Looking back over 27 years of coaching young athletes, the most valuable piece of wisdom I’ve gained is the necessity of setting team rules at the first practice, then reinforcing these rules throughout every practice and game. Team rules are important for a few reasons: They maintain order, they teach important values and they set expectations.
Setting the right rules has infinitely more impact than setting imperfect rules. This is a fact I learned through a lot of trial and error and experimentation — a process that has yielded a set of team rules that are magical in their simplicity and effectiveness. Here they are:
