Rick Davis, a PCA National Advisory Board Member, is a retired professional soccer player and former member of the U.S. National Team. He played with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, and was named Player of the Year in 1979. Davis was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2001 and served as Executive Director of AYSO.

Davis discusses the tricky situation coaches face when correcting players who aren’t performing at the desired level. Coaches spend a lot of time working on certain sport-specific skills with players, and it can be frustrating to determine what’s going wrong if athletes aren’t successfully mastering skills. There’s a balance to strike between having an uplifting attitude and being candid, which can lead to a tendency to reprimand rather than encourage. At the youth level in particular, this is a struggle a lot of coaches will encounter, and they should be aware of these inclinations.