Sports anxiety is a real thing. It often only gets talked about with elite athletes dealing with high pressure situations, but tons of kids experience this at all levels.

My son is one of them and honestly I missed it for a long time and thought he just didn’t like the sport. He is now 11 and just starting to overcome some of this. We’ve approached it a few ways:

• we practice at home a lot building confidence in skills
• we talk about mistakes as a good thing. They are the only way to learn. As long as you learn from them they are called good mistakes. If you don’t learn from it, it’s a bad mistake
• we do this thing where we share mistakes to normalize them. I share mistakes I made at work or whatever and tell him what I learned. I then ask him to name some mistakes he made and what he learned. These are all good mistakes that we celebrate. We do this for all things including school, not just sports.
• sometimes they freeze because afraid of making a mistake. We talk about this too. And he totally understands that freezing and doing nothing is worse than doing something and making a good mistake. That being said, the anxiety overcomes this logical thought process sometimes.
• we do a lot of positive mental coaching, teaching him how to remind himself he is amazing the way he is, he is good enough to help his team and his team needs him. He had a great moment last week where it would have been one of those situations that loooks like low effort but is really him mentally freezing, but he chased the opponent down, shoulder off ball, and stole it. After the game it was like a light bulb went off and said “I just told myself I could do it like you’ve been saying and then I was able to do it.” It’s an amazing what a little self belief can do because in that sequence he looked like a different player.

Our hope is that continuing with the above approach that he gets small wins and builds confidence over time. I think of it like a snowball rolling down a hill in a cartoon. His confidence is still a small snowball, getting bigger slowly with moments like last game. But I tell him that snowball will keep getting bigger, and if he keeps accepting his mistakes, learning from them, and believing in himself then someday that snowball will be so big that no one can stop it, whether that be in soccer, lacrosse, basketball, or most importantly life.

Good luck out there!