Why Coaches Should Let Athletes Take Risk and Make More Decisions

As a coach, you may assume that your role is to protect athletes from failure, make the decisions that you feel are in the best interest of the team, and generally keep the team’s results steady.

But viewing your role in this way may be holding your athletes back from finding their true potential—and from the important growth that comes from taking risks and occasionally failing.

Here, board-certified family physician and TrueSport Expert Deborah Gilboa, MD, is sharing ways that coaches can help athletes take (safe) risks, make their own decisions, and live with the consequences.

The importance of risk and consequences

Obviously, when Gilboa is talking about risk and consequences, she doesn’t mean driving without a seatbelt or staying out past curfew. Instead, she’s speaking to the idea of taking thoughtful risks within the relative safety of an athlete’s sport life. Coaches should not only let athletes take risks and make more decisions in their athletic life but create these opportunities for athletes. Whether that means allowing athletes to design new plays for the team or pick their own captains, decision-making opportunities are everywhere in sport. And these small-scale, low-stakes risks can teach athletes big life lessons.

“We want to find more opportunities for athletes to fail with purpose,” says Gilboa. “Every risk they take is an opportunity to stress-test their resilience. We want athletes to push themselves to the next level, because if they don’t push themselves to the point where they may fail, they don’t learn to deal with failure and navigate towards their goals when inevitably, they hit roadblocks in life. We need to give them more opportunities to use their resilience and strengthen that muscle.”

The problem, Gilboa says, is that in the athletic world, we tend to play it safe. “For example, we won’t promote someone to be team captain unless we're positive that the athlete is going to succeed,” she says. “But if the purpose of sport is to strengthen the athletes and not only to have a winning season, we need to give them chances to fail.”

“Our athletes’ lives will be full of risk, and if we protect them from all of these situations now, we are accidentally telling them that we don't think they can handle risk at all,” she adds.

Progressing risk-taking

While risk and failure are important, Gilboa is quick to add that risk-taking isn’t meant to be truly risky. Rather, it should be done in a progressive, step-wise manner. Work with your athletes to determine a pathway to progress, with small risks along the way. “The process should involve small changes and gradual increases to serve a larger goal,” says Gilboa. “These steps should increase the challenge enough that failure is possible, but not an almost-certain outcome.”

Giving athletes decision-making power

We need to give our athletes more opportunities for decision-making, Gilboa says. “So many student-athletes see decision-making as very risky, because of all the social pressure that can come from it, along with the fear of failure,” she says.

Nudge your athlete to make a decision by providing direction, but not a full decision. “For example, if an athlete needs to improve their aerobic capacity, tell them that, but ask them to help create a plan for how they will do that rather than just creating a plan for them,” Gilboa says. “Or if your team needs to get better at communicating during games, point that out, but make the team decide how they’ll fix the problem.”

Finally, while empowering athletes to make decisions is important, Gilboa notes that this doesn’t mean ceding all team power to the athletes. As the coach, you do need to be part of the decision-making process in some cases. “Athletes can more often choose what, when, and how,” she says. “For example, let them make decisions about plays the team is going to try, but not the starting lineup. Or let them collectively choose the structure of team practice, but not the frequency.”