My summer routine is pretty simple: eat, coach tennis, eat, coach more tennis, eat, crash on the couch, repeat. If spending six days a week surrounded by kids under 12 every summer has taught me anything (other than patience), it’s definitely that kids are hard to convince. Running up against an 8-year-old iron will is worse than skiing into a tree. But over the past six years I’ve spent as a coach, I’ve found two keys for successful manipulation persuasion.
- Play with Calico Critters. Kids won’t understand or relate to anything you’re saying unless you get into their world. One summer, a lady approached me and asked me to teach her youngest daughter. The whole rest of the family loved tennis, but it was the bane of Emi’s existence. She hated practicing and had a difficult time even making contact with the ball. Our first lesson was a struggle. Drilling was unappetizing. Technique was a chore. At the end of hour, I learned that she adored Calico Critters… and thus every drill, game, and
exercise we did had to do with Calico Critters. We saved them from the evil Bear Queen by hitting ten forehands over the net in a row. We represented teams of critters and had competitions to see which critters were best at volleying the most in a row together (I had to be a beaver, pig, dalmatian, and koala before the summer was out). Even though this was extremely corny to me, Emi loved it – and loved coming to lessons. Basically, successful selling to kids depends on how well you can frame the task in a way they can relate to. If you need to be a kangaroo for an hour, deal with it.
- Find the Gatorade. Kids’ brains work in mysterious ways. And nothing seems to motivate them more on a hot summer day than a cool bottle of free Gatorade. But I don’t just give
them the Gatorade – they have to earn it by hitting a hopper on the fly with a volley during the Free Drink Game. Once I realized how much all the kids loved playing (and winning) this game, I started using it as a reward for technique practice. Since the more the kids
practiced their good (ok, passable) technique, the better they performed in the Free Drink Game. When I figured out that 7-year-olds are not interested in learning good technique because it will make them better tennis players in the future and realized that Gatorade is the main goal in their minds, I became a much more influential coach.
So at the end of the day, don’t be afraid to play with Calico Critters and use Gatorade because
all you’re doing is being an awesome salesman – using empathy and understanding to close the deal.
BoweryJE22