Coaching cheerleaders with bad attitudes is tough. Eyes rolling during corrections, half effort through warm-up, a comment under their breath when you ask for one more rep. They treat your practice time like it belongs to them alone, and every coach has felt the urge to clench a fist over it. The hard part is that nothing in your certification taught you what to do with that frustration, or with the athlete causing it. For a long time I thought my only options were to let it slide or come down hard. Neither one ever fixed the attitude, and both quietly wore me down. What finally changed things was getting clear on one question: which part of this is actually mine to handle?

The Only Part of Their Attitude You Actually Control

Here is the truth that took me too long to accept: you cannot control an athlete’s attitude. Their eye roll, their tone, their decision to coast, all of it happens whether you allow it or not. When it lands, you feel something immediately, and usually that something is anger.

There is a space between what an athlete does and how you respond, and that space is the entire job of coaching. Epictetus said, “Men are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of things.”

Your response is the view, and that response is the only piece of this whole exchange that belongs to you. Lose it and you have handed a teenager control over how your practice goes.

Your Frustration Is Information, Not Instructions

When an athlete’s attitude sets you off, that anger is trying to tell you something. The anger is data, not an order. Most people do one of two unhelpful things with it. They either treat the feeling as proof that something must be done about this kid right now, or they bury it, call that being the bigger person, and let resentment build all season.

A better move is to read the signal and then decide on purpose. Notice the emotion, name it, figure out what it is pointing at, and choose your response from there. “I am frustrated because this athlete is wasting the team’s time” is accurate and useful. Snapping at them in front of the team because you feel that way is rarely either. The feeling informs the decision. It does not get to make it.

What’s Yours, and What You Can Only Influence

The stoics separated what is up to you from what is not, and I have added a layer I think every coach needs. There are three buckets: what is, what is yours, and what you influence.

What is yours is short. Your standards, your structure, your plan, the effort you bring, and the example you set. What is not yours is long, and it includes every choice an athlete makes about how to show up. In between sits influence, and this is where coaching actually happens.

You cannot force buy-in.

What you can do is build an environment where driven athletes thrive, hold the line on your standards, and let each athlete decide whether they want in. Control means forcing a result. Influence means shaping the room so that the right result becomes the obvious choice.

The Bad Attitude Is Usually a Blind Spot

The thing that frustrates coaches most is rarely the joking or the eye roll on its own.

What actually gets to you is the athlete’s blindness to their place in something larger. When a kid coasts through practice, they are not just shortchanging themselves. The cost spreads to the coach who planned the session, the parents footing the bill, the teammates working hard beside them, and their own future on the mat.

Most young athletes operate from a single question, “What do I feel like doing right now?”

Effort, opportunity, consequences, and the people affected by their choices are not on the radar yet. None of that makes them bad kids. It makes them young, and a real part of coaching is widening that lens for them. The poor decisions usually are not malice. They are a failure to see the system the athlete is standing inside, and that blind spot spreads through a team faster than almost anything else.

Provide the Path, Then Let Them Choose

Coaching runs on a paradox. You have to care deeply that your athletes grow while accepting that some of them will choose not to. Stop caring and you are not coaching anymore. Demand that every athlete change and you will burn out long before you find the ones who would have come around. The way through is a boundary you actually hold.

When athletes treat my time as disposable, what I feel is not frustration anymore. It is detachment, and I used to think that meant I had gone cold. Detachment is not the same as not caring. It is a clear line between my responsibility and theirs.

Mine is the standard, the structure, the effort, and the example.

Theirs is the focus, the attitude, the work, and the choice to take the opportunity or leave it. Once I have done my part, the outcome is on them.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that you have power over your mind, not over outside events. He was not saying the job gets easy. The point was about where your strength comes from.

Enforcing your standards sometimes means letting an athlete go, and that is not you quitting on them. It is them deciding not to hold up their end, and no coach can carry that weight for a whole roster and last.

Provide the path, walk it yourself, and invite them to follow. Some will and some won’t, and the ones who do are the athletes you built the standard for in the first place.