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1. Sportsball
A few weeks ago I went on my buddy Shaun Dawson’s podcast, Raising Men. Shaun wanted to talk about kid sports. I have a lot of thoughts about kid sports. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good forty minutes. You can listen to it here.
Today I want to revise and extend some of those thoughts.
You political sickos who want only Trump talk can opt out.¹ For everyone else, let’s talk about why kids play sports, what our society does right (and wrong) with youth sports, and what we can do better as parents.
For new readers, I want to level set. I have one kid who is a high-level athlete. He’s playing college baseball this year. He has a (very outside) chance of getting drafted after college, depending on how he develops. The odds are against that and even if he did wind up in the pros, he’d probably just bounce around the minors for a year or two and then, I don’t know, go to law school or something. 🤷♂️
I have three other kids who are mostly indifferent to sports. So I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum.
Here is something I have told my baseball kid, Flash, since he first started throwing a ball: There are only two reasons to play sports. For fun or money.
That’s not all-the-way true, but it’s true enough. If you aren’t getting paid to play a game, then you better be having fun. Because why else do it? If a kid feels like 10-year-old baseball is a grind, then he shouldn’t be playing 10-year-old baseball. He should be trying a different sport. Or learning the clarinet. Or hanging with his friends. Or drawing.
He should be exploring the world around him to find something he loves.
The idea that kids should pursue sports for some other reason—to help with college admissions, or build a résumé—is mostly wrongheaded. Because if your kid will be good enough to play in college, then you probably already know it.
Lesson #1: Elite talent shows up much earlier than you think. We hold this idea in our minds about how great athletes can bloom late. That’s mostly not correct. When you see a kid who is going to play at the next level, you notice him or her immediately because they aren’t 10 percent or 50 percent better than everyone else. They’re in a different category. Like looking at an alien species.
A few years ago I wrote about a young girl I’d seen at an elementary school cross-country meet. I watched her run 200 meters and my eyes fell out of my head. She was in fifth grade and in thirty seconds you could tell she was different not just from everyone else at the meet but from anyone else you’d ever seen. Last fall she was a high school freshman running cross country and she finished in the top fifty in the nation. And keep in mind that while this girl will absolutely run at the next level, even she will probably never be “elite” enough to make the Olympics. That’s a whole other category difference.²
Another example: Before he switched to pitching full-time, Flash worked out at a local baseball academy. Great group of kids. All very high-level; everyone there would eventually go on to play college ball. I walked in one day and saw a 16-year-old taking batting practice and after three swings my jaw was on the floor. In a building full of high-level high school players, this kid was a freak and you could tell after three practice swings.
He skipped college and went straight to the MLB draft where he was taken in the first round.
I could give you story after story illustrating this reality. A long time ago, a family friend in Connecticut watched a 12-year-old win his club championship (against grown men) by like 5 strokes. By 21 that kid was on the PGA Tour.
Point is: Those category differences are obvious extremely early. And if you don’t see them, then the kid isn’t going to the next level.³
Which is why they better be having fun.
Lesson #2: Sport is life. Why do we romanticize sports? Because sport takes a lot of different parts of the human condition—courage, heartbreak, resilience—and concretizes them.
When kids learn about sports, they learn about life. They learn how to win and how to lose. They learn to work with others. They learn how to take criticism in stride. They learn discipline.
They learn about death. [Record scratch]
Let me explain that last one.
I know it sounds morbid. It’s not. This is where we start really digging into the good stuff. Come take the ride.
