By Lydia Grobler, The Resilience League
The best conversations about sport don’t often happen at sport.
They happen in the car. When the seatbelt’s on and nobody’s making eye contact and the adrenaline is still wearing off. That ten-minute window between the field and the front door is where the real stuff lands.
Not the score. Not the stats. The stuff underneath.
Here are five conversations worth having this summer, not all at once, and not as a checklist. Just when the moment fits.
1. “What was the best bit today?”
Not “how did you go?” because that puts them straight into results mode. “What was the best bit?” opens the door to something you didn’t expect. It might be the goal. It might be the halftime oranges. It might be that their mate finally came back after being away for three weeks.
You find out what they’re actually there for. And that’s worth knowing, especially in week six when they want to quit.
2. “How’d everyone else go today?”
This one’s sneaky. It moves the spotlight off them and onto the team, but it opens up something bigger than sport.
When a kid starts noticing how their teammates are going, they’re building empathy without even realising it. And when they follow that up by encouraging someone at the next training session, they’re learning what it means to be a good teammate, not because the coach told them to, but because they saw it mattered.
3. “Anything tough out there today?”
This one takes trust. Most kids will say “nah” the first few times. That’s fine. You’re not digging for a deep and meaningful, you’re just making it normal to talk about the hard bits.
Because sport is full of hard bits. Getting subbed off. Missing the shot everyone saw. Being the slowest in the squad. Kids notice all of it, even when they pretend they don’t.
You don’t need to fix it. You just need to let them say it out loud.
4. “Did anything funny happen today?”
This one sounds light, but it tells you a lot. It tells you who they’re connecting with. Whether they’re having fun. Whether the social side of sport, which, let’s be honest, is half the reason they’re there, is working.
Sometimes the answer is a teammate doing something silly at training. Sometimes it’s something the coach said. Sometimes it’s something that only makes sense if you were there, and they’ll try to explain it and crack up halfway through.
That’s the stuff you want. Not a performance review, just a kid who had a good time and wants to tell you about it.
5. “I liked watching you play today.”
That’s it. No feedback. No coaching from the sideline. No “but next time try to…”
Just: I was there, and I liked watching you.
For a kid, that lands harder than you think. Because what they hear underneath it is: you don’t have to be great for me to enjoy this. And that’s the thing that keeps them coming back, not the trophy, not the team photo, not the end-of-season certificate.
Just knowing that someone they love was watching, and it was enough.
Make the most of those ten minutes
The car ride home is ten minutes. You don’t need all five. You might only get one. But the conversation you have in that window, when they’re tired and open and not performing for anyone, is where sport becomes something bigger.
A major Australian-led review published earlier this year by researchers at the University of Newcastle synthesised 189 studies spanning more than three decades and found that organised sport can be a powerful setting for building mental health and social skills in young people, but that the benefits depend on supportive relationships and well-structured environments.
That’s where The Resilience League’s Game Plan: Family Toolkit comes in. The Summer Edition features 14 original short stories following three young characters, Tali at the pool, Alex on the basketball court and Jordan on the cricket pitch, as they navigate the real pressures of junior sport.
Each story is paired with a mental skill, conversation starters to help families talk about it together, and a hands-on family activity designed to bring the skill to life at home. The toolkit is designed to run one story a week alongside the summer season and requires no preparation or expertise from parents. Each story takes around 5 minutes to read.
“I thought about my own kids and I thought, how could I actually get them to listen to what I wanted to tell them about this stuff,” says founder Lydia Mollard, who has a background in psychology and education. “That’s when I realised that stories were the way to do it. These stories give kids the language and the space to work through those moments. The story does the work, it’s not a lesson, and that’s deliberate.”
Game Plan: Family Toolkit Summer Edition is available now as an instant digital download:
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