HOW TO MAKE CHAMPIONS
FROM THE GROUND UP: RAISING CHAMPIONS FOR LIFE THROUGH SPORTS
The book helps prepare athletes and their families for the realities of competition, providing knowledge on both the pragmatic and the more abstract elements of becoming a champion. By combining scientific data, training programs, business advice, tactical theory, industry stories, and personal anecdotes from my own life as well as the lives of my most famous students, How to make Champions offers some of the most dynamic and holistic information available to athletes of all ages and rankings, as well as their families and coaches.
While some innate predisposition makes certain types of actions more intuitive for some children, most of what we understand as talent comes from a variety of external factors, well within the power of the parents and their children’s coaching team, one such factor is time: parents have a small window of opportunity to help make their children great, which means the time to act is now.
Sports and arts are potent tools for the growth of a child, ones that allow parents to establish a solid foundation to foster their children’s ambitions while rewarding effort and hard work.
What makes the book different:
The Expertise:
What makes Gabe an expert: over 40 years of experience, proven results, and a method that can be replicated. The book was also written with Gyasi Hall, a talented young writer from the University of Iowa, the country’s most prestigious nonfiction graduate writing program.
THE MODEL FOR STUDENTS:
Quality is at the heart of all pursuits in elite sports; it is the cornerstone of all growth, development, and skill.
Honesty means doing everything you possibly can to the absolute best of your ability: no shortcuts, no explanations.
Self-responsibility means understanding that your destiny is in your hands.
The Role of Parents:
A child cannot become their best, most talented selves without the constant healthy support of their parents.
Parents have to operate having a deep familiarity and understanding of the process. You are not the coach, and your role is more fundamental. You are the project’s general manager. The coach is a part of your team, and he works for you.
PLANNING:
It is simply impossible to become a high-performance athlete without a plan, and if the plan is not in writing, it’s just an illusion.
The main principle behind periodization planning is to understand, compare, and reflect on your quest’s two most vital parts: what you have now and what you still need. The idea is to work backward, trace from your goals to your actual abilities and outline the appropriate steps to get there.
The Focus on their DREAM
There is almost no better motivator for a young player than their dream of success. Your job as a parent or a coach is to stoke that dream, turn it from a spark to an ember of roaring fire in a healthy, communicative, and realistic way for the child.
COMPETITION:
A parent-coach role is vital; this is where the children learn to fight, not to surrender, to try until the last moment. Parents who helped their children from the beginning understood the importance of competition, encouraging them to compete without putting pressure on results.
At the heart of all competition is a struggle to balance two essential facets of play: wanting to win and being afraid to lose.
TALENT
Talent is a raw material that needs to be shaped and refined, changing forms over time through honing and application and a series of intricate steps to turn it into exceptional athletes.
This leads to another fundamental aspect of building up talent in young children that are often overlooked and misunderstood: talent and potential, while undeniably interwoven, are decidedly not the same.
MARKETING
Marketability isn’t discussed very often: most coaching books and how-to guides assume that this is a natural side effect of talent or exposure. But, unfortunately, this isn’t true.
The Inside Knowledge:
Learn how to find the right coach, team, and environment, the three essential pieces to building a support system for a young athlete.
APPLICATIONS
The sequences of development Gabe has outlined in this book are linear in how they progress, but can be applied in virtually all aspects of your life and career. In reality, these theories are more of lifelong philosophies that can be applied in nearly infinite ways.
The Psychology of an Athlete:
Three basics: “No Fear” is my first commandment; those who don’t take risks never get anywhere. The principle of imagination is the second and not, to be clear, the same thing as merely “wanting it.” The third and final component of a solid mental game is a player’s attitude, which goes beyond clichés about “positive thinking.”
BIG PICTURE:
This book is called How to Make Champions for more reasons than the clever tennis pun. It’s not just that I hope that’s what you came away from this book now possess. Instead, it underscores a central point: the road to becoming a champion, especially in sports, is a process of accumulation or constant change and growth on every level, and parents are a big part of the process.
Importance of high-performance sports
Sports can teach cognitive skills like organization, decision making, problem-solving, leadership, interpersonal expression, inner motivation, control, and how to both win and lose gracefully, as well as values like routine building, discipline, perseverance, tolerance, trust, and respect. Gabe gives you the keys to unlock all of this and so much more for your child. Excellence is like perfection, a constant moving target that a player will reach in waves as they and the world around them fluctuate with incomprehensible variables, and How to make Champions: Gabe Jaramillo’s Guide to Making Champions is the ultimate handbook to navigate that fluctuation.
About Gabe Jaramillo
Gabe Jaramillo is a Colombian/American renowned Tennis Coach, Entrepreneur, Innovator, Consultant, Influencer, and Motivational Speaker and CEO of Altitude Academies.
Jaramillo worked with and developed many of the greatest players in tennis history, including training 11 of the world’s No.1-ranked players and 27 top-10 players, such as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Mary Pierce, Maria Sharapova, Monica Seles, and Kei Nishikori.
His Tennis On Demand youtube channel has over 10 million viewers. Facebook has over 107 thousand, and his Instagram has 60 thousand followers.
About Gyasi Hall
Gyasi Hall is an essayist, poet, and playwright from Columbus, Ohio. His work has been featured by the 68to05 project, Thoughtcrime press, Get Lit, Z Publishing, and MabLab Theater, among others. His debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in spring 2019.
He is the nonfiction editor for The BreakBread Literacy Project. He currently resides in Iowa City where he is pursuing his MFA in creative nonfiction.
HOW TO MAKE CHAMPIONS
Investing in your children is the best investment you will ever make. As the head coach, a delegation is never an option.
Motivated parents have many burning questions: Do my children have talent? What is their passion? How much potential do they have? How can I help my children become champions? Can I keep them motivated? What exactly are the steps I need to take? Finally, Gabe Jaramillo reveals his secrets and provides an exact blueprint for how successful parents can take charge of building up their children’s development and turning them into elite athletes and lifelong champions