The Question Parents Should Stop Asking After Practice

A veteran women’s lacrosse coach with more than thirty years of experience says one well-meaning sentence from parents is quietly doing damage to young athletes.

Parents ask it in the car. They ask it at the dinner table. They ask it, sometimes, before the child has taken her shin guards off. “Why aren’t you playing?”

It sounds like concern. It sounds like love. And according to Kathy Taylor, who spent more than thirty years coaching women’s lacrosse at every level from high school to NCAA Division I, it is one of the most corrosive things a parent can say to a young athlete after a hard practice.

The problem, Taylor explains, is not the parent’s intention. The problem is the position it puts the child in. An eleven-year-old who hears “why aren’t you playing” has two choices. She can tell her parents the truth, which might be that she is not yet as good as the girl ahead of her on the depth chart. Or she can redirect the blame onto her coach. Most children, given that choice, will pick the coach. And once that story takes hold, the trust between family and program begins to erode in ways that are very difficult to repair.

Taylor is not an anti-parent coach. She has spoken publicly and repeatedly about her gratitude for the families who trusted her with their daughters across a career that included state championships, NCAA Final Fours, a national championship, and a tenure as head coach at Colgate University. She served as president of the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association and has worked with thousands of families over three decades. She likes parents. She just thinks many of them are accidentally making things harder.

The accelerant, in her view, is the phone. A generation ago, the car ride home from practice was a buffer. A child had thirty or forty minutes to process what happened before she had to narrate it to anyone. That buffer is gone. Today’s athlete is texting before she reaches the parking lot, and the parent is reading a live stream of frustration from hundreds of miles away. The emotional temperature of practice arrives at home with no time to cool.

Taylor’s advice to parents is practical. Drive the car. Show up to games. Cheer. But let the child carry her own bag, literally and figuratively. Let her own the story of practice. Let her sit with disappointment long enough to learn something from it before someone rushes in to take the sting away. The parents who do this, she says, are giving their children a gift that will outlast any season.

The research supports her. Studies on adolescent resilience consistently find that young people who are allowed to experience manageable adversity, and who are supported but not rescued by the adults around them, develop stronger coping skills and higher self-efficacy over time. Taylor does not cite the research by name. She cites thirty years of watching it play out on practice fields.

Her broader point, one she has made in Kathy Taylor lacrosse coach coverage and podcast interviews, is that sport’s real value is not in the trophy. It is in the difficult moments that make the trophy possible. Being cut is a teacher. Riding the bench is a teacher. Losing a game you should have won is a teacher. A parent who removes those experiences, however lovingly, is removing the curriculum.

For parents navigating youth and club sports, the career and philosophy of Kathy Taylor lacrosse offers a useful compass. Not every practice will end with a happy child. That, she would argue, is the point.