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Setting the table for violence is a verbal buffet of hatred, prejudice and just plain meanness. This is created by an undercurrent of negativity within the population that is most readily reflected in our news media, popular music, movies and politics, to name a few. While anger and frustration attend our athletic contests, they also pay a visit to the rest of our lives. Lack of self-control is pandemic. Negativity reaches into all corners of our lives and acts as an incubator for many societal ills. Negativity also affects our physical health and our ability to recover from injury. It lessens employee productivity, reducing output and creativity. The emotional health of our citizens is a national health issue that should be of paramount concern in our country, but it’s not addressed systemically though our schools where it would do the most good. Emotionally healthy people, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians, “are in control of their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. They feel good about themselves and have good relationships. They can keep problems in perspective.” · Are we emotionally healthy? · If not, can we become that way? · Most importantly, are we, as a society, training our children to become emotionally healthy? In athletics, we have a rare opportunity. There, through schools and private leagues, we can attack lack of self-control in our citizens and negativity in our society head-on. We can reach over 30 million young people a year (there only about 52 million children between the ages of 5 and 17) in an existing infrastructure that includes mentors (coaches), places to play, equipment, schedules and contests. The sports team is also a venue where the kids want to be and to improve. What a wonderful place to start teaching American youth how to create and maintain a positive environment for themselves and for others. Businesses now pay millions of dollars to companies to re-train their employees to be ethical human beings who care about their work, are detail-oriented and are critical thinkers. Retraining adults is a lot harder than training children. We can have kids practice controlling their thoughts, feelings and behaviors while they are having fun playing sports in our schools and youth leagues. By the time they get to the workplace, they can be ready to be productive employers and employees. The Problem Currently, each team is lead by a coach. The athletic director or league administrator gives little or no direction to the coach about the subject matter, besides the sport itself, that is to be taught. The mental part of excelling in athletics, which translates into the rest of life, is rarely addressed. Each coach teaches verbally, going against time-tested educational methodology that uses a text. Except for winning the game, the object of athletics is not clear at all. The Solution The mental health professional community can step into that vacuum. In that space, where there is no specific agenda, people who know how to help kids fix problems and avoid crises can capture the message of sport and make it their own. In this venue, we can have kids practice the tools that work to overcome adversity and have them become resilient. To do this, we will have to wrestle the administration of sport away from those who’s self-interest prevents us from teaching these life skills to our children and, in its place, administer a science-based curriculum and text for children on all sports teams. Sport psychology has studied how controlling thoughts can improve performance on athletic fields. And cognitive-behavioral psychology uses many of the same techniques to relieve us of many troubling, even if temporary, emotional disorders. Why not use these sciences to teach preventative mental health to mitigate violence in our society? These sciences give kids tools to work through mental problems they frequently encounter. When they are negative, they learn how to make the mental choice to become positive because they learn faster and perform better when they create a positive environment. When they feel like being lazy, they learn how to change attitude and make a decision to give all their effort because it affects the way they feel about themselves. They can understand and practice paying attention to detail, set goals and use visualization techniques to make progress in their tasks because achievement increases self-worth. In those teams and schools that have undertaken to change the paradigm of sports, kids are learning that the choice is theirs to make. They are not prisoners of their thoughts, but instead, learn how to recognize their thoughts, categorize them and then change them to better serve themselves and their team. To accomplish this, there are three paradigms that must change: 1. Coaches must have a written curriculum that shows what mental skills to practice with their young athletes to improve performance and behavior every time they meet.; 2. Children must be given a text, following an educational model, to augment what the coach is teaching; 3. Athletic directors or administrators must view their position as one of leadership in holding coaches and kids accountable for teaching and learning mental life skills. As a basketball coach of over twenty years, I know first-hand that kids can learn more than just a specific sport when they play on a team. They can also learn to live a life that is more emotionally stable and filled with achievement. With that kind of plan, we have a chance to create a safer, more positive society. Mitch Lyons is president and founder of GetPsychedSports.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation advocating for a positive change in the subject matter of athletics. See the website www.getpsychedsports.org for more information on how you can affect change. www.HealthNewsDigest.com Top of Page 
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