One of the keys to coaching aggressive, positive-thinking athletes who are willing to go for the big play is creating practice situations in which they are not afraid to fail.

This may sound contradictory. Why should you practice failure?

In fact, the athletes will not be learning failure, they will be learning not to be afraid of it.

Jack Donohue, coach of Canada's national basketball team, points out that "all athletes are going to fail at times during a game. Players have to get used to the fact that things will not always go the way they want them to."

The coach who is always a perfectionist, who demands correct execution of skills every time, therefore runs the risk of creating two problem areas:

1. The athlete will start to play it safe. He will stay too far within his skill limitations, because the coach will jump on him if he blows it. Like the baseball shortstop who never makes an error because he never tries to cover much ground or go after a difficult chance, he will seldom come up with the really big play.

2. The athlete will develop a complex about failure. He will lose confidence in his ability to perform properly and master new skills. If he continues to fail (i.e. make mistakes) he will tend to think of himself as a failure

The coach is, of course, right to look for and demand proper performance of skills the athletes knows how to do well. But he should let the athlete know that failure to perform skills he is still learning will not result in ridicule or benching.

This is the reason for permitting failure during some practice situations. You, the coach, are not approving it; you're simply not condemning it.

Says Donohue: "Suppose I'm athlete, and I'm trying to dribble the ball behind my back at full speed. This is a skill I have not developed yet.

"I should be given the chance to do that under supervision, because when the coach watches me he can help me correct the parts of the skill that I am not doing well, and reinforce the things I'm doing right."

"Even more important, he can give me the right attitude if it doesn't work out -never mind, get on to the next thing, get back in the play, because that's the way it has to happen in a game. If I make a mistake, I can't let it bother me."

"There's an old saying: 'Stumbling block or building block?' Kids in a failure situation begin to wonder if it's too much for them, if they're really inferior. I know some kids who worry more about throwing the ball away in a crucial game than they do about failing a math test."

This particularly true of losing teams. The coach of a winning team can jump on an athlete who makes a mistake in a game. It probably won't change his or her team's winning attitude, unless it happens to be a crucial play in a crucial game.

But if he's coaching a team that has just lost eight in a row, the matter has to be approached more carefully. Mistakes shouldn't become a big deal, even though it may be mistakes that have caused the losses.

"You don't turn this situation into a crisis." Donohue warns. "Mistakes may be just a symptom of the problem. The player who hears too much about his mistakes will start to tune the coach out. He doesn't want to hear about his failures, and maybe it's because when he hears so much about his mistakes, he begins to lock in on them."

In other words, the athlete may forget to think positively. He is so busy thinking about losing, he is not thinking about winning.

"We hear that the team making the fewest mistakes wins," Donohue adds. "I'm not sure about that. Sometimes the team that makes the most mistakes wins simply because they've done the most things. If they make errors 10 percent of the time and do 100 things, they should still beat the team that makes five percent errors but only does 10 things."

The less experienced the coach and the younger the athletes, the easier it is to fall into the trap of emphasizing mistakes rather than the things that are being done properly.

Research has shown that many coaches use such words as "no" and "that's not the way" far more than they do the words "good play" and "way to go." Sports psychologists believe the ration should be about four to one - four "good play" to one "don't do it that way."

"I'd rather make it five to none, if I could," says Donohue.

Sarcasm is another manifestation of negative coaching. A remark like "where did you learn to do it that way, in the little leagues?" is simply a way of telling an athlete that not only has he made a mistake, he's never likely to get it right. A confident athlete may react positively; young athletes may simply lose confidence.

"The term I sometimes use is 'Be the best of what you are.'" Says Donohue. "Every kid has to have the opportunity, first, to learn how to do a thing properly and, second, to be successful at doing it regularly with no great fuss about failing."

"In this context, it's not a matter of making the play, it's 'did I try to make the play?' because trying comes first."

Kids won't even try for the hard ones if they know the coach is going to blast them for failure.