Sports Parents: Ever Heard of a "GAME"?

The BBQ Pit
1

ONE HOUR AGO – MY NEIGHBORHOOD BASKETBALL COURT

Me: “So, um, you guys – (dad and son) – want to play some horse or 21?”
Dad: “No thanks, we’re working on his shot.”
Son: red faced, won’t look in my direction

Me: [in my head] “No you’re not SHOT DOCTOR ASSHOLE!”

“You are yelling contradictory instructions at your teenage son, who by the way, will never play at the college or NBA level. Why? Because he’s not already at least my height.”

My childhood at the same age.

Me: “Dad (retired military officer, not oft…ever noted for a lack of discipline or interest in what I was doing, if I asked), I’m going down to shoot some baskets.”

Dad: “OK, dinner at six.”

Me: “Shutup you old motherfucker.” Just kidding, “OK”.

OTOH, had I been this kid, I might have been tempted to go with answer one.

First of all, the key to shooting, once you’ve made some shots, is confidence and consistency. To develop either one a player must work on range, diversity in your game – passing, rebounding, running also – and, yes, shooting percentage – without coming to hate the freaking game. I ran around for hours just heaving up bricks. Thank God, nobody came around to “coach” me the way this guy was.

Now – on an intercept course with 40 – I can make all kinds of shots. I’ve been playing for fun for years. The best way to learn something is to break it up into small pieces and have fun with it. If there were “designated basketball players” that you could bring in for – say – two minutes, I might be dangerous.

About three trips full court at full speed, I become the “designated defender” for one possession (I’m camped). OK, maybe two, but then I’m hauling ass.

Basketball is not the military. “From 18’ – AGAIN!”

Why not, you know, play some basketball with him?

Try that approach with golf and you are likely to have a kid just quit, or “accidentally” shove a five iron up your ass.

If sports were easy, everyone would be good.

I’m not a parent. But, I live in a neighborhood with all sorts of kids. There are not that many kids that play sports to begin with. Well, old guy sports. Bikes and skateboards are largely the only things keeping our kids from growing roots in the couch and having to be harvested.

If the kid is actually willing to stand out there and listen to that shit, he is “motivated and devoted” – QUIT TELLING HIM HE ISN’T!!!

If you want your kid to love sports, be supportive even if he or she “fails”. Guess what, mostly he will fail!

“Here kid, be Tiger Woods”

Fucking Hell!!!

2

People learn in different ways. Being that you’re not the kid’s dad, you can’t say this way does or doesn’t work.

Yes, it’s kind of assholish, but then again, basketball coaches aren’t exactly known for mollycoddling their players. I’m not saying coaches should go to the Bobby Knight School of Intimidation, but there’s something to be said for a militaristic approach to instruction.

At least it was a high-school age kid. The worst is when you see parents just totally losing their sh*t at their below-two-digit-age kid at a baseball game. IMHO, THOSE are the people most in need of a Doc Marten-to-throat introduction.

3

Then again, this isn’t a coach we’re talking about. It’s the kid’s dad. His job isn’t to teach the kid basketball, it’s to look out for the kid’s best interest. The only reason he should be lecturing the kid about how to shoot is if the kid wants him to.

The really sad thing is now the kid is screwed three ways: first, he has to put up with all the bullshit from his dad about how to play. Second, he’s inevitably going to hate basketball because he’ll burn out in a couple years. On top of that, he’s never going to find out whether or not he would have liked basketball, because Johnny Vicarious is ruining it for him.

I know exactly the type of parent you’re talking about, Beagle, and the thing that really bothers me is that if a young Larry Bird is out there, and he’s got a dick like this for a father, he’s never going to become Larry Bird, because by the time he gets to middle school he’ll hate the thought of playing the game.

4

Well, he was actually out there with his kid: a plus. I did not hear his son responding to his Knightesque coaching methods: “clank, clank, clank”. I would mix some praise in with the yelling.

For one thing, it was windy. I mostly stay inside 15 feet when the ball is going to curve a foot in the air if I don’t. Second, the same shooting drill, over and over? If there was some way to verify it, I would bet money that the kid quits basketball within the year. That is, if he plays organized basketball.

I think the only way to produce a champion is to first accept that you may not be able to do it. Second, try to make your child love the sport. Out of that passion will come competitiveness. Remember, no knee breaking in ice skating. Also, one must be realistic about the physical demands and attributes necessary to be very good at a particular sport. Tall: basketball. Short: soccer. Big: football. Thin: running. This poor kid was being asked to shoot from the top of they key, over and over. Grooving failure, the pathway to success?

5

Related tale:

I’ve had singing ruined for me by a choir director in church. When I was about 14 I went to choir practice every week, where we practiced and practiced and practiced the same damned passages until we hated the music and (at least in my case) hated singing. Add to that that I am an alto but was expected to sing soprano. (Not a soloist, never a soloist, however!) Never any rest, never got to rest my voice. Hated it. I remember that my throat hurt because I was singing too high. (I can sing that high, not just all the damned time, over and over and over again.)

I still don’t really like to sing that much, but it’s gotten better so I will sing along during the church hymns, most of the time.

My mom, a singer, thinks I have an okay voice and could do quite well in a choir, but all desire to do that was permanently squelched by that choir director.

6

From A League of Their Own:

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

7

Hey, sounds like my experience with every single sport. From soccer to baseball to swimming to racquetball, repetition and competition made me turn against every one. I liked playing baseball games — I did not like being pushed to join a Y team where people actually cared about winning and losing. That made it work, added stress, killed the pure fun of it. I was a good pitcher when I was a kid (no delusions, though, I’d never play college baseball, and certainly nothing higher, but I coulda been good in high school), but I’ve reached the point where I won’t even play catch with anyone, ever. Why?

Because they tried to turn baseball, which should be fun, into something that was “important.” SPORTS ARE NOT IMPORTANT, AND SHOULD NEVER BE CONSIDERED IMPORTANT. Sports should not be a source of stress or distress for a kid. But no, gotta make me compete, gotta make me “strive” but never convince me that that striving makes me any better, when I know that the competition makes the game less fun.

Why do we do this crap? Nothing good comes of it.

8

The problem of overbearing parents is so bad in hockey that assaults have occurred in the stands. Walter Gretzky has said that they moved Wayne out of his home and home league at 14 because of stress due to hockey parents berating him. In 2002 Hockey Canada commisioned a series of ads reminding parents “It’s Only a Game”. See here, click on “ideas” and then click on the image of the guy with the bullhorn. An excellent campaign against this sort of idiocy, and very funny to boot.

9

My kids play high school sports, and I can tell you 2 things:

i) It is the rare child indeed who benefits in the long run from being drilled by his or her father. Most quit the first chance they get.

ii) It is ALWAYS the Dad.

My kids are thus the beneficiaries of having an achoholic father who wouldn’t dream of assisting his kids in that way. The first season I took my son to little league every kid there had his very own “assistant” giving a continual string of suggestions except mine.

If the kid is lucky, they’ll take to a second sport and the parent will have learned his lesson when he/she dropped sport number 1 and back off. It helps if Sport 2 is one they don’t know much about. Case in point, my daughter has played volleyball with 2 girls who began their athletic careers playing softball. Dear old dad worked with them every chance they got. Take them 60+ miles away from home on weekends to work with specialists etc. etc. Both girls got sick to death of softball and won’t have anything to do with it. However, they are athletic and now (thanks to the years of softball practice) have arms like cannons - both have D1 volleyball scholarships.

10

I disagree. Sports can play a very important role in helping a kid develop things like self-confidence, a sense of fair play, a cooperative spirit, and mechanisms for coping with dissapointment. The commitment and dedication you need to really be part of a team sport (and not just play a pick-up game here or there) can be intense, but that doesn’t make it bad.
Of course, the same can be said for things like debate teams, or band, or 4-H, etc. etc. Sports don’t have a monopoly on character-building, but that doesn’t mean they’re unimportant to those who make them part of their lives.

11

I used to coach 13-15 year olds in baseball and I have seen fathers drilling kids while the mother rants like a lunatic from the sideline. I have seen mothers put so much pressure on a kid by insisting that they play a certain position, never mind that the kids talents are better suited for a different position, that the kid just stops trying and eventually quits. I once had a grandfather try to climb the fence to fight me over his grandson’s playing time. The out on the court drilling may be a mostly father thing but the mothers are not completely innocent.

12

By the way on the grandfather incident I just shook the fence until he fell off and proceeded to throtle him. :smiley: … Just kidding the crowd pulled him down. :slight_smile:

13

And they can also destroy a kid’s self-confidence, crush their sense of fair play, make them hate cooperative activities and saddle them with a lifetime’s worth of crushing disappointments.

The emphasis we place on sports in American “culture” is sick and disgusting. If we took half of what we waste on sports each year and put it towards truly worthy causes — sciences, the arts — we would enrich our society to an unfathomable extreme.

Sports rewards jocks, it makes millionaires of out idiots who can’t balance their checkbook or name both their senators, but boy, they can throw a stupid ball, and gee, isn’t that worth money?

Sports should be games, and that’s it. Putting pressure on kids to compete compete compete! is unhealthy, breeds more losers than winners and strips sports of their fun, which can make kids sedentary.

14

If someone gets better after practicing something for hours on end (and all but the most inept will) they will learn positive lessons about persiverance and that hard work pays off, etc. etc. etc.

If they compete in sports, however, they’ll also learn that life isn’t fair. That seems to be the bitter pill parents have a more difficult time with than their kids. Somebody with O.J. Simpson’s athletic talents is going to do better than 99.99999% of the population no matter how many hours, how many drills, how much anything the others put in.

My daughter worked her butt off and went from barely making a B volleyball team in junior high to being named All-State as a senior in high school. And while the working hard part helped, what REALLY made a difference is that she grew 10 inches in that span and is six foot tall now. If she had topped out at 5’2" nothing else she could have done would have mattered.

It’s too bad you couldn’t get the son alone and see if he didn’t want to hoop it up a little bit after trainer/drill/Dad left.

15

Lessons that could just as easily be learned doing something has socially redeeming value, such as writing, painting, music or other academic pursuits.

Again, not a lesson you can only learn through some stupid, sweaty sport.

I have a hard time considering athletic ability a ‘talent’ since it does nothing to enrich society or further human advancement. An over-lauded skill would be a more accurate term.

16

Spectrum, easy, there. We get that you don’t think sports are important, but you’re going a little overboard. What’s the difference, objectively, between music, art, and sports? All of them are loved by some, hated by others. Does art, or music, or poetry (or whatever) enrich society or further human advancement more than sports do? Not objectively they don’t. The only difference is that people who play sports don’t look down their noses at people who pursue other interests. Socially redeeming my ass.

17

Wow, spec, I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much about someone from so little said. :rolleyes:

Without putting too fine a point on it, what qualifies you to determine “socially-redeeming value?” Is there any less art in a grand-slam home run than a Rembrandt? And before you step up and try to defend the arts, understand that I’m not belittling anything artistic in nature at all – I’m trying to make you understand that you’re judging a little harshly things which you apparently have no interest or skill in.

If the quantifier in this case is lasting impression on the beholder, let me assure you that sporting events leave just as much an indelible memory as anything else. One of the most cherished memories I have of my father was the first hockey game we took in, and how much we enjoyed ourselves.

“Enrich society or further human advancement?” Are you under the deluded impression that if it hangs in a museum, it’s genius? 99% of everything is crap regardless of whether or not it’s housed behind glass and a guy with a hat guards it.

You’re coming off as extremely judgmental of sports here. You might do well to not dismiss out of hand skills which millions of people enjoy watching and participating in, simply because you haven’t the patience or the inclination to learn.

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Art, particularly literature, is one of the primary vehicles of social evolution. The written word, in both allegorical fiction and persuasive essay, can move men and nations forward. Art enriches our intellectual heritage. Art allows us to confront the weaknesses and failing of the human condition, to challenge and explore them, and correct them. Literature and art has always been a key component of every great social advance and social movement in history. Even today, we debate topics like gay rights and the role of religion in society through artistic mediums such as literature, stage and screen.

The written word, itself an art form, has played a central role in every great advancement of recorded history, from rationalism to democracy. The vibrancy of a culture’s artistic output is a direct indicator of their potency as a society.

No one ever changed the world by throwing a stupid ball. But putting pen to paper has changed the world more times than one could count.

19

Would you argue, then, that socialization isn’t a part of human development? How about team-building and learning to work towards a common goal?

Your argument is weak and your words plenty, my friend.

20

Yes. One is a work of artistic expression (though I don’t care too much for Rembrandt’s work) that captures for posterity the culture that produced it, and for that culture allows for consideration and . The other is just swinging a stick at a ball.

I like baseball and watch baseball games (minor league stuff, mostly), and was also a decent baseball player (better pitcher than hitter). Whoopee, I could throw a decent curve ball and strike people out. Big deal. That’s not an accomplishment. It’s just throwing a ball.

Not historically. We remember the art and literature of the past, we rarely, if at all, look to their games to find the soul of long-gone civilizations.

Sporting events can be fun to watch, and entertaining in a shallow sort of way. But they are not important, and their elevation, particularly in our school systems, is a major cancer on our culture.

No.

I dismiss them because they are transitory and, on the whole, meaningless.

Why should we fawn over brutish morons who can throw a ball?