Our Mission
We are a fun, family-oriented, friendly club dedicated to providing an experience that not only teaches our kids about lacrosse but helps them develop as people as much as they develop as athletes.
Positive Coaching Alliance
The Westmount Lynx Lacrosse Club has adopted the Positive Coaching Alliance’s philosophy of POSITIVE COACHING as the coaching philosophy for the organization. The organization expects coaches to be “DOUBLE GOAL COACHES” who want to win (but not win at all costs) and help players learn “life lessons” and positive character traits through sports. Learn more in this short video.
What Our Coaches Do
1. ROOTS. We model and teach our players to honor the game of lacrosse by abiding by and teaching the Program’s Code of Conduct which is based on RESPECT. The acronym for the Code of Conduct is ROOTS.
Respect for:
- Rules
- Opponents
- Officials
- Teammates
- Self
2. ELMar. We help players redefine what it means to be a “winner” in terms of mastery, not just the scoreboard. We teach players ELMar mastery. Essentially this means that players should focus on improving their lacrosse skills (mastering lacrosse). They will be viewed as successful if they are giving their best effort and improving themselves as players and people. A more detailed explanation of ELMar is below:
(E) EFFORT. Players are expected to give their best effort every time they come on the field.
(L) LEARNING. Players should strive to continue learning individual and team play skills during the course of the season. If players continue to learn players and the team will improve.
(Mar) MISTAKES and responses Mistakes are part of the learning process and a player can’t learn something as complicated as lacrosse without making mistakes – In this organization it is OK (and sometimes encouraged) to make mistakes, our aim is to help coach through these learning opportunities.
The Club believes that the mastery approach can be applied to many other undertakings in life and will have benefits for players beyond lacrosse.
3. FILL PLAYERS’ EMOTIONAL TANKS
- We use encouragement and positive reinforcement as our primary method of motivating.
- We strive to achieve the 5:1 “Magic Ratio” of 5 positive reinforcements to each criticism/correction.
- We give “Kid-Friendly Criticism” so players will be able to hear it. We use the criticism sandwich where you sandwich a correction between 2 positives. Suggest corrections in private (if possible). We avoid giving corrections in non-teachable moments (while kids are frustrated).