Building & Maintaining Coach-Parent Relationships

From setting team goals to conducting practices to providing player feedback, coaches have a lot of responsibilities on their plates to juggle. When you add in the element of building and maintaining coach-parent relationships, coaches can become overwhelmed.

The purpose of coach-parent relationships is to provide parents with consistent and detailed feedback on how their child is performing. Without proper feedback, parents aren’t in the know of what skills their child can improve upon, or better yet, what areas their child excels in (and can keep working towards mastering). In addition to feedback, parents will also have frequent questions about the practice schedule, upcoming tournaments, or equipment to buy.

While parents deserve to be seen, valued, and respected, coaches have the right to a stress-free and pleasant experience when interacting with parents. To help manage parent expectations and create a clear path of communication between both parties, we provide some tips on how to build and maintain coach-parent relationships.

How to Maintain Healthy Coach-Parent Communication

1. Communicate Clearly With Parents

Make it a habit to communicate important information to parents before any practice or tournament. The shared information might be as simple as providing a schedule breakdown, a reminder about tryout fees, or the details about the venue for an upcoming tournament. Essentially, any information that will eliminate confusion should be shared.

The best method of communication to send these frequent updates and reminders is through email. Templates can be created ahead of time. I.e., If you are routinely sending emails about updated practice schedules, a template can be created in which the date and time of the new practice can quickly be added in. Emails also allow for easy referencing, in which you can track all emails that have been sent out to avoid the excuse, “Oh, I never got it!”

2. Manage Parent Expectations

24/7 communication, undivided player attention, and guaranteed skill development are a few unrealistic expectations parents might have. At the beginning of each season, ensure parents have a clear understanding of what to expect. For example, this could be in the form of an email stating what you will be responsible for. Key focuses might include:

• Monitor athlete performance to understand player strengths and improvements.
• Explain, demonstrate, and correct errors for relevant skills.
• Provide verbal encouragement when deemed necessary.
• Create a welcoming environment open to player feedback and communication.
• Treat all players equally and avoid any acts of favoritism.

3. Educate Parents on Athlete Performance

Parents often leave a tryout with little to no information on why their child didn’t make the team or get selected for the position of their choice. Parents are then left to wonder what criteria were used to evaluate their child and how the selection process was conducted.

A good evaluation process should have tangible results that can be shared with both athletes and their parents. This information should showcase what skills an athlete excelled at during an evaluation and also what skills need further attention.

With SkillShark’s athlete report cards, parents & athletes provide a digital record of every skill that was assessed during a tryout. This includes the athlete scores for each skill assessed, along with the team average for each skill (for side-by-side comparison). This information provides parents with some transparency into the criteria used in the selection process.

Individual report on SkillShark’s athlete evaluation software

Managing Communication With SkillShark

Ultimately, parents want to know that their athletes are given a fair shot to make a particular team. With advanced communication, unbiased evaluators, and professional feedback, healthy coach-parent relationships can be formed!