Playing The Field: Synovia Youngblood

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Synovia and Kendall Youngblood

In Playing the Field, we profile women who are making an impact in the world of sports, either in competition or behind the scenes. For this installment, we spoke with Synovia Youngblood, the mother of two college athletes.

Of the many people it takes to make sports happen, the one that’s the least talked about is the parent—unless, of course, there’s a fight in the stands at an amateur hockey game or a verbal altercation with the refs at a little league game. Professional athletes often thank their parents, acknowledging the time and effort their parents put in to help the athlete achieve greatness, but what does it really mean to be the parent of successful collegiate athletes?

Synovia Youngblood, herself a successful volleyball player at the University of Southern California in her college days, has two daughters currently playing college field hockey. Oldest daughter Camille is a senior at Amherst College outside of Boston and younger daughter Kendall is a freshman at defending national champion University of Connecticut.

Though she knows her kids might have found their interests lay elsewhere, Youngblood knows her life was enriched by playing sports and so is happy her daughters can also have that experience.

“Sports gives you the opportunity to learn how to work on a team, to learn how to develop individual personal goals, it allows you to think about fortitude—your ability to handle failure or losses,” Youngblood said. “Sports serve so many purposes, especially for girls to (figure out) how do you pick yourself up when you fall down, how do you handle defeat, how do you know what you’re good at, how do you do your own PR? ...You can really take the symbolism of sports and apply it to real life.”

The way that Youngblood helped mold and guide her children is a somewhat unusual one. To listen to her describe parenting techniques and discussions with her daughters is to be a little impressed and a little intimidated. Her style was so successful with her own children she’s started her own business teaching similar techniques to other families.

Her style comes in part from her mother and grandmother and in part from methodologies learned during her leadership doctoral program. Youngblood said she was intrigued by the ideas she learned, but wanted to develop and adapt them for practical, everyday use. In the end, she admits that it required a certain amount of audacity to use her family as test subjects, but she also knew she wasn’t reinventing the wheel. If you strip away the terminology, it becomes clear that while Youngblood’s approach is incredibly cerebral, it’s also based in the need to ensure her daughters were prepared for the transitions of the world they were in.

Because they were both into activity and movement, both daughters did numerous activities as children, including dance and gymnastics, before they settled in to field hockey.

Youngblood was open to whatever sport it was her kids wanted to play, though she really wanted it to be something other than what she herself had done.

“I just didn’t want them to play volleyball,” she said. “I didn’t care what sport they played, as long as it wasn’t volleyball … I did not want to be a parent who wanted to live vicariously through their children. I wanted them to be unique to who they were. I’ve always known it’s the coach’s job to coach, it’s the parents job to be the parent, so I was OK being on the sideline and trusting them to a good coach. My job was to have them on a good team. I had this plan. [There is] the head coach on the field and I was going to be the head coach to keep [her daughter’s] thinking straight and to keep their confidence level up.”

Field hockey is not a popular sport in Milwaukee and as the girls became more serious about the sport, it required the Youngbloods to join a club in Chicago, which meant multiple trips during the week for practices and games.

The long and plentiful car rides are where Youngblood’s methodologies would come in to play. Her daughters would spend some of the time working on homework, almost like college study tables, but Synovia also spent time with each daughter developing a strategic plan for each of them.

“When a child is in school, you have an individual education plan if the child is a special needs student and I just always believed that every child is special, every child needs this and it should be more comprehensive than just education and so I wanted to develop that tool,” she said. “It was an individualistic holistic plan for raising a child. From a parenting perspective, it forced me to stop and think about the decisions I was making with my children.”

Youngblood didn’t stay and watch Kendall and Camille practice, but the time they spent away from the field was crucial in helping them develop. And Synovia took those dedicated hours to prepare her daughters for the reality of the world they were heading into.

“On the weekends, we did something that was very unique and I didn’t realize it; we worked on a strategic plan for them,” she said. “We did a series of exercises and tools and experiences ... I snicker because that’s how I built my business. The focus group I did with the kids became a reality for my business. For example, over lunch they would have to tell me things like not just what do you want to do, but how are you going to do it? ... We took sports analogies and taught them how to prepare for peer pressure and how to make good decisions. Most kids are not forced to think through future situations and do scenario planning. How to deal with your image. What does it mean to be the only African American on the team or in the classroom or in the boardroom and you’re a woman? And we just took the time to think it through ... They’re both very successful because they were able to do, adapt and adjust to whatever they had decided for themselves.”

Camille, who recently interned at the White House and has an interest in studying human trafficking, has also learned valuable life lessons on the field. When she told Synovia she hadn’t played very much, Synovia used the moment to point out the positives that could be taken from the situation.

“You can be a leader from the sideline, you don’t always have to be a leader on the field,” she said. “You will garner more respect by saying, ‘I can handle the adversity and I can handle not playing and I can still be a leader off the field.’ She’s translated that success and that skill set and honed it into her academics. The person who didn’t play has more empathy for other people, which will help her in her chosen professional path.”

It’s all about how you frame each lesson, positive or negative. For Youngblood, the many jobs she had all led her to this one. She knows that helping other parents is her calling. She didn’t know that all those hours on the interstate between Milwaukee and Chicago would translate into her feeling like she’s found her own place in the world, but it’s an unexpected bonus.

Being a parent is about helping your children along their paths. It just so happens that Synovia added a branch to her own during the process.

“It’s been an amazing journey just watching them,” she said. “Who knows what’s going to happen. It’s not where they start, but where they finish that’s important. It’s just like the beginning of a season ... I think the greatest contribution I gave my kids was the freedom to believe and think and dream and imagine that they could be and do anything that they wanted to do.”