How Family Support Helps Players Thrive

Whether you like it or not, your family has an outsized impact on your journey as a player. Sometimes it’s a negative – they don’t believe in you and that fuels you – and sometimes it’s a positive. When pros are asked about how they achieved success, you often hear something like, “My parents are the reason I’m here.”

Your family plays an instrumental role in establishing your relationship with soccer and instilling your desire to continue playing into young adulthood. Unfortunately, most players don’t realize this until they reach adulthood themselves, and they no longer see their parents every day.

This is why we encourage our athletes to give their parents the praise they deserve today, and make sure their efforts don’t go unreciprocated.

Your Parents Shape Your View of Soccer

Soccer skills always start at home. Lots of athletes were introduced to soccer by their parents at a young age. However, only some of these athletes developed a passion for the game that fueled them to continue their soccer journeys on their own free will.

Why did these athletes develop a passion for the game? Odds are, it’s because their parents showed them the game and it became something they shared together. Their parents got excited for matches, cheered from the sidelines, and took them out for ice cream every time afterwards. In other words, they made it so that soccer was fun, and that they couldn’t be prouder to be the parents of a soccer player.

Your Parents Turn Your Hobby into Your Passion

As kids, we naturally take our parents for granted. We have no idea how much their behavior is impacting our relationship with soccer, because as far as we’re concerned, this is just normal. “Isn’t this what every parent does?”, you might think.

Young athletes also don’t realize that passion is essential for success. Passion is what fuels athletes to power through the rigorous grind of high-level sports. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’ll wonder why you’re putting yourself through all this physical and mental stress, and inevitably burn out. By helping you develop a passion for soccer with their happiness and support, your parents are giving you the tools for a long and successful career.

During our careers, we regularly found ourselves looking back on our earliest soccer memories, and remembering how our parents turned every match into an experience, as opposed to just another monotonous part of their routines. Soccer became important to us because we felt like we were doing something special, and we wanted to keep having these special experiences over and over again.

Your Parents are Your Shoulder to Cry On

Parental support is particularly crucial when adversity strikes. There’s a lot of emotion in high-level sports, and the lows can be just as extreme as the highs. Our parents lift us up when we’re down, something that’s very hard to do on your own. If your parents didn’t make a conscious effort to cheer you up during these moments, your passion for soccer would gradually fade away.

Young athletes also tend to get angry when their soccer journey hits a speed bump, and they have no one to take it out on but their parents. What if your parents just yelled right back at you, instead of telling you that everything would be okay?

When Your Athlete Won’t Open Up to You

Initiating these conversations isn’t easy because many athletes have trouble opening up to their parents about soccer-related struggles. Since they feel their parents can’t personally relate to their struggles, they feel like they won’t be understood.

One solution to this common dilemma is mentorship. A mentor has lived the journey of a high-level soccer player, and knows exactly what your athlete is going through. Young athletes often have an easier time opening up to mentors because they know that when their mentor gives advice, it’s based on firsthand experience with the same situation.

If your athlete is struggling to open up after a recent setback, let’s connect. At Beyond Goals Mentoring, we help parents preserve their relationships with their athletes by serving as their full-time emotional outlet. You don’t have to get yelled at or watch your athlete suffer in silence. Helping athletes overcome adversity is a mentor’s specialty, so you get to leave the tough conversations to us.