Some Thoughts on Youth Sports

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.

My Reality and the News

This is a bit of an unusual topic for me on this blog as it is not really an issue specific to pediatrics. But I have been thinking about the difference between the news coverage of racial, ethnic, ideological, and religious hatred and what I experience every day.

I probably interact with at least a hundred different people every day. I interact with folks from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different countries of origin, different religions, different socioeconomic circumstances, different political parties, and different sexual orientations. I interact with police officers as well as people who have been convicted of crimes. And most of my encounters with all of these people are pleasant interactions with folks with good hearts. And some of them are absolute saints.

Unfortunately I do also see the effects of poverty, violence, mental illness, and lack of education and they are sobering. When I get home and start going around hugging everyone in my family, one of my kids will say “Did you see something sad today, Dad?” In my experience, neither sainthood nor sadness is confined by demographics.

As a middle-aged, white professional, I certainly have advantages in my dealings with society. I know this not only from the stories of those who do not share those advantages, but also by objective psychological data that reveal our biases, biases that we do not even know we have and that we find offensive when we recognize them in ourselves. Some of my advantages were earned and some were bestowed upon me by outside forces. But even the ones that were earned were more easily obtainable for me than they would have been for some others who started with a different set of conditions.

People are just people. If you are religious, we were all created in the image of God. If you are not religious, we all share the same cosmic chemical origins. Either way, we are all just people, related to each other and deserving of each other’s respect. But we are people whose experiences and identities are unique and it is important to acknowledge that my experience is not your experience and vice versa. The only way we understand another’s experience is to listen. Pretty much every religion has some version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In order to do that, you first need to see that other person as a person, just like you.

Last week a little African-American boy wandered into my office and struck up a conversation. He was intrigued by a picture of my children and asked me all sorts of questions. And yesterday at the end of the visit, two African-American children gave me hugs as they exited the exam room. Those children simply treated me like a human being, not like some alien from another demographic. We would all do well to follow their example.

PS – I like hugs from brown and white children as well.