What to Say in the Car After a Bad Competition

The short answer. Very little. After a competition your athlete needs food and sleep more than they need your read on what happened. No feedback, no learning and no fixing until 24 hours after it ended. The conversation you want to have is a good one. It belongs to tomorrow. And the habit matters more than any one ride: an athlete who knows a debrief is waiting in the car starts rehearsing it while they are still competing.

Why the car feels like the right moment, and isn’t

It is fresh. You saw all of it. They are sitting right there and can’t leave. Everything about the ride home says now.

Two things are true in that car, though, and both work against you.

They are tired and hungry. The thing athletes need and want more than anything after competing is food and sleep. Athletes, like every other human, cannot learn, develop and grow when they are tired and hungry. Trying to decompress and figure things out right after a competition rarely goes anywhere good, for exactly that reason.

Everyone’s emotions are running high, and that includes yours. The only way to truly learn from a performance is from a place of objectivity and emotional stability. Neither one is in the car. Not in the back seat, and not behind the wheel.

So the ride home is not a conversation window. It is a recovery window. It is the start of the last of the four phases of performance, and that phase opens with a rule.

The bigger reason: the car ride follows them into the next competition

One car ride is one car ride. The problem is the habit.

When decompressing, learning, opinions and drilling questions after competitions become the family’s habit over time, something starts to happen to the athlete during competitions. It is one of the biggest reasons nerves, anxiety and worry show up in the 13, 14 and 15-year-old age group, and beyond.

Time traveling

Teenage athletes are developing control over their psychological capabilities, and one of those capabilities is imagination. Imagination lets us see and remember what has happened in the past, in detail. It lets us imagine the future: what might happen, could happen, or should happen.

Both are very helpful when they are used well. Both are very unhelpful when it comes to performing, because performing happens in the present moment.

I call this time traveling. The athlete is competing, and in their mind their world is consumed by what has happened and what might happen. They are very rarely in the moment, competing where their feet are.

Staying present is a skill. For young athletes it has to be developed and understood, and it is very fragile, because they have not yet learned to control their imagination as it relates to performance. (What an athlete imagines is what travels to their muscles.)

So as parents, we have to be really good at helping them stay focused on what they can control, and on the present moment. A debrief waiting in the car does the opposite. It gives their imagination somewhere to go.

What breaking the habit tells them

We need to break the habit of decompressing, trying to learn, and offering opinions from an emotional state after competitions.

When you do, your athlete learns two things. No matter what happens out there, they will still be good enough in their mom and dad’s eyes. And there will be a time to decompress and learn from the competition objectively. It is just not now.

What to leave out of the car

These are the three questions that come most naturally, and the three we ask parents to set down completely for the first 24 hours:

The outcome question. “Did you win?” “Did you drop time?” They know the result. So do you.
The replay question. “What happened in the second half?” “What happened on that last one?”
The fixing question. “What do you need to be better at?”

Here is why they matter more than they seem to. What you put your focus on in the stands, and in the car, is what your athlete will put their focus on in the arena.

When the first thing they hear is about winning and losing, that is what they learn to carry into the next competition, and it tends to show up as nerves, worry and fear.

When what they hear is about execution, they tend to show up more confident, more in control, and prouder of their own work.

You are not just asking a question. You are teaching them what to care about.

What to do instead

Feed them. Before anything else.
Let them lead. If they want quiet, quiet is fine. If they want to talk, it’s a gift: listen. No opinions and no drilling questions. If they ask for your opinion, let them know that the time for decompressing and learning doesn’t happen until tomorrow, and that you’ll be glad to have that conversation then. (Why asking beats telling.)
Get them to sleep.
If you ask anything at all, ask it after the food and the rest, and make it this: “What did you execute that you were proud of?”

That is the whole job for the first day. It is harder than it sounds, because it asks you to sit with your own feelings about the result and not hand them to your kid.

“But what if we forget the details?”

This is the pushback I hear most, from parents and sometimes from athletes too: we talk about it straight away because it is fresh in our memories. I totally understand that.

The answer is simple. Write it down.

If you saw things you want to give feedback on, write them down. Your phone, a notebook, anywhere. Nothing is lost. It will all still be there tomorrow.

The same goes for your athlete. They may get feedback from their coach right after the competition ends. They simply need to write it down, and then shut the book.

Then they deliberately and intentionally take the rest of the day to recover, and come back to the learnings, and what to do about them, tomorrow, when they are in a space to actually do something about it. (Where this sits in the four phases of performance.)

Writing it down keeps the detail. Waiting is what makes it useful.

24 hours later: the real conversation

Once everyone has eaten, slept and come back down, there is a conversation worth having. This is when the notes come out, yours and theirs. It has three parts, in this order.

Pride. “Out of 10, what’s your pride level in how you executed?” Their number, not yours. If they went in with a definition of success, one physical or technical capability and one mental one, the number is measured against that and nothing else.
Continue. “What do you want to keep doing, the things that really helped you out there?”
Opportunities. “If you were to change one thing about your process, not your result, what would it be?”

Notice what is missing. There is no “what went wrong,” and the word is opportunities, not fix. The point of this conversation is ownership. An athlete who can look at their own performance, say what they are proud of and name their own next step does not need you to do it for them. That is the goal.

You will take the wheel again

You’re human. At some point you will be twenty minutes into the drive and hear yourself asking about the third game, or the last lap, or the missed shot. Every parent does it.

Accept that, and recommit. One car ride does not undo the pattern you are building. The pattern is what your athlete learns from.