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The Sports Habit
I guess my wife and I shouldn’t complain about Allie and Caleb’s hectic sports schedules, because we’re the ones who keep signing them up and writing the checks to feed the habit.
Fall soccer bleeds into basketball, which melts into spring soccer or baseball, which overlap with the weeknight swim clinics that help get our two children ready for the summer swim season. We look forward to those two or three free weeks every August like Disney Channel teen starlets count down to their rehab getaways in Malibu.
But it turns out that we are mere novices at cramming our kids not-so-free times with sports, because until now, we have avoided the overdrive treadmill of travel team sports.
My semi-serious goal as a sports dad has been to raise a daughter and son who are both athletic enough to enjoy team sports and limited enough in their physical prowess to avoid getting plucked for the obsessive rigors of advanced-level club teams. As far as the family gene pool goes, our odds were 50-50.
My athletic career washed out as a high school distance runner who capped his varsity track career with a disqualification for unsportsmanlike conduct in the conference meet’s 2-mile relay. (That’s much harder to do than actually winning the 2-mile relay, I would argue.) My wife Gay, the all-region high school basketball player from Virginia Beach, was recruited by Stanford.
Even as we cringed at our friends’ tales of having weekends swallowed whole by soccer tournaments in Asheville, roller hockey games in Myrtle Beach and endless innings of baseball all over, now we find ourselves giving in to the temptation.
Caleb is 7 now and has been playing with the same Dream Camps Soccer Club rec-league team since he was 4. But in two weeks, he will be trying out for the club’s “Advanced Soccer Program.” Allie, who is 9, will spend a week this summer at Kay Yow’s basketball camp at N.C. State, and my wife and daughter are already looking ahead to jumping into the AAU circuit or some other elevated level of basketball.
Just like that, we could be going from one practice and one low-key game a weekend for each sport to two, maybe three practices a week and uber-competitive competition where no one is guaranteed playing time, and not every one gets a trophy.
Pediatricians, psychologists and organizations such as the National Alliance for Youth Sports all will tell you that children are far too young in elementary school to get on a year-round training schedule and focus on just one sport. Burnout and injury are common side-effects.
Yet it’s easy to get sucked in when you see the other players on your children’s teams who supplement their rec-team schedule with outside training or indoor-league play. Soon enough you convince yourself it’s in your daughter or son’s best interests to try out for a more advanced-level team. Because even if you’re not foolish enough to harbor college scholarship fantasies for your 7-year-old — seriously, don’t be that dad on the sideline who boasts about how his daughter’s entire indoor-soccer team is destined to start for UNC 11 years from now — you worry that your child will fall behind all the other players whose families have taken the plunge well before middle school starts.
At a certain point, the more talented kids on any rec-league team start chomping at the bit practicing and playing with teammates who simply are not as gifted. For them it makes sense to seek a higher level of competition.
The problem is most of us think our kids are athletically gifted, and we’re too quick to channel our kids in one sport. So we’ll inch into the increasingly hectic world of travel-team sports while letting them take the occasional break.
Maybe that’s unrealistic, but so is my faith in finding new escape routines from work to get the kids off to practice every week.
Check out our daily themes at TriangleMom2Mom:
MONDAY: Meet!
TUESDAY: Ask!
WEDNESDAY: Eat!
THURSDAY: Play!
FRIDAY: Out!
WEEKEND: Relax!
Comments
I was talking with the mom of middle schoolers/high schoolers the other day. Her kids played rec soccer but once they got into school, she figured they just play on the school teams. Well - that ended up putting them at a disadvantage because at least one wasn't able to get on the varsity team right away. He was on the JV team while the rest of his friends - all of which also were on Challenge soccer teams - went up to varsity. So he got discouraged and quit.
So now I'm wondering what's worse - quitting at 15 because you've been playing for 12 years and you're tired of it. Or quitting at 15 because you can't get to the level you want to be at because every other kid is playing soccer 24/7 on school and community teams.
This is a real dilemna! In today's society, kids are not allowed to grow up, and try things. And the dilemna is not only in sports, but only more obvious with sports. Sports is too professionally competitive at too early an age.
This mom you spoke to is not unusual. THere are very few outlets for kids who merely enjoy a sport, or want to try it out, but are not willing to spend a phenomenal amount of time perfecting a particular skill.
I can remember my daughter crying at age 11 because she wanted to spend all her time playing volleyball so that she could make the team at school. I thought she was overly dramatic. She was only 11! Surely her volleyball career was not over at age 11 if she didn't make the team then. But I soon realized that I was the one out-of-touch with how the world worked, not she. Once cut from one team, the child gets less training and farther and farther behind his friends who play all the time, and can seldom "catch up" (unless a natural athelete).
Kids do not overly train for soccer at an early age, but for every conceiveable other profession. Exposing one's child to a variety of activities should be a life-long opportunity, not only an opportunity for preschoolers only.
As for your dilemna? I vote for quitting at 15 because you haven't been playing soccer 24/7 for your entire life. Maybe you have been doing a variety of life experiences that make you a more balanced person. After all, chances of that soccer scholarship and full-time profession are unlikely. Soccer is great, but at what expense?
But, personally, my family chose the other option! Am I a hypocrit? My now 15 yo daughter, btw, now spends all her free time playing volleyball on a highly competitive team. She loves it. If she left volleyball now, she would leave having had a terrific experience of developing a high skill level at something and I wouldn't regret the time. I guess love of an activity trumps a broad experience of activities.
I struggle with the quality v quantity dilemma for my daughters, now 7, 7, and 11. Even for the 11YO, it seems too early to have to choose a higher level of soccer competition over say, ballet. Yet, with the demands of either (at age 11!!), she may have to choose just one, and that is sad to me, but not uncommon these days, from the posts I read here. Also, with more than 1 child, advancement of one to a travel league of any kind or more intense schedule of practice/play almost autmomatically precludes the others from pursuing a sport to that same level, at least not without a PhD in scheduling & carpooling - and so we go......