Player EQ was started by regular sports parents. We are not experts, former professional athletes, professional coaches or sports psychologists. We didn’t even grow up playing many of the team sports our kids love to participate in.
Competitive youth sports is a large part of many families’ lives and schedules year round. It can be inspiring, rewarding and exhausting for parents to navigate through.
We saw an opportunity to curate different conversations and perspectives into a destination that considers the impact competitive sports has on young players and the parents/coaches who care about them.
Empowering our players
Our goal with Player EQ is to cultivate a resource for sharing articles, interviews and discussions around raising mentally strong players in a very competitive youth sports atmosphere.
We look to empower our children and ourselves with positive mental tools and emotional armor to become stronger through the experiences and learn from their competitive process.
Discovering the emotional intelligence side of sports
For our family, developing Player EQ has been about discovering the emotional intelligence (EQ) and character building side of youth athletics that sometimes is overlooked at a younger age while skills, drills, fundamentals and game play are a stronger focus.
After investing a lot of money on almost a decade of teaching leagues, rec leagues, competitive leagues, clinics, summer camps and private lessons that all taught the fundamentals and specific skills in their favorite sports… we stopped and asked ourselves a question. How much money and time had been dedicated to further motivating, inspiring, strengthening, and cultivating the spirit, strong self belief, confidence and psyche of our little athletes? (Hint – a whole lot less)
We started to take a beat more often to ask ourselves questions like:
“Did I use that sports moment as the best teachable opportunity I could?”
“Could I have said that a different way?”
“Should I have bit my tongue and said nothing at all?”
Getting the most positive experiences from the journey
Player EQ will look at how building mental armor, emotional intelligence and resilience impacts how our families participate in competitive sports. The Player EQ community will share concepts, ideas, books, podcasts and beyond to help families garner the most positive experiences from their competitive sports journeys.
Player EQ is about considering different outlooks and approaches to process competition, growth, wins and losses in both sports and life. While Player EQ may point to perspectives from experts in their fields, it’s not always about prescribing a solution or an answer derived from the experts.
Experiencing the most beneficial lessons
Player EQ is not about presenting a single formula for success for your athlete. Every player and every parent is a unique individual, who must determine what motivates and connects them.
With Player EQ, we can share in the discovery of how all of this influences our impressionable athletes and approach competitive sports in a way where we can experience the most beneficial lessons from victory, defeat and the years of playing in between.
We hope you’ll come on this journey with us to engage in conversations about how we can foster confident and strong youth athletes, both physically and mentally.
– Danielle Mintz, Founder of Player EQ
June 2018