Growth Mindset Through Overcoming Challenges

One of the best things about playing sports is that they don’t just build physical strength—they build mental strength. The ability to deal with frustration, disappointment, pressure, and failure carries over into every part of life. In my opinion, learning how to overcome challenges may be one of the most important lessons a young athlete can learn, because eventually the game ends, but life’s challenges don’t.

That brings me back to one of my favorite books by Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Most people have heard the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. In simple terms, a fixed mindset creates the need to constantly prove yourself, while a growth mindset is built on the belief that your abilities improve through effort, better strategies, and help from others.

The question I’ve always struggled with is this: How do you actually develop a growth mindset? Reading about it is easy. Living it is much harder. Just like learning to throw a lacrosse ball or play the piano, developing a growth mindset requires repeated practice.

That practice doesn’t come from success. It comes from being challenged. It comes from struggling, failing, trying again, and gradually making progress. The frustration, setbacks, and even the desire to quit aren’t signs that something is wrong—they’re often signs that real growth is happening.

My 13-year-old son recently experienced this firsthand. He was the pianist in a chamber music group, and his part was far more difficult than anything he had previously attempted. To his credit, he attacked the challenge. He woke up at 5:00 every morning to practice before school and often stayed up late practicing after homework. I’ve never seen him work so hard.

The problem was that all of that effort didn’t seem to be paying off. He felt stuck. The stress eventually affected other parts of his life. He was exhausted, mentally drained, and his performance in school and sports began slipping.

After many difficult conversations, we decided to pull him from the performance.

Looking back, I consider that one of my biggest parenting mistakes.

At the time, we all had legitimate reasons. The piece really was beyond his current ability, the timeline was short, and the pressure was enormous. But the bigger problem was that the challenge stopped being about learning music and became about proving he was good enough.

That’s exactly what Carol Dweck describes as a fixed mindset.

A few months later, both my son and I came to the same conclusion: quitting had been the wrong decision. Not because he missed the performance, but because we missed an opportunity to learn something far more valuable than the music itself.

Looking back, I realize there were many better options. We could have removed the pressure of the performance while continuing to work on the piece. He could have simplified difficult passages or treated it as a long-term project instead of an all-or-nothing goal. We didn’t need to quit—we simply needed a different path forward.

That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about youth sports.

Sports naturally create opportunities to experience adversity. An athlete misses the game-winning shot, gets cut from a team, loses a starting position, or struggles with a skill they simply can’t master.

Every one of those moments creates the same internal conversation:

• “Maybe I’m just not good enough.”
• “Maybe I’ll never be able to do this.”
• Or, “Maybe I just haven’t figured it out yet.”

That conversation is often more important than the outcome itself.

As parents and coaches, we spend countless hours teaching mechanics—throwing, shooting, skating, footwork, or musical technique. But we spend far less time teaching kids how to think when they encounter something difficult. How do they respond to failure? How do they recover? What do they tell themselves when things aren’t going well?

Those are learned skills too.

That’s one of the reasons I created Hit the Wall Ball.

Most people assume it’s simply a platform for teaching lacrosse skills. It certainly does that, but the larger goal is to give young athletes repeated opportunities to struggle, persevere, and improve in a safe environment.

The challenges are intentionally progressive. Early successes build confidence. As athletes improve, the challenges become harder. Eventually, something fascinating happens.

Kids stop asking for easier challenges.

They start asking for harder ones.

That’s when you know something has changed. They’re no longer chasing rewards—they’re chasing improvement.

Just as importantly, athletes are encouraged to reflect after completing a challenge. Instead of immediately moving on, they’re asked questions about what they learned, when they became frustrated, what kept them going, and how they handled negative thoughts.

The wall ball challenge teaches a lacrosse skill.

The reflection teaches a life skill.

Over time, athletes become better at recognizing negative thinking, recovering from setbacks, and approaching difficult situations with curiosity instead of fear. Those lessons don’t stay on the lacrosse field—they carry into school, music, careers, and life.

When I think back to my son’s experience with that piano piece, I wish we had treated it as a long-term growth opportunity instead of a short-term performance problem. I can’t change that experience, but I can help create environments where other kids learn to embrace challenge differently.

That’s the foundation of Hit the Wall Ball.

The goal isn’t simply to develop better lacrosse players. It’s to help young athletes become people who aren’t afraid of difficult things—people who understand that frustration isn’t the opposite of growth; it’s often the pathway to it.

And in the end, that may be the most valuable thing youth sports ever teach them.