The responsibilities and demands placed on youth sport and interscholastic and intercollegiate coaches are sometimes underestimated. Unlike the generations of coaches that preceded them, today's coaches are expected not only to teach motor skills to young athletes but to do so in an environment that is conducive to the ethical, emotional, social, and physical well-being of each and every one of them. Tasks as important as these cannot be accomplished in a haphazard fashion. They require deliberate and conscious thought.

To improve themselves and their athletes, coaches have to stop coaching out of habit and challenge themselves to rethink the way they do the little things. Each of the 15 chapters of this book presents, and then systematically debunks, the most pervasive, persistent, and potentially harmful myths in coaching, including such chestnuts as play by my rules, winning is the ultimate goal, and there's no I in team. Although the information in every chapter is based on current scientific evidence (and includes a complete list of citations) each is written in the everyday language of coaches and covers topics that are of particular interest to coaches, parents, athletic administrators, recreation programming specialists - and even the occasional fan.