daughter to go play a game tomorrow so you can just get in the car with them and go "I love watching you play"? Despite the accent, I have lived in this country for 16 years. I think I sound amazingly dinkum. I'm told that I don't. And what I'd like to follow on from John, and I'm going to talk to John a little bit because your TED video actually changed the relationship with my son, and I'm going to talk about that a little bit later too.

Just a quick check-in with you all, how many here are coaches? How many here are parents? How many here coach their own child? A good subset here. And how many student athletes in the room or athletes in the room?

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We've got a good crowd over here too. So I have three children. I have a 23, a 21 and a 10, and she was not a mistake, it just took a long time. They've all played sports. They have played netball, they've lived in the United States, they've lived here, and I love living in Western Australia because we can make the change. We're not so caught up yet. And America is going to take a long time, but we can make the change here in Perth and do it quickly. So I'm here tonight purely as a father and a coach, as a teacher.

I've been in education for 26 years. I've seen all your sons and daughters come through from 6-year-olds to year-olds playing sport the whole way through and quitting sport at some stage. So I want to talk about that and what we can do as coaches. I'm so glad that there's so many coaches in the room here because why I'm here tonight is really important because if you don't know my why for being on stage, we're not going to connect tonight.

So this is my why. It's the longest slide I have, so bear with me. This is a really big cool screen here too. So I've seen the positive impact for students in education, I've seen the positive impact of sports for families growing together through their values and for all children moving through the different ages and stages of life. My why is that I see on a firsthand basis every day the benefit that sports has for kids', for teenagers', for adults' mind body and soul and that's my focus tonight is our athletes' mind, body and soul.

So I want to start tonight with the coaches and we have - actually over half the room is coaches here. And I love this. I think every coach should start every season with your why, not your what you're going to do, "We're going to train on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6.

You either love engaging with kids, you either want to see teams gel and come together, but when you have your first meeting with your parent group and your players, start with your why and watch what happens that season, because they'll connect with your why and that's your success. I believe in competition, I believe in excellence, I believe so highly in success as long as we define what success is at the beginning of the season.

So for coaches please start with your why. If you don't know what your why is, have some fun trying to figure it out. The other thing I would actually do is this, tell all your players "Here's what you can expect from me this season. When you come to talk to me, I will listen to you. I have high expectations for you being on time. I will be on time every training. And then this is a really cool one because they don't know - remember kids are trying to please you, your athletes are trying to please you because they naturally want to do what's good for the coach and make the coach happy.

So tell them, "What does it look like when you're playing well, what does it sound like, what does it feel like when you're playing well? The other one here, and I love this one and this is great to ask, "when you walk off the field", "off the court", "out of the pool from playing another team, what do you want them to say about you as a team? And then this is the last one, "What is success for you? What does success look like at the end of the season? So this team here, we didn't win a single game in three seasons and every single member of that team felt like a total success. We would get off the bus and I always have the tallest, biggest kid get off the bus first so at least the other team goes "oh", and then the rest of the team would get off and they would laugh.

They felt like champions of the earth and we didn't win a single game. And teams hated playing us because our kids never stopped playing because they were trying to get better every game. It was really fun to do. So the other thing - and it's really good to hear about values. The reason kids play sports and the reason they get so much out of life from playing sports is it's all about our values. It's about playing for your teammates, it's about perseverance, it's about hard work, it's about love, it's about having fun.

So the reason we talk about values is we link sport to their values, they grow as human beings. Because why do they play sport? Yes for fun but to be better human beings. That's why we coach too. So I had a really interesting gridiron coach at college and he was fantastic. He was an ex-marine, he said some really stupid things like "pair off in threes" and "straighten up that circle" and all these great things, he was just nutty, but he had one really cool thing and this was it. When you came for practice the first thing 75 people trying out for a team, he never made cuts ever, he would never cut a single person, but people would leave in the middle of the night because it was too hard.

But as you walked in it had a white line and as you walked up the white line, there was a sign facing you before you crossed on the field, because this was his measure of success for us. If you could live up to this ideal right here - responsibility, loyalty and grit - then you're ready to step over the white line.

And when you're 18 years old, long on hair, short on thought and a bit of an idiot, you know, you've just rolled into practice and you stop at the white line and you go, "Ah, responsibility, loyalty, grit" - really cool, right? After about six weeks you'd go, but the sign was facing the other way for when you came off the field and this is what it said. And he was all about the life lessons that we learn stepping on to the field with the life lessons that we learn stepping into life. How cool is that? You're an to year-old idiot and you're already being taught these life lessons about why when you step into something, when you step into your marriage, when you step into being a parent, what are you stepping into, and he's teaching that to year-olds.

I still remember that. I don't remember a single score of any game I ever played in college, not a single one, but I remember that sign every day. So I want to talk about school and sport, and this is really interesting because kids naturally move and every bit of data and research in the world - you can see me, I can't stop moving, right, making you dizzy? So kids when they learn have to move and through movement they get the literacy and maths skills.

So I'm going to be a teacher here for a second. Is anyone else a teacher in the room? We're so lucky in Perth, these kids are lucky. So when we move, we learn. This is a program, the perceptual motor program, that has 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds every morning climb up a little ladder - it's literally this high, some of them can't do it - cross a plank like this and then jump off.

And they can't jump that far. Then they do it and they practice, they practice, they practice. Now, here's the interesting thing. You know why we do it? Because their early phonetic skills and early reading schools and early literacy skills improve by six months when we start doing that program with 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds. It doesn't change when they get older. If our students, athletes, are moving through teenage years and playing team sports, they do better in school.

Every bit of research shows that. They do better in school. So this is the other thing too. Why do we move? So when we want to keep kids in sports, we talk about if you play sports, you're going to do better at school, learning is more easy, it's fun. And this is the key, and we all know this - I'm really glad we have some student athletes with us over here too because when our students and when our kids play sport, this is what improves - social understanding and EQ, emotional intelligence. Now, we're all adults here in the room.

What's the one thing that makes us successful in the world? It's not our ATAR score. It's our social and emotional intelligence. Sorry for teachers who teach year 12, I'm not crushing your souls. But what makes us thrive in the business world and the world around us is our EQ and social skills and that happens through playing team sports all the time.

Okay, let's talk about this slide I just love because this is what great coaches do and great parents do with the kids, we push them outside of their comfort zone. The macaroni and cheese is a great one, "I only play netball". So because we've been sitting down for a while can you do me a favour - only if you want to, this is free choice - could you stand up for me a second? Now, no-one is allowed to get injured here because I haven't signed off on anything.

It's nice to shake a little bit. Our athletes think they know what excellence is, they think they know that they're playing at their best, and here's one activity I'm going to show you around goal setting to show our athletes that they actually don't know.

So what you're going to do - and I'll explain first and then we'll do it - is without injuring yourself, very slowly - don't do it yet - you're going to put out your right hand. Don't do it yet. Look at these eager beavers. You're slowly - just watch me for a sec. You're slowly going to rotate. Again, don't twist your torso. We don't want any back injuries. You're going to go back and point as far back as you can on the wall or somebody or a person behind you. And then what I want you to do is look a metre or two past where your hand went and fix that spot in your mind, and then slowly come back.

Please don't hit the person next to you, especially a spouse. It doesn't go well. So we're going to slowly rotate to our right as far as you can go - no injuries, please - and when you get to that point, stop and look at where you're pointing. And then look 2 metres past that, picture it in your head. Thank you so much. What I want you to do is close your eyes if you want and I want you to picture this, with your eyes closed, not moving, please. I want you to picture your hand moving to the right and I want you to picture your hand going to that point that you could before straight and easily past it to that point two metres past.

Look at that spot in your head and open your eyes. Right hands out, nice and slow and rotate. Now, interesting, you're the first crowd that's gone silent there. Most people go, "Oh". So it either didn't work or I just really suck. Okay, so did anyone pass the point they did before?

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And it's not because you stretched and did it once before. It's because if you fix something in your mind's eye, you can actually do it, and that's what great coaches do. You can have a seat if you want now that we stood up, we did our thing. But great coaches can do that with kids. They can set the expectation higher than they think the athlete can go and they challenge them. So setting goals for our kids is really good. So all these things, if you look at the things, all those things is what we do through sport and every one of those makes you succeed better in school.

Every single one of those makes you more successful in a school setting. And that's why we need to get our young kids playing team sports and lots of different sports, not specialising, even though that kid was pretty amazing with the ping-pong, you know?

I wanted to see his lefty or his backhand, though. So when we get our youngsters into sport and we know what success is and we know they're playing for fun and we engage them, we'll get them playing until they're really old. One thing I love - and John, I'm not bagging America or the President, but what I'm going to say is when I came to Australia, I was driving one day and I saw a rugby match and all the people playing rugby were over 65 and they had a rule like you can't hit when you're bending down, you basically can't hit at all.

But all these people, men and women, were playing touch rugby. That doesn't happen in America.

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If you're lucky enough to play at university or college over there, then you stop afterwards pretty much. No, I'm actually doing okay. So this is why we play sports, and I'm coming as an educator, is our student athletes do better at school because they play team sports. So I've hammered that point pretty hard, I'll move on. Who's heard the word resilience lately? We need to teach our kids resilience - I totally agree. It doesn't happen in the classroom. We cannot teach resilience well enough in the classroom. The only place we can teach resilience incredibly well is in the pool, on the court, on the field.

We teach resilience through sport. It's the only way they're going to learn it. And it happens every day. That's where they learn resilience. So that's why they need to play team sports. Okay, talking about our kids for a second here, I have to do this as a teacher because this is what I love.

Now with functional fMRIs when they map children's brain activity when they're playing sport, everything lights up in their brain, their verbal centre, their reasoning centre, their spatial centres - everything in their brain lights up because they're having massive synaptic growth across their brain. Is anyone here a brain surgeon or a brain person? But what we see with the fMRIs, the minute children move it lights up.

Anyone have a grunting teenager at home, by the way? So if you have a grunting teenager at home, and I do this in a lot of my talks, all you need to do with them is move. You need to walk the dog, kick the soccer ball, shoot the hoops. One study said that driving does it. They actually start to verbalise and articulate. You guys are all really young in the room, but back when I was a teenager phones had cords and as I was talking on the phone, and it was the 80s so it was a really long cord, you know, and you talk and you do this, and all it was doing because the blood flow in my brain was increasing I had verbal things.

The benefits of sport is for their brain. It's the number one thing and it's literally they just want to have fun and they want to play. And then to follow on, they want to be outside in nature, they want to be outside. So this is our focus, as coaches, as parents. It's not about wins and losses, it's about what teaches you about life.

And I'm going to go on, John, about why you changed my relationship with my son. This is my son and I used to love going to watch him play footy. And I'm loving that you brought your baby with us tonight, it's fantastic, because we all remember that moment when you first saw your child and you went, "Oh, this is going to cost me a lot of money. Now, my daughters banned me from showing pictures of them tonight. They both looked at me and said, "No, no pictures of us anymore. He got good - yeah, Dockers, sorry. He got good, and I started to get really fired up because I thought maybe he can make it.

Wow, wouldn't that be awesome for me if he made it? I thought you were actually getting a little bit fired up, that you wanted me to play AFL.

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And it is a simple thing. But it's not simple in what it does in changing the lives and relationships we have with our kids. So "I love watching you play". So parenting and sport, this is the good, this is the bad and this is the ugly. We've all seen it. And I'm going to get a bit Freudian on you here. So if you're not able and if people aren't able to say "I love watching you play", if they're not ready to get to that space, it means because they're being led by their shadow self.

We all have a shadow self. It's every one of our unmet dreams, expectations, fears, things we didn't become, our mother-in-law's voice, all that is our shadow self. And some of you have left seats next to you for your shadow self, so well done. It's in every single one of us. It's the person who's sitting on the field going "just run" and everyone looks at you like this. It was a voice inside my head when my son and I was like, "God, if you just hustled you'd make it.

And if you're not able to as a parent, and I'm going to be a bit harsh - as a parent, if you can't get in the car and say "I love watching you play", you need to spend a bit of time with your shadow self figuring out what it is that is your unmet dreams and expectations that you're trying to live through your child. Now, the fact that you're here tonight means you've probably already dealt with that, so that's really good. But we all have it and it's that voice that shouts out.

And John said something today, I think it was on the radio, but he said if you're not able to parent and be parent and enjoy your kid's sport from the sideline here, back up. If you have to go metres away so that no-one can hear you shouting, back up metres. But that's the change we're looking for in sports around here. We talked about getting grunts at home already. Now, you talked about helicopter parents and snow plough parents. What I see every day is a lawnmower parent because they're smoothing the path right in front the whole time.

You are lawn mowing in front. And I know this is a bit cheesy, but what you're not doing is planting seeds for your kids, you're disabling your children. And those lawnmower parents aren't giving our kids the shock absorbers to deal with the normal ups and downs of life, we're smoothing everything out. So we need to avoid that as much as we can. Now I'll be kind again here. And here's my last thing about sports with kids.

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I actually think it's the only thing that does count. Your son or daughter's character, their values is what counts in life and that's what they learn through sport. That's what we need to be focused on is character matters and they do it through sport. So this was a quote from - I had this fantastic young year 11 girl come into my office today and she happened to say "I love playing sports now". I was like, "What do you mean now? If your child is struggling in a sport, my advice always is find a coach, find the right coach for your child. If the coach is a shouter, abuser, a shamer, there's no reason for your child to be on that team.

If the coach is shaming a child on a team, find another team, find a different sport. We're so lucky in Perth, we have tonnes of sports. Find a different coach and go join their team because the benefit for your son or daughter is going to be enormous later on because this is what sport is supposed to be about.

We're in nature, we're fun, we're playing, we're learning, we're growing, huge brain growth, everything there. And we talked about a little bit you spend a lot of time in the car, don't you? It's amazing how much petrol you can use to go to sport especially on Saturday mornings around Perth. You get a lot of time. Crank the 80s rock, shut your mouth and say, "If you want to talk, let me know", and it's fun.

And I love that thing, "What do you want for lunch? So this was posted on as I call it the Facebook the other day. This is from a year-old cricketer who has had to leave cricket because of injuries but not caused by cricket but by other ones. We'll see if my arm is long enough here. Wow, you captured a young boy's imagination. You made him dream, you gave him heroes, real friends and fake foes. You made him wish away rain clouds on a Saturday morning and gave him stories to tell at school on a Monday. You gave him recognition and taught him to take criticism.

You made him feel alive, to feel real nerves, to feel real elation, and to feel deep disappointment. You showed him how good it feels to make someone proud, especially oneself. You taught him that life is not always fair and that if you are given an opportunity, you need to grab it. You taught him optimism and the power of positive thinking. You taught him to savor the good days, but keep persisting after the bad ones. You taught that boy to take responsibility, that preparation doesn't always equal success, and that you can never succeed all on your own.

In teaching him those lessons, you made him a man. That's the benefit of what you do and that's the benefit as coaches and parents why we need to continue to engage our kids in sports and say, "I love watching you play. You can't walk out of this room tonight without some call to action, something you're going to change, something you're going to add to your game, something you're going to try tomorrow.

So before you leave tonight, in your head or on your piece of paper, think "what's my call to action I'm going to do" because you gave up incredibly valuable time to be here. Leave with an action, something you want to do, something you want to add to your game. And the biggest thing is thank you for being here because you're making a difference in the lives of the girls and boys in Perth and with sport and keeping them in the game, because keeping them in the game is success for life.

So thank you very much and I think we have some panel presentations later. We'll keep moving, hey. I love that idea of how your team or you will be remembered when you leave the field of play. That's awesome, isn't it? During our panel discussions tonight we do have a couple of copies of "Changing the Game" by John O'Sullivan we'll give out for people who ask a couple of questions, so thank you for that. We're going to go into our panel discussion right away. We've got a great panel for you. The boys will be back in just a second, John and Clark will be back as part of that panel, but we've got an Olympic gold medallist for you and we've got a footballer for you as well, a Coleman medallist, and they're going to come and have a chat to us about the change of the game.

The first person I'd like to introduce you to has an Order of Australia Medal and she's a mum these days. Please make her welcome. She played in the Sydney Games and if you watch this little video we're about to show you very, closely, you may see that she features. Please make Simone Fountain welcome applause. So Simone featured in that little passage of play there. She finished her career as an elite water polo player in and she has worked as head coach of women's water polo.

I'm about metres away from you -- We are a long way away. I might get a hand-held mic. When you look at that clip, tell us what happened there and tell us how it makes you feel. Well, my heart is racing. Certainly every time I get to see that vision, it takes me straight back to those moments. And something that people don't really know is that Yvette, who scored our winning goal with 0. So really I guess in a way that was a little bit of a rehearsed moment. Yvette was sitting out the top as a left hander, probably the best left hander in the world, and we had 19, people in the stand that night making a lot of noise with only seconds to go.

She had her eyes alight telling me to pass her the ball. And it was almost instinctive because we had practised so often together just the two of us that I passed her the ball, she got it on the hand sweep and put it top corner with 0. And John, I don't know if you noticed, but that was the Americans that we beat in that particular passage of play there. Sorry about that, chief.

It was amazing, we all remember it. But you've stayed involved, haven't you, with grassroots water polo and also now as a parent. Tell us a little bit about that. Right alongside my career I was always coaching, so I found I got a lot of joy out of it and it actually provided me with a different aspect to give me good feedback about how I played.

So I always coached as a volunteer back in my club and found that it was really positive for me to give back to the sport. That's why I've continued to do it and, you know, I was really lucky to be able to obviously coach at an international level as well along the way. And certainly now as a parent I always say that that was my life then and my life now is with three children and my husband and I have a year-old and twin year-olds at the moment. And I think everything I did then actually prepared me to have two babies at the same time and a toddler.

And so certainly some of the things that I tried to provide to my children is what was provided to me by two great role models in my family and my parents and they provided me with - you know, they stood aside, they're not athletic themselves, and they just provided me the appropriate amount of support. They were always there when I needed them, but because they didn't know the techniques or the tactics or the emotional parts of the game, they certainly always just stood aside and caught me when I had hard moments and lifted me back up and great family support.

I know I was very lucky because that's not what every child has now who are playing sport, but I feel like I need to do that for my children now and offer them that same support along the way. So that's really important to me now as a parent. As a parent, I guess we try to emulate that idea of "I love watching you play" that the fellers have been talking about. It's pretty tough at the top level, water polo, isn't it? It is, it's a really tough sport, and particularly because it's not a professional sport. So our athletes are always preparing themselves outside of having jobs or looking for career aspirations.

So for me really that was the way that I was, that was my life in the sport, and I always had to have a career to support my habit of water polo. So I was always as a coach very supportive of what the girls were doing outside of the pool and I always tried to ask those incidental questions to make sure that I was engaged in their lives away from the water to ensure that I understood them when I was trying to provide an influence, their life as an athlete. So that was really important as well. Is an advantage for water polo and sports that are of a lower profile that are not professional sports - is that an advantage, do you think, with the expectations and the playing the sport for the joy and achievement is there?

I think that's why we were so lucky to come away with that win. Women's water polo wasn't included in the Olympics until and it wasn't until people realised we were going into the Sydney Games ranked second a lot of people jumped on board. And we were very lucky to have that support leading into the games, but we still believed that we loved the game. And certainly if I think about my parents again, the best piece of advice I ever received was to do it because I love it and when the love stops is when you look to retire.

And so they're the types of things that I remind the athletes that I might coach and I also try to instill in my children. You know, now we have this life of instant gratification and our kids are grabbing things and wanting things to work for them straightaway. So I want to provide what I was provided and that is to have that resilience, to have the persistence that even when you don't like sport for a day, or the things that you usually liked to do the coach didn't let you do, is to actually be able to tell them that there's tough times in every sport and there's tough times in every job and there's tough times in life where you have to do things that you don't necessarily love to do.

And so it's trying to provide them with those pieces of expertise that allow them to then be resilient through their sporting life. I realise sport is really important and it gives a huge amount of life skills and so that's what I want to give back to my kids now and any athlete that I come across. Simone, the audience are going to get a chance to ask you some questions later during our panel, but can you please thank Simone for being here today applause and she'll answer some questions. Thanks, Simone, beautifully done.

He's also a father. Please make him welcome, everybody, Josh Kennedy. That finished pretty quickly. Josh, nice to see you, mate. How are the kids? Which one is your favourite? No, the kids are going well. Sage is 11 weeks tomorrow and Lottie is 21 months. At the moment Sage is the favourite because she's pretty chilled. Lottie is an absolute nightmare, an absolute nightmare. Mate, I want to ask you I suppose about your junior and your formative years of being a footballer.

You come from Northampton, the Cripps, Hazelby area.

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Some really good footballers come out of Northampton. I know you've heard a little bit of what the boys have had to say and what Simone has had to say. Sport for country kids, how important is it and what did you get out of it? Yeah, I think it's what brings the community together. You know, I grew up in Northampton and sport was everything, Friday, Saturday, Sunday was either basketball Friday, Saturday nights and then obviously rolling into football season, where you train Monday, Wednesday, Friday and you play on the weekend.

So it really brought the town together. You know, Sunday football was the best day of the week, especially as a kid. We'd get to go play juniors and then you'd go watch the league play or Colts Resies league. I used to do scoreboard, which was pretty good pay. I used to get a Coke and a pie. And because we had a creek near our goals, obviously the ball used to get kicked over. If you would go and fetch that, you used to get two cokes and a pie, so that was an even better job. But no, just the whole sense of community, you know, from the juniors to the seniors to just the parents to the whole town getting around it I think, yeah, it was a real good sense of community and it brought the town closer together, especially in hard times I think with a lot of farming and situations up there.

Football was always something that brought everyone to the club and to get together, which is pretty cool. And what about parental support from your parents and parents in a town like that, super important driving kids around and to other towns, what was the parental support like for you? Look, yeah, obviously everyone took their fair share and I remember going to a lot of games, especially when we had to go to Mullewa, which was about an hour and a half drive from Northampton, and it depends which mum I suppose drew the short straw to take the kids.

So no, it was definitely - and like I said before, it was just a sense of community, everyone was willing to help each other out. And obviously a small town, all us kids used to gang together help each other out and get to training and get through it all, so it was good. I go to quite a few West Coast games and I'm sure there are other people here. You've become over the years a favourite with the crowd, one of the more popular players.

Do people say to you, other than your parents, "I love watching you play"? I'm sure they do. I was the guy that got rid of Juddy, you know what I mean? I was the guy who replaced Juddy, so it was pretty hard. But no, I've been quite lucky over I suppose my journey at the club and the fans have been great, the club has been great. I'm just so rapt to be able to play back in my home state.

Has it always been fun for you? Elite sports people get injured. Has there ever been a time where it hasn't been fun for you for whatever reason? Yeah, definitely it's ups and downs. I was talking to someone about this the other day. One thing I'm not going to miss when I retire is the roller-coaster. You know all about the roller-coaster and the ups and downs that you go through with it and everyone has it in their life and work and whatever it is. But yeah, the best thing I think about a football club and we were lucky is the team environment, everyone is around there to support you.

We had really good coaches and staff, resources that we could lean on to get through. Plus you had your parents and your family and all that stuff. So yeah, look, it's been an amazing journey. But yeah, the fun thing, it's a very interesting topic because even in professional sport with us, a lot of the time when shit hits the fan, that's the first thing the coaches do.

They bring out the soccer ball and you have a bit of fun. You bring it back into the game and it almost, yeah, gets you going again to get back on the horse and start charging. So, yeah, it's good to see, you know, people appreciating it because that's why we play. That's why we play sport, it's for the fun. I'm sure someone in the room will ask about round 1, Josh, it's been all through the media in the last little while. It won't be me, it will be one of these guys I reckon.

Mate, just finally, with regards to your own - the girls, the kids are little now. How do you reckon you're going to go as parent when they start playing sport? And it will put the play back in play ball for all of our young athletes. Are you ready to take action? Are you ready to change the game? Toon meer Toon minder. Recensie s The future of our children in sports lies in the hands of parents, coaches, and themselves. This book provides tools and tips to accelerate positive youth development experiences, as well as critical life lessons along the way.

Changing the Game serves as a powerful guide for both parents and coaches who want kids to have fun, enjoyable, and meaningful youth sporting experiences. The 7 Cs section is a must-read for every coach and parent. Many of the lessons and values in this book are timeless and will make a significant impact for everyone involved in youth sports. I highly recommend it! It explores in both depth and breadth the youth sports experience, its blood, sweat, and tears. Any parent who wants their children to gain the physical, psychological, emotional, and social benefits of what sport has to offer and isn't that every parent!

It will make you a better sports parent, and it will ensure that your children get all the good stuff and avoid most of the bad stuff from participating in sports. I firmly believe that the youth sport experience for a child is shaped as powerfully by their parents or guardians involvement.

That involvement by definition is neither a good nor bad thing.

Samenvatting

Rather the importance of that involvement needs to be appreciated and then it needs to be intelligently managed. In this book John gives practical and helpful guidance to elevating the experience of the children in youth sports by directly addressing the role of the parent or guardian. I think this book helps the ongoing challenge of making youth sports fun and safe as well as somewhere talent can be developed whatever the level. John O'Sullivan has clearly and professionally illuminated this challenging path with both research and common-sense advice.

This book will help your athlete reach their full potential and allow you to be part of their good memories. In my work with younger athletes, it is necessary to devote some of the time to the parents so they can help their kids to improve their mindset, focus, and confidence. As I read John's book, each chapter reminded me specifically of several of my current and former athletes, what they were going through, and their parents' role in the process.

Changing the Game is a wonderful resource for parents to help their young athletes succeed in sports and life, and I can't recommend it enough Brian Baxter, director, Sport Psychology Institute Northwest, and author of The Sports Mindset Gameplan: An Athlete's Guide to Building and Maintaining Confidence John O'Sullivan's approach to parenting high-performing athletes is insightful, comprehensive, and effective.

He provides practical and relevant principles that can improve communication and understanding between parent and child. His approach helps foster growth and strengthen core family values; most importantly it reminds parents that organized sports is supposed to be fun. Changing the Game is a must read for parents who want to take an interactive role in raising confident and well-rounded athletes. D, author of Education and Empowerment for the 21st Century Parent Changing the Game offers invaluable insights into the reality of the youth sports world and the critical impact that parents have to make or break their kids' experience in sports.

John O'Sullivan's thoughtful approach and guidance is spot on and just what we parents and coaches need to help our kids thrive on a field, on a team, and in the game of life! With such a changing climate of youth sports today, this book provides a guide for parents that brings the focus back on what is truly important for a child participating in sports.

This guide offers ways for youth sports organizations to make sure that no child walks around with a hole in their heart. If youth sports organizations implemented this book within their educational efforts we would perhaps see more children involved in athletics beyond the age of fourteen!