The Two Minutes Before You Drop Him Off

Everybody worries about the drive home.

The drive in is the one nobody thinks about, and it's the one you can actually steer — because on the way to a game your young athlete isn't defending anything yet. Nothing has gone wrong. He's just a kid in a car with a bag in the back, slightly nervous, listening to whatever you decide to say.

Two minutes, maybe eight. You'll get forty of them a season, and they're the cheapest coaching minutes you'll ever have.

The short version

Set the frame, then get out of the way.

One sentence about what he's working on, one sentence that has nothing to do with lacrosse, and then let it be quiet. That's it. You're not preparing him tactically — his coach does that, and the program did it all week. You're setting what he thinks the afternoon is for.

The single most useful thing you can put in his head before a game is a process target he controls, rather than an outcome he doesn't.

Why the frame matters more than the pep talk

Whatever you name becomes the scoreboard. If the last thing you say is have a good game, he has to define "good," and a young athlete will define it by goals allowed every time. If the last thing you say is see if you can step to the ball every time today, he's got something he can actually win at regardless of what the other team does. Same two seconds, completely different afternoon.

This is the drive-in version of the idea underneath everything else in this collection: the score is a target, but it isn't the one that matters most, and development is what compounds. A process target is just that idea, said out loud, on the way to the field.

It lowers the stakes without lowering the effort. Nerves in the car are mostly about the unknown — how many, how good, what if. Naming something small and concrete gives him something to hold onto that's the same size every week no matter who's on the schedule.

And it's the one moment he's actually listening. After the game he's flooded. Before it he's alert, a bit keyed up, and open in a way he won't be again for hours. Nothing you say afterward will land the way something said at 7:40 in the morning lands.

Suggestions on what you can do

Pick the target from what he's actually been training. This is where the week pays off. If the program has been on stepping to the line of the ball, that's the sentence. If it's been on hands out and eyes up, that's the sentence. You're not inventing coaching, you're reminding him of the thing he already owns — which is also why it works better than generic encouragement.

Keep it to one. Two things is a checklist, and a checklist in a helmet is noise. One thing, said once, not repeated at the curb.

Then change the subject entirely. Music, breakfast, what's happening after, the dog. The second sentence's whole job is to prove the first one wasn't a lecture. Quiet is fine too — a lot of goalies want the last three minutes silent, and you should let them have it.

By age: with third and fourth graders, keep the target playful and physical — let's see how many you can catch with two hands today. Fifth through eighth, name the actual cue from the week's training, because at this age they're proud of having something specific to work on. High school, ask rather than tell: what are you working on today? By then he has an answer, and hearing him say it out loud does more than anything you could have supplied.

Feed him and stop talking about it. Whatever the pre-game food plan is, settle it the night before so the car isn't where it gets negotiated. A nervous stomach at 7 a.m. is a real thing and it isn't fixed by a conversation on the way.

Leave with time to spare. Nothing you say in those two minutes survives a rushed arrival. Being early is itself a form of preparation, and it's entirely within your control.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to talk about the other team. Who's good, who beat us last time, who's got the kid with the shot — none of that gives him anything he can use, and all of it raises the temperature.

Go easy on last week. The drive in is not the place for the debrief you didn't have, and a young athlete who gets last Saturday's review on the way to this Saturday's game is now playing two games at once.

Try not to name a number. Keep it under five sounds supportive and it hands him an outcome he can't control, and a goalie chasing a number stops playing the ball in front of him.

And don't send him in with your nerves. He'll read your voice before he reads your words. If you're wound up about this one, say less — silence is much better than false calm, which kids detect immediately.

What you're actually doing

You're telling him what the afternoon is for, before anybody else gets a chance to tell him it's about the scoreboard.

Two sentences. Then music, and the parking lot, and the walk across the grass with the bag banging against his leg.

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The process target only works if there's a process behind it. That's what the daily program builds — three real days of a fifth-grade week are open on the site, no signup. Take a look at the free week.

Coach Greg — LAX Goalie Hub