It’s the night before tryouts. Your kid pushed dinner around the plate and said they weren’t hungry. Now the light’s still on in their room at 10:40pm, and you both know nobody in that room is sleeping.
You know what you’re going to say when you knock. You’ve been rehearsing it since dinner. Some version of: You’ve worked so hard for this. You’ve got this. Go in tomorrow and show them what you can do.
Don’t.
Not because it isn’t true — it’s probably all true. Don’t say it because of what it does to your kid on the other side of that door.
Here’s the thing. A pump-up speech sounds like support, but it lands as pressure. Every line of it says the same quiet thing: tomorrow is the day everything gets decided. You meant to hand them confidence. What you actually handed them is a bigger scoreboard. And they were already staring at the one in their head.
So the heart races a little faster. The stomach ties one more knot. You watch it happen, and you reach for the speech again, louder this time — which is a bit like pouring gas on a fire.
Now look at what that racing heart actually is.
The pounding chest, the no-appetite, the wired-and-can’t-sleep — that is not a sign something is wrong. That’s the body actually getting ready. Adrenaline is doing its job: sharpening the eyes, waking the legs, loading the system for a hard morning. Your kid isn’t malfunctioning. They’re standing at the line, with the engine running.
The trouble is nobody told them that. So they read the pounding heart as fear, and fear says danger, and danger says don’t mess this up — and the whole thing spins tighter.
Which is where you come in, and where the speech comes out.
There’s a move here that researchers keep finding, and it’s almost annoyingly simple. When you’re keyed up before something that matters, trying to calm down mostly fails — the body’s already hyped, and ordering it to cool it adds a second job. But telling yourself you’re not scared, you’re ready — even excited — works, because it doesn’t fight the pounding heart. It just changes what the pounding heart means. Same engine. Different sign on the road (Brooks, 2014).
You can’t hand a twelve-year-old a research paper at 10:40 at night. But you can do the one thing that quietly turns the switch for them.
You ask a question instead of giving a speech.
Not “are you ready?” — that’s the scoreboard again, wearing a question mark. Ask the one that turns them away from the verdict, and toward the part they can actually feel good about:
“What’s the one thing you’re looking forward to tomorrow?”
Watch what that does. It can’t be answered with making the team or not making it — there’s no verdict in it. It points them at something real and in-reach: seeing their friends, the first touch on the ball, the sound of the whistle. It swaps this is a test for this is a thing I get to do. And it tells them, without you having to say it, that you’re not up at 10:40 grading them either. You’re their parent, curious about their tomorrow.
They might shrug. They might mumble. That’s fine — the question already did its work on the way in. You don’t need the answer. They needed to hear the frame.
Then say goodnight, and go.
That's one line for one moment. But the night before is only the first of them — there's the drive in each morning, the pickups on the days in between, and the two ways it all ends: the ride home after a cut, or the trickier-than-it-sounds moment when they make it. Each has a right thing to say and a very natural wrong one, and I've put the full set — the exact words for all five moments, on a card you can keep in the glovebox — in Sunday's paid drop: Tryout-Week Scripts (Glovebox Edition). If the night-before question helped, that's the rest of the week, handled.
For tonight, though, you only need the one. Skip the speech. Ask what they’re looking forward to.
The pep talk was going to remind them the scoreboard exists. The question reminds them there’s a game.
I’m a sports parent who reads the research so you don’t have to. Free posts like this one explain the why behind the mental game; paid posts hand you the scripts, routines, and worksheets to use at the field and in the car. Subscribe for free to follow along — upgrade any time for the tools.
Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035325
Dobb Mayo · The mental game behind youth sports · dobbmayo.com
A sports parent, same as you — just one who reads the science so you don’t have to.