What to Say Before a Game (and What to Drop)

It's 8:20 on a Saturday morning. You're parked at the tennis center with the engine running because the heater is the only warm thing your daughter has right now. Her match is at 8:30. She has her racket across her knees, picking at the grip tape. She hasn't said anything since the gas station.

She's nervous, and she plays worse when she's nervous. What you say before a game in youth sports can settle her or tighten her up, and you have about ten minutes left before you hand her over to a court and a stranger with a clipboard.

So you start talking. She's been serving great all week. The girl she's playing is beatable, you watched her last month. Remember to bend her knees on the second serve, that's the one thing. Don't get down on herself if she drops the first game.

"Okay."

You say, "Just have fun out there."

"Okay."

She gets out and walks toward court four, and the way she's holding her shoulders tells you none of it landed. You were in that car for ten minutes. You said nine things. You have no idea which one she's carrying.

The Voice That Moves the Needle

There is a study of 238 young competitive swimmers in the United States, ages nine to fourteen. Club swimmers, roughly fifteen hours a week in the water, with parents deeply invested. Researchers measured two things separately: the atmosphere the coach created and the atmosphere the parents created. Then they looked at which one predicted the child's performance anxiety.

The parents won. It wasn't close. Once the researchers accounted for what the parents were doing, the coach's approach stopped predicting anxiety altogether.

Read that twice. The coach is not the reason your kid is tight before games, and you can't outsource this one. The person whose voice moves the needle is the person driving the car.

What Do Parents Actually Do in the Last Ten Minutes?

A group of British researchers interviewed seventy-nine young athletes, ages nine to eighteen, across twenty-six sports. They asked what the adults around them do that changes how they feel about playing. Buried in the results is a section called parent pre-performance behaviors, literally the things parents do in the last few minutes, and it sorts into three kinds.

Encouraging effort. Two of the researchers' own labels are "everybody contributes" and "play your own game." Building confidence: telling your child you believe they can do it. Then pressurizing behaviors, which break down into exactly four: pressure about selection, high expectations, discussion of consequences, and pressure to perform well.

Look at that third list. Not one of those four things is cruel. Pressure about selection is a parent who knows tryouts are in three weeks. Discussion of consequences is a parent explaining what's at stake because she assumes her kid doesn't know. High expectations is a parent who believes in her child so much she says so out loud. Every one is love, delivered on the wrong day.

That's the problem with this window. It's the moment your own nerves peak, and what nerves make you do (give information, raise the stakes, prepare them for what matters) is exactly what lands in column three. Two categories help. The one you reach for when you're anxious is the one that doesn't.

Their Body Goes Before Their Mind Does

Most parents treat a nervous kid as a thinking problem: if we can talk them out of the worry, the worry will go. Kids don't experience it that way.

Canadian researchers interviewed young soccer and hockey players, ages eight to twelve, in the weeks before they tried out for higher-level teams. One ten-year-old girl described it better than any adult could.

She doesn't feel nervous. Her body does. In her words: "Usually I pass and it goes straight to the person, but the same way I do it, it goes like the opposite direction."

Same girl. Same feet. Same pass she has made ten thousand times. And it goes the other way. She isn't scared. She'd tell you she's fine, and she'd be telling the truth as far as she knows it. Her hands have just stopped taking her calls.

This changes what you're actually doing in those ten minutes. You are not talking to a child with a bad idea in her head that you can replace with a good one. You are standing next to a nervous system, and you cannot fix a nervous system with information. Bend your knees on the second serve is information: a perfectly good instruction she cannot use, delivered to a body that isn't listening.

Don't Lower the Nerves. Change What They Mean.

A sport psychologist in Greece spent six months working with young tennis players and measuring their anxiety before matches. He measured two separate things: how much anxiety they felt (racing heart, tight stomach, loud thoughts) and what they thought it meant. Was this feeling helping them, or wrecking them?

At the end of six months, the first number had barely moved. The kids were just as nervous as when they started. The second number moved a lot. They had gone from reading those feelings as a warning to reading them as fuel. And their tennis got better.

That's the finding, and it runs against common sense: your child does not have to feel calm in order to play well. What the nerves mean to them is the problem, and that part is negotiable.

Which is lucky, because you were never going to make an eleven-year-old calm ten minutes before a match. You've tried. But you can change what a fast heartbeat means in your family, and it takes about six words, said the same way every time: that feeling means you're ready.

Not calm down. Not don't be nervous. Not there's nothing to be nervous about, which tells your child her body is malfunctioning. For the physiology of that racing heart, see this post on pre-game nerves. Your job is mostly not to disturb theirs.

The One Sentence That Plants the Thing You're Afraid Of

There's a fourteen-year-old in that Greek research with a specific problem: her double faults. She was missing two-thirds of her second serves, ten a set. The cause wasn't her arm. Every time she missed a first serve, she said one sentence to herself: don't double fault now, just don't.

Then her eyes would squeeze shut, and her arm would swing as one stiff piece. No elbow, no wrist. She was describing exactly the shot she didn't want, in detail, immediately before hitting it.

Nobody can execute a negative. Don't think about the net. You just thought about the net. Your brain has to build the picture before it can reject it, and a body under pressure grabs the picture and runs.

Adults hand kids negative instructions constantly, and it feels like caution rather than sabotage. Don't get down on yourself. Don't let them get in your head. Don't come out flat like last week. Every one puts an image in a child's mind that you would not choose to put there.

The fix is mechanical. Say the thing you want, not the thing you fear. Don't rush becomes take your time. Don't get down on yourself becomes stay with it. Same intention, opposite picture. If you remember one rule from this, make it this one. It costs nothing, and it works in a parking lot.

Why "It's Just a Game" Sometimes Bounces Off

I want to be honest about the limits here, because you have probably tried the obvious version and watched it fail.

In that same Greek study, an eleven-year-old girl seeded fifth arrived an hour early and sat next to her mother without moving. Twenty minutes before her match, an adult asked whether she was going to warm up. She said she wasn't feeling well and didn't want to play. Her stomach was so tight she couldn't breathe, her face had gone white, and she was working hard not to cry.

He told her it was only a game and that she should try to have fun. The paper records what happened next in one line: she did not seem to take these comments seriously. She went back, sat down next to her mother, and stopped talking to anybody.

Now the other side. A professional baseball player, recalling his own childhood, remembered his parents telling him it's just a game as one of the best things they ever gave him.

Both are true, and the difference is the whole point. It's just a game works as a stance, held for years and proved by how you act after losses. It does not work as an emergency intervention on a kid who is already white-faced and can't breathe. In that moment it isn't reassurance. It's a correction. You're telling a child that the enormous thing she's feeling is out of proportion, which she now has to feel bad about on top of everything else.

You cannot build a belief in ten minutes. You can only hand over the one you've spent months building. Which means the last ten minutes started earlier than you think: if Thursday was tense, Saturday morning is already tense, and no parking-lot speech undoes it. That longer work is where real change happens. A fear of letting you down is rarely solved in a car; the car just makes it visible. If that's the pattern in your house, disappointing a parent is worth reading before your next Saturday, and The Drive Home is the deeper field guide to what happens after the whistle.

The Four-Sentence Drop-Off

Here is the practical version. Four sentences. Then stop talking. The stopping is the technique.

First, something about the body. "Did you eat? There's a banana in the bag." "Water's in the side pocket." You're being useful, and proving that this is a normal morning.

Second, name the nerves and give them a job. "Feeling it a bit? Good. That means you're ready." Say it lightly. Don't turn it into a conversation about feelings. That's a different tool for a different day. Name it, normalize it, move on.

Third, one thing that isn't the outcome. "Play your own game." One thing, not three. It should be something they can do on purpose no matter what the other team does, not a coaching instruction. If it contains a body part, it's a coaching instruction.

Fourth, the line that never changes: "I love watching you play." The same words you say in the car afterward, win or lose. That repetition is not laziness. It's the evidence.

Then you stop. If they want to talk, they'll talk, and you follow. If they don't, the silence in that car is not a missed opportunity. It's the calmest ten minutes anyone will give them all morning. If your child wants a routine of their own to run before the whistle, the pre-game mental routine is the other half of this.

And if you only get one sentence, because they're running late or already out the door, make it the fourth.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I say before a game in youth sports if my child is really nervous?

Name the feeling and hand it a job. Something like, "You've got the jitters? Good, that means you're ready." Then be quiet. You're not trying to calm your child down, because that usually doesn't work in ten minutes. You're teaching them what the feeling means.

Should I give my child a coaching tip right before the game?

No, even if it's correct. A technical instruction ("bend your knees," "keep your elbow up") is information, and a nervous body isn't taking information. Give one thing they can control on their own, like "play your own game," and save the technique for practice.

What if my child says they don't want to play at all?

Take it seriously without making it a crisis. Ask what part feels worst, and don't argue with the answer. Some kids need a smaller moment after ten minutes of quiet. Some are telling you the pressure has gotten too big, and that's a longer conversation for later in the week, not the parking lot.

None of this requires the perfect sentence, and that's the point. What you say before a game matters far less than saying the same few things every time. Pick your four lines, say them the same way all season, and let the silence do the rest.

---

Mike V. Clark writes about the mental side of youth sports at Winning the Inner Game. His book, Winning the Inner Game: Mental Tools for Young Athletes to Develop Grit, Focus, and Emotional Control, is published by Moonbury Publishing.