The pressure that elite athletes in every sport have to face and balance is immense, and comes from many sources.
Which makes the narrative of American figure skater Alysa Liu absolutely remarkable. And, it is a narrative whose lessons translate across sports.
Alysa Liu, at the age of 16, was already a world-class singles skater who made it onto the U.S. team for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. She finished fifth, which was largely seen as a disappointment because of the pressure that was placed on her not just by the competition, but by her coaching team, which included her father.
After the Olympics, she announced on social media that she would be retiring from the sport, only to announce a return to international competition.
During her reintroduction to the world of ISU figure skating, she uttered a paragraph which, I think, should stand for all time as a declaration of independence for young athletes:
“I get to pick my own program music. I get to help with the creative process of the program. If I feel like I’m skating too much, I’ll back down. If I feel like I’m not skating enough, I’ll ramp it up. No one’s gonna starve me or tell me what I can and can’t eat.”
I call this The Liu Doctrine, a cogent argument against the micromanaging of young athletes by coaches, parents, and various hangers-on. Alysa Liu made the declaration on her return to skating a year ago.
With a body maturing into a frame seven inches taller than when she was at her first Olympics, Liu won the 2026 Milan women’s singles figure skating title with a tour de force performance which was heavy on art and clean skating, although she did land a triple lutz-double Axel, double toe-loop combination which gave her the highest technical score in her free program.
For me, a result like this gives me hope that there are different ways to coach youth sports than some of the heavy-handed tactics we’ve observed first-hand over a third of a century of reporting on high-school sports.
What’s been happening, over the last few years, is that youth sports is an industry, not a means for young people to discover the love for a particular sport through improvisation and not over-coaching.
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve noticed a complete 180-degree turn in attitudes when talking with postcollegiate field hockey players. When I was in the dailies, coaches were often talking up their Sunday playing opportunities in major cities.
These days? Not so much. I run into desultory social media comments all the time, declaring an outright animus towards the sport of field hockey.
Yep, the fun got coached out of the players. That needs to stop.