As a youth sports coach, you don’t have time to sit around all day thinking about things like:
- Understanding individual athlete’s personality and how to best motivate them
- Team/squad dynamics and managing relationships within the team/squad
- How to communicate better with athletes and parents
Your lack of time as coach requires finding quick and tangible solutions that improve your coaching and your athletes’ development. You want to impact the kids you’re coaching, but you can’t commit full-time hours to your craft as a youth sports coach.
Whether you’re looking for the best basketball coaching podcast, football coaching podcast, or soccer coaching podcast, or for your specific sport – we’ve identified the top 5 youth sports podcasts for any coach looking to maximize their impact and create champions on and off the field.
The Top 5 Youth Sports Podcasts For Coaches in 2022
In no particular order, these podcasts give you the best ideas, mentalities, and advice for impacting kids positively, winning games, and having fun while doing it. Topics like resolving conflict, managing playing time, and creating a successful volunteer program are just some areas that these podcasts cover throughout the episodes listed.
Whether through interviews with top youth sports coaches or stories from hosts, these youth sports podcasts do a great job of helping you find fast solutions for being the best coach you can be.
1. Winning Youth Coaching Podcast
Simply put, host Craig Haworth wants to interview great youth sports coaches that can share winning mentalities with other coaches. With over 170 episodes on the Winning Youth Coaching Podcast, you’ll hear lessons from coaches across all of the major sports that can be applied to the way you coach your sport.
This is one of our favorite youth sports podcasts to recommend for young coaches looking to learn how they can improve to impact their athletes.
2. Coach Forward Podcast with Jason Mejeur
On the Coach Forward Podcast, hosted by Head Coach and CEO Jason Mejeur (Coach J), Jason sits down with today’s top coaches, to go beyond the X’s and O’s and explore the ever-changing landscape of high-impact coaching in youth sports. He shares the latest innovation, advice, and hands-on youth coaching insights to help you mentor, inspire, and create champions for life.
“A coach will impact more people in 1-year than the average person does in a lifetime. Here on the coach forward podcast our mission is to help these coaches have an even greater impact.”
-Jason Mejeur, Host of Coach Forward Podcast
Jason is passionate about helping coaches and increasing the impact they have on kids, and every episode leaves listeners with 3-4 tangible things to take away and implement into your program right away. Each episode is around 45-minutes long and there are over 25 episodes available already.
3. Art of Coaching Podcast
The Art of Coaching Podcast just eclipsed 200 episodes full of the best coaching advice that you can’t find with a quick Google search. Ranging from topics like evaluating soft skills to building buy-in with a foreign culture, this podcast covers tons of topics that will give you instant improvements as a youth sports coach.
In addition to some incredible interviews and episodes, host Brett Bartholomew has created some great additional resources. You can check out their online courses, interactive workshops, best-selling book Conscious Coaching, and personalized mentoring opportunities too.
4. Coaching Culture Podcast
For the coaches that are trying to do everything themselves, this podcast is a lifesaver. There are too many holes to plug as a team of one, and co-hosts JP Nerbun and Nate Sanderson have seen that more than anyone.
The Coaching Culture Podcast was started to help you “establish a strong, healthy culture with disciplined follow through.” With a great culture in place, you find yourself able to impact character, winning, and enjoyment even when you’re only getting an hour or two a week with your team. With 200+ episodes, this podcast covers different methods and quick tips that will help you do more for your culture with less time.
5. On The Whistle
SquadLocker CEO, Gary Goldberg, says that “Coaches, teachers, and mentors are unsung heroes in the fabric of America’s youth.” As host of On The Whistle, Goldberg captures stories of leadership, character, and coaching in youth sports.
This podcast serves as a great reminder of the perseverance needed in youth sports coaching, and the lasting impact you make on the kids you’re responsible for. The interviews contain loads of athletes, former athletes, and coaches that found ways to overcome adversity, find joy in the game, and impact others through youth sports.