Peak newsletter 🧠 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic’s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports. Sign up here to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.This week, I asked five former pro athletes who now coach youth sports a question: What’s the one thing you wish kids knew about the mental side of sports?I thought I’d get a variety of answers. Instead, I heard one word over and over again: failure.Here’s what the five pros-turned-youth-coaches said, in their words.Travis Snider, former MLB outfielderThe more that we can fall in love with being a great teammate, the more that we can fall in love with the things that motivate us to play, that’s an important piece that we sometimes lose track of.As a kid, if your motivation in sports is to have a good time with your friends, well, then let’s not make it any more complex than that. There are a lot of great life lessons that we can learn if we don’t tie our identity to our success or failures on the field or court.We all remember what it was like to be in middle school and high school and how much of who you are gets defined by what you’re good at. Ultimately, the person you are, the way you treat people, the type of teammate you are, is way more important for me.What are you feeling? That’s a really underrated question that we forget to ask. And from the kid’s perspective, can I identify my feelings?Do I feel embarrassed? Do I feel shame? Do I feel sad? What is the feeling or feelings? And a lot of the time it boils down to fear.I’ll give you one example.A kid on my son’s baseball team was refusing to swing the bat at the plate. He was getting upset. I tried to give him a couple of different external cues, but nothing seemed to land.And then I finally slowed down, pulled him aside and said, “Hey, bud, what are you feeling right now when you’re up at the plate?”And he said, “I feel like my arms are going to betray me.”This was a 10- or 11-year-old kid. That was the thought, and then we could identify the emotion, which was fear.