As the mother of a 10-year-old boy, I have been in my share of sports programs. These days, a stick and a wall simply isn’t good enough. It’s been replaced with speed training and sports classes and Athletics 101.
Is this a wonderful sign of the times, reaping the rewards of modern methodology? Or are we robbing the young of their youth?
And if it weren't enough to have specialized training in your specific sport, they’ve further reaped the target market dollar by offering specialized training in your specific position (quarterback, point guard, etc.). Summer camp, where you had your first kiss and got poison ivy and swam in a lake, has been replaced by sports boot camps and clinics and seminars.
Younger and younger they get pumped out, so much so that last year, it was suggested that my 3rd-grade son was now ‘too old’ to join football because teams have already been established for a few years. A few years? These kids have only been alive for a few years.
It's so intense in my neck of the woods that, at first glance, you'd think we lived in the hood and this is everyone’s meal ticket out. Then you notice the mommies driving Escalades and carrying Vitton bags.
To add to the pressure factor, every little Johnny and Joey and Bobby’s daddy is a self professed “coach” -- which, in quasi-suburbanite dialect, often translates to “don’t know much about coaching a team or even the sport but my kid blows and needs to get playing time, so here I am.”
Renee Antonelli Valente
To make matters worse, you’re sitting with a crowd of strangers, watching it all unfold before your eyes.
I know it's become a cliche, but some of these parents truly are obsessed. They are the yellers and the troublemakers and the people who have an opinion on every play, every kid. Ask them and they'll tell you: They know the program inside-out.
They even take pride that little Johnny is a brutal beast with no regard to anyone’s physical well-being, including his own. They beam when they tell you Billy is the team’s quarterback, while failing to mention, of course, that his Dad is the coach.
And the kids go from lacrosse practice straight into a soccer game, which ends up making them a little late for math tutoring.
Math tutoring? Maybe if the little monster was actually home instead of being driven around like Miss Daisy, he wouldn’t actually need it.
It's such an unnatural pace. Like Marmeduke the big, dopey Great Dane, they all need that awkward phase, where their arms and legs are too big for their bodies and they don’t run straight. Where they learn that bumps and bruises are the name of the game, and sometimes Daddy's not the coach and you sit on the bench.
This frenetic pace of pumping out little beings of quasi-perfection is going to bite us in the ass. We'll be sitting with our 20-somethings in therapy, as they try to come to grips with not getting an A or being passed over for a promotion.
Call me Old Fashioned Annie, but I think we should all just sit back and allow nature to take its course. It's perfectly fine to give your child every advantage, but there comes a limit to where athletic intervention will take you.
Look at it this way: If your kid was meant to be the next Eli Manning or LeBron James, the cream will naturally rise to the top. And if not, so be it. We all love milk, too!
