Parents & Performance: Two New Books on Supporting Young Athletes and Competitive Gamers
Two of our new titles did not fit anywhere in the Sports & Fitness series. One is not about a sport at all, and the other is not written for the athlete. So we made them a subcategory of their own: Parents & Performance.
The Sports Parent's Guide To Succeed (141 pages)
This is the book we have been circling for three years. Fifty-six chapters plus a full reference section, written for the parent rather than the coach or the athlete.
The chapter we expect to be read most is the one with the scripts — what to say before a match, what to say during it, what to say afterwards, and what to say on the car journey home. That last one matters more than most parents realise, and getting it wrong is one of the most reliable ways to make a child dread the sport they used to love.
Beyond the scripts, the book covers:
- Managing training load safely — growth plates, the overtraining continuum, and the injury red flags that mean stop rather than push through
- Nutrition and fuelling, including RED-S awareness and the body-image risks that come with it
- Safeguarding red flags and how club reporting structures actually work
- Long-term development versus early specialisation, talent identification and the relative age effect
- Working with coaches — selection disagreements, when to raise something, and when to change clubs
- An honest chapter on US college recruiting and scholarships, written specifically for Irish and UK families rather than reprinted from an American source
There is no chapter promising to turn your child into an elite athlete. There is a long one on burnout prevention.
Gaming Performance To Succeed (150 pages)
Competitive gaming is the fastest-growing thing our readers' children do that most of our readers do not understand. This book is written for both sides of that gap.
For the player, it treats gaming performance the way the rest of the series treats sport. The ergonomics and injury chapters are grounded in published esports injury research rather than gaming-chair marketing — wrist and trunk problems are real, well documented, and largely preventable. Reaction time and anticipation are separated out properly, because they are not the same skill and only one of them is really trainable past a certain point. Tilt management, clutch decision-making and a repeatable VOD review method get full chapters, as does team communication: callouts, role clarity, tilt protocols and what to do about toxic chat.
The pathway chapter is deliberately unglamorous. School and university esports, the pro-versus-content-creator decision, and honest odds instead of hype.
For parents, there is a dedicated strand that requires zero gaming knowledge to follow. It includes a plain-English explanation of the UK's confirmed 2026 rules on high-caffeine energy drink sales to under-16s, which take effect in England in April 2027 — the kind of thing that gets mentioned in passing on a forum and never explained properly anywhere a parent would look.
Why a Separate Subcategory
Both books share a reader the rest of the series does not really address: the adult who wants to support somebody else's performance without taking it over. That is a different job from coaching, and it deserved its own shelf.