Empowering Athletes to Be Independent Young Adults

In the “old days” (that is, before the internet), coaches would share important information about upcoming contests during practice: “Our next game is away; it starts at 5 p.m. You need to be there by 3:45 p.m. Wear your blue uniforms. Tell your parents.” Students would go home and relay this info to their families or take care of things themselves. Students who forgot something suffered the natural consequences of doing so, and learned from that mistake—because it was their mistake, and their mistake alone. The expectation was that students were responsible for themselves.

 

Email and the internet have revolutionized our ability to communicate and our access to information in a multitude of ways, mostly for the better. I would argue, though, that an unintended effect of our improved access to information and ease of communication is that it is also easier to fact check the information they’ve shared with us, whether by searching online after the fact or by sending emails or texts to confirm. In many cases, this is perfectly appropriate. We should be aware, however, that in other situations, we may be sending insidious messages to the other person, such as, “You don’t need to do this because I’ll do it for you” or “You’re not capable of doing this properly.”

 

Emails and texts give us the capability to communicate directly with each other quickly. Just because we can use technology, however, doesn’t mean that we always should.