In 1998 Jim Thompson founded the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit for youth sports. It urges coaches to follow the “Magic Ratio”: “five pieces of positive feed-back for every criticism.” Thompson calls it “the single most important action most coaches can take to become more effective.” By 2015 the alliance had partnered with roughly 3,000 schools and youth sports organizations.
The 5-to-1 figure came from studies of stable marriages. The basketball coach Phil Jackson learned the ratio through the alliance. He admitted that his own ratio with his players “was closer to 3:1.”