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. By now, most people have heard the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. In simple terms, a fixed mindset creates the need to constantly prove yourself. A growth mindset is built on the belief that your abilities can improve through effort, better strategies, and help from others.

The question I’ve always struggled with, though, is this: How do you actually develop a growth mindset? It’s easy to read a book, understand the concept, and even agree with it intellectually. But understanding an idea and living it are two completely different things. Just like learning to throw a lacrosse ball, play the piano, or skate backwards, developing a growth mindset requires practice. It has to be experienced over and over again until it becomes part of who you are.

That practice doesn’t come from success. It comes from being challenged. It comes from taking on something that is just beyond your current abilities, struggling with it, getting frustrated, failing, trying again, and eventually making progress. The tears, the setbacks, and even the desire to quit aren’t signs that something is wrong—they’re often signs that real growth is happening.

Like many children, both of my sons play musical instruments. My older son, now 13, is, for whatever reason, less passionate about playing the piano than his younger brother is about playing the violin. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t practice or that he isn’t talented. In fact, he’s a very musical player and performs well whenever he’s prepared. He simply doesn’t enjoy practicing the way his younger brother does, and he’d probably be the first one to admit it.

Recently, he was part of a chamber music group where he served as the accompanist for a flutist and a violinist. His piano part was by far the most difficult. It wasn’t just challenging—it was a true stretch piece that was well above the level of music he was accustomed to playing.

To his credit, he didn’t avoid the work. He practiced relentlessly. He woke up at 5:00 every morning to practice before school and often stayed up until 11:00 at night practicing after homework was finished. He put in more hours than I’ve ever seen him put into anything.

The strange part was that all of that work didn’t seem to be helping.

Instead of slowly getting better, he felt like he was running into the same wall every day. Eventually, the stress began affecting other parts of his life. He was exhausted during a standardized math test. His speech became slower and slightly slurred because he was mentally drained. His performance in sports started slipping. His brain simply wasn’t functioning the way it normally did.

As parents, we recognized that feeling because we’ve experienced it ourselves. After a lot of discussion—and a lot of concern—we made the difficult decision to pull him out of the chamber group and have another pianist perform in his place.

Looking back, that decision still bothers me.

At the time, our son had plenty of reasons why it wasn’t working. The piece was too difficult. There wasn’t enough time to prepare. The other musicians had easier parts. Honestly, many of those reasons were probably true. It really was an exceptionally difficult piece for someone his age.

But there was something much bigger happening beneath the surface.

He wasn’t just trying to learn a difficult piece of music anymore. He was carrying the weight of deadlines, expectations, comparisons with other musicians, pressure from teachers, pressure from parents, and the fear of letting everyone else down. The challenge stopped being about learning music and became about proving that he was capable.

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

When every mistake becomes evidence that you’re not good enough, it’s almost impossible to learn. Every difficult passage becomes proof that maybe you don’t belong there. Every practice session becomes another reminder that you’re falling behind instead of moving forward.

Looking back now, he wasn’t really practicing anymore. He was spending hours repeating frustration.

A few months later, something interesting happened. Both we as parents and he as a student came to the same conclusion.

Quitting had been the wrong decision.

I consider it one of my biggest parenting mistakes, and he would probably tell you it’s one of his biggest failures (yes, I know—he’s only in seventh grade). Not because he failed to perform the piece, but because we all missed an opportunity to learn something much more valuable than the music itself.

The more I’ve reflected on that experience, the more I’ve realized that all of his excuses were probably legitimate. The piece probably was above his level. There probably wasn’t enough time. The pressure was absolutely real.

But what if the environment around him had been different?

What if, instead of focusing on the upcoming performance, we had simply said: “Let’s see how much of this piece you can learn over the next few months.”

What if another pianist had stepped in for the performance, but my son had continued learning the piece anyway, without the pressure of an audience?

What if he had simplified some of the difficult passages? What if he intentionally skipped notes that were beyond his ability? What if success wasn’t defined by performing perfectly, but by making steady progress?

There were probably ten different ways we could have approached that challenge without walking away from it entirely.

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

Sports naturally create opportunities to experience adversity in ways that few other activities do. An athlete misses the game-winning shot, throws the ball away during a fast break, gets cut from the team they wanted, loses a starting position, or simply can’t complete a skill they’ve been working on for weeks.

Every one of those moments presents the same decision:

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

That internal conversation is far more important than the outcome itself.

As parents and coaches, we spend a tremendous amount of time teaching mechanics. We teach proper throwing technique, shooting form, footwork, skating mechanics, and musical technique. Those things matter.

But we spend far less time teaching kids how to think when they encounter something difficult.

1. How do they respond when they fail?
2. How do they talk to themselves?
3. How quickly do they recover?
4. How do they process disappointment?

Those are learned skills just as much as throwing or shooting is.

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

Most people assume it’s simply a platform for teaching lacrosse skills. That’s certainly part of it. The challenges help players improve their stick skills through structured, progressive practice.

But that’s not really what I hope kids remember years later.

The platform was intentionally designed to create repeated opportunities for young athletes to experience challenge in a safe environment. Early on, players complete relatively easy challenges that build confidence. As they improve, the challenges become progressively harder. Eventually, something fascinating begins to happen.

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 badges or rewards. They’re chasing improvement. They’ve begun to associate difficult challenges with growth instead of failure.

Just as importantly, the platform encourages reflection after every challenge. Instead of immediately moving on to the next activity, athletes are asked questions that help them understand what happened internally during the process. Questions such as:

1. Was this challenge easy or difficult?
2. At what point did you feel like giving up?
3. What kept you going?
4. What were you telling yourself when you barely missed your goal?
5. What negative thoughts entered your mind, and how did you overcome them?
6. What would you do differently the next time?

Those conversations are just as important as completing the challenge itself.

The wall ball challenge teaches a lacrosse skill.

The reflection teaches a life skill.

Over time, athletes begin recognizing the voice inside their own heads. They become better at identifying negative thinking, recovering from setbacks, and approaching difficult situations with curiosity instead of fear. Those lessons don’t stay on the lacrosse field. They show up in the classroom, during music performances, in future careers, and eventually in life as adults.

When I think back to my son’s experience with that piano piece, I wish we had viewed it differently. I wish we had treated it as a long-term growth opportunity instead of a short-term performance problem. I can’t go back and change that experience, but I can certainly try to create environments where other kids have a chance to experience challenges 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. If they can learn to embrace challenge, push through adversity, reflect on failure, and keep moving forward, they’ll carry that mindset long after they’ve played their last game.

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