Might I suggest orienteering, which combines hiking with maps in a hide-and-seek game. At 8 he’s a little young, but it’s a low-cost family event that can be competitive if that’s your thing. An offshoot similar activity is geocaching but again that is something better done as a family at his age.
Competitive floor-moping? It’s called curling, and may be the right thing for someone on the spectrum. It is just not very widely practised, only in some areas.
As someone who can relate to the kid I greatly appreciate that my parents (both of them!) never forced me to practise any sport. They tried judo, tennis, skying, table tennis and gave up. Thank Goddot for that! I did cycling for a while in Madrid in the 70’s, but that was murderous. One day my bike got stolen, that may have saved my life.
Exactly. Don’t force a child to go through that.
One of the teens I’ve known on the spectrum really liked rowing, possibly because of the repetition.
A nephew on the spectrum grew to love martial arts and bodybuilding in his teens.
The father of that nephew, when he was younger, in order to normalize his son’s lack of athleticism, would say, “He’s built just like me - for comfort, not speed.”
Orienteering sounds like a blast, especially for someone on the spectrum.
I like many others here see no reason to push him in sports if that’s not his thing. He can learn exercise habits when he’s older, but team sports isn’t something that kids need. If it’s peer interaction that he really likes, see if there’s a Dungeons and Dragons group or something similar for his age group.
Again, my father who is as I said probably on the spectrum loves croquet. But as you say it is hard to find a game and when he was playing he found it a bit weird socially because it was him and a bunch of elderly women. And there is also as I understand it constant pressure to move to “golf croquet” which is a less mental game.
The ‘elderly women’ thing is partly Australian croquet culture - as I understand it, in less enlightened times (but well within living memory), men played bowls and women played croquet. This is much less the case in other ‘major’ croquet countries such as England and the US. Here (in England) the majority of members are indeed at or past retirement age, but roughly equal in terms of gender. And like bowls, most top players are significantly younger.
How much pressure there is to play golf croquet (which is, as you say, generally less of a mental game, albeit still tactically rich and great fun for both beginners and experts) depends entirely on the club - many are predominantly or even exclusively set up for golf croquet, others try harder to preserve association croquet. In the US there is a third ruleset called American Rules, which is similar to association croquet.
This, this, this.
Okay, so team sports have been pushed for the last 30 years or so not for the sport itself but because it is a great way for kids to learn how to cooperate to reach a common goal and for the socialization skills it brings. But, it really is torture for some kids and it sounds like your son is one of those kids. I suggest doing some reading up on how you can use the things he is interested in to gain those socialization skills. For a friend’s son, that turned out to be a school robotics competition. Learning the same skills but also working with the kind of stuff he valued. He’s still in his 20s, in the military now, and very valued for his robotic and electronic skills, amongst others.
You have just described me as a child except for the autism spectrum stuff. Oddly, I kind of looked like I should have been athletic. Lots of pressure to live up to the appearance. It made my junior high and high school years an unrelenting hell. Once in college I never touched a ball or team sport. Stayed away from both for decades. Life became pretty good. Now I fly fish and shoot.
Let your kid socialize another way. You and your wife maybe cool your jets and give the child a broader range of exposure. He’ll like something.
I played in a pinball tournament this past weekend. I’m not a psychologist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if half the competitors were on the spectrum…especially the half that kicked my ass.
Maybe I should let it go, but this kid likes basketball. What he doesn’t like is practicing with Mom and Dad.
It’s possible that he doesn’t like it because Dad’s “what the fuck is wrong with this kid” comes through loud and clear when Dad asks him to practice outside, and Mom’s competitive spirit turns practice into a series of drills. I don’t know.
But from what @msmith537 wrote, it sounds to me like the kid is fine with basketball with his peers.
Just chiming in as the (former) parent of someone pretty deep on the spectrum.
- How is your son’s core strength? I came to learn that core strength is pretty key to some many fundamentals like handwriting. Spectrum kids can have weak core strength, which also translates into being bad at sports.
- A lot of spectrum kids love the water. Have you tried swimming? They may not actually like swimming, but they love being underwater, the water pressure, etc. You might want to try swimming if you haven’t
- Hi Opal
I too was going to suggest robotics, although that seems to be more for older kids. Maybe they have beginning clubs at age 8?
I have Asperger’s syndrome and am very short-sighted as well.
So I always got picked last for any school team sport.
I had few friends at school and got bullied.
What saved me was chess.
I taught myself out of a book (aged 6!) and practised on my own. The autism actually helped me concentrate and I enjoyed the clear rules and lack of social interaction. 
When I joined a chess club (aged 13), I was the best player in the club. 
Adults came to me for analysis and I made lifelong friends.
This gave me confidence at school - and the bullying stopped.
I even made a career later out of chess (but that’s another story.)
I agree you should combine chess with some exercise / sport.
I took up jogging (and played chess games in my head whilst doing it.)
That’s a wonderful story! I too love chess and did well in our HS chess club, though I never took it beyond that. I believe many chess grand-masters are/have been autistic. In fact, I believe masters in many fields have been autistic (Beethoven, Mozart, and even Einstein are thought to have had Aspergers).
Perhaps the OP’s son would enjoy chess boxing?
Parent of two grown Asperger’s kids here. We binged Queen’s Gambit not too long ago, and I thought the main character might have it. It wasn’t “can’t ignore it because it’s right out front” obvious, but I came to a point somewhere along the way where I found myself thinking that assuming she had it would be more consistent with her character than assuming she didn’t. Of course, I’m pretty sure that diagnosis wouldn’t have been available at the time and place of this character’s childhood, so in any case, it wouldn’t have been mentioned by name.
As opposed to Punch Drunk Love, a movie that left me with the unshakable feeling that Anderson simply googled up a list of Asperger behaviors and checked each one off as he developed the story.
My best friend’s son is autistic and I also have a male cousin that is autistic. They both LOVE bowling and have been bowling for many years. My friend’s son is a teenager and my cousin is in his 50s.
Even if the child isn’t autistic, I don’t know why any parent would force them to play a sport, instrument, etc. if the kid doesn’t want to do it. It’s agony for everyone involved.
Did she watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver this weekend? His long segment was on AI, and in the section talking about AI evaluating job resumes, the AI said the most successful potential employees were named Jared and played Lacrosse.
Seriously, though, I’m so thankful I went to a high school where academics were highly prized and athletics pretty much bottom of the pile for most kids. About the only football game we were more-or-less guaranteed to win was against Beverly Hills. Yay, us.
Me: Mom, please let me quit the track team. It wasn’t my idea to join, and I’m not getting anything out of it. We hardly do anything, and all the girls hate me.
Her: Oh, they don’t hate you!
Me: Uh, from day one they’ve been punching me, headlocking me, tripping and pushing me, and they scream at me to admit it, I’m really a boy, and I only joined the team so I could creep on girls. They won’t let me into the girls’ bathroom, and today they tried to pull my shorts and underwear down to prove that I’m a boy. They got the shorts but not the underwear…What did the coach do? He was nowhere around. He’s hardly ever around.
Her: Well, they only do that to you because you let them. You’re just gonna have to be tough.
Me: But –
Her: I don’t wanna hear it!!! You’ve heard my brother and sister brag about their sons who are high-school varsity and college varsity athletes. I made my ten-year-old daughter quit orchestra and take up a sport for a reason. Nobody brags about their kid playing the violin. You are going to be a track star and that’s it. Look at Jesse Owens and what he had to overcome.
Me: [walks away silently, thinking, there’s something wrong with the Jesse Owens analogy, but can’t pin it down.]
Now I’m trying to imagine my friend Becky’s daughter Amelia, who is that age, telling her mother what I told mine. I think that coach would have to take early retirement after Becky got done with him.
Sadly, I think a conversation like this happens a lot. Parent: “I ain’t rais’in no quitter!! If you quit this you’ll get the idea you can quit anything in life when it gets hard!”
I know, right? And think of all the time wasted pursuing a lost cause, when the kid could have been applying hirself to something s/he wanted to do and was good at. What’s wrong with the Jesse Owens analogy was that he wanted to be there, and, his teammates weren’t among the people harassing him.
And more to the point, somewhere along the line, parents started thinking that it’s not a good thing, it’s not character-building, for a kid to be harassed, beat up or both just for being hirself.