While watching our youngest son, Jacob, play soccer last
spring, one of the other fathers asked me “Do you think sports teach life
lessons or do you think we overdo it?” I replied “Yes.”
I have loved sports for as long as I can remember. As a
child I could spend hours by myself playing make-believe sporting events or
sorting my baseball cards. And I played hours of driveway basketball with
friends or baseball in the pasture across the road from my best friend’s house.
We would use major league line-ups and bat the way the actual players batted.
That’s why as a natural left-handed hitter, I usually chose Mike Easler over
Bill Robinson to play left field in my version of the late 1970s Pirates. It
got me another left-handed bat in the line-up.As I got older, I discovered soccer and ended up being pretty good at it and played both soccer and baseball in college. My wife, Cindy, played college volleyball. So when we had children, I naturally started playing all kinds of ball with them. We ended up involved in youth and high school sports from the recreational to “elite” levels and everything in between. This has included swimming, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and soccer.
And we have had some great times with all of these activities and I have enjoyed the times traveling with our kids to games and the opportunity to help coach some of their teams. But sometimes things seem a bit over the top. I hate that seasons have gotten longer and now overlap. What is a kid supposed to do when two different coaches, from two different sports, want them two different places at the same time?
And I have witnessed ten year olds standing on the pitcher’s
mound crying. Baseball is fun! I don’t think we ever cried while playing
baseball unless we got stung by a bee we stepped on while rounding third base barefooted
through a patch of clover or collided with a backyard swing set while
attempting a Willie Mays over-the-shoulder catch.
And I know I have my own youth sports weirdness. I like
making trading cards of my kids which is clearly mainly for my enjoyment, not
the kids’ (if anyone needs a 2013 Rachel Sauder basketball card, I have
extras). And we have had some great experiences with youth sports and it is not
unusual for us to have conversations that start with “Remember that game when…”
And I do think there are a lot of life lessons to be learned. How do you deal
with being the best player on the team? How do you deal with not getting to
play very much? What do you do when the coach puts you at a position you don’t
like? How do you react to getting cut from a team? How do you react when the
season is only half over and you don’t want to play anymore?I recently finished reading Overplayed, which was co-written by Dave King who is the athletic director at Eastern Mennonite University where Zach, our oldest child, attends and plays soccer. It has some great practical insights for parents who may be figuring out how to proceed with youth sports (or not) in their family. It is written from a Christian perspective which may not resonate with everyone but I think everyone would find the insights from the perspective of a college athletic director helpful.