What not to do at your child's youth sporting events

Recently, while scrolling on Facebook I came across a clip from the CBS Morning News that highlighted an organization called 3aathletics run by former Major League Baseball player Travis Snider. Mr. Snider’s organization was formed after his major league career ended and he dealt with some mental health issues tied to his worth as a major league baseball player. He formed 3aathletics to “ensure that the next generation of athletes has a healthier experience playing youth sports.  This experience will be shaped by how we reimagine parenting, coaching, and supporting our children throughout their athletic journey.”  In my opinion he produces some great content that everyone involved in the youth sports world should be following and while reviewing some of his content I came across the following list that I think would be very helpful for parents who have children playing youth sports. 

Mr. Snider entitled this list “Seven reminders EVERY parent needs to hear – especially on game day.” The list is as follows (please note I am only discussing the items on the list that I feel are most important every time in the list is important): 

·       Your child is watching you more than the scoreboard 

·       “Hustle” doesn’t mean 24/7 grind 

·       Not every emotion needs to be fixed 

·       Your anxiety is not their responsibility 

·       Your kids coach doesn’t need a second coach 

·       Playing time is not a parenting metric 

·       The best sports parents know when to say less 

As with most lists I post, all seven reminders are pretty self-explanatory and basic common sense, but since people/experts in the field are always posting similar lists it leads me to believe that what they are discussing is not as self-explanatory and common sense as I think they should be.  As usual I am not going to go in depth with all items on the list, but I would like to highlight a few of the items. 

The first item “your child is watching you more than the scoreboard” is truth.  Many times, when I was coaching, I would see a youngster make a mistake on the field and the first thing that they would do is look up in the stands to see the reaction of their parent(s).  Now what does this do for a child’s self-esteem if every time they make a mistake on the field they are looking in the stands to gage their parents' reaction?  Don’t we tell our children that they should “learn from their mistakes?”  If we are looking for perfection from 7 to 12- or 13-year-old children, then we have big problems since we do not have perfection from college or professional athletes, and we should not expect perfection from our youth. 

The second item, “hustle doesn’t mean 24/7 grind” is VERY important.  Parents today think their child needs to be playing/working out 24/7/365 and all that does is burn their child out and not make them better.  If you follow professional sports, you will notice that every sport has an “off season” whereby the players of that sport spend down time and recover from the previous season.  Now if “down time” is important to paid professional athletes why do we think that children should be playing year-round?  Too many parents are buying into what their travel/select/elite coaches are telling them, if their child is not playing their sport year-round from earlier and earlier ages then they will be left behind.  This is a fallacy that has to be changed before we burn out more children and turn them off from youth sports forever. 

The third important item on this list is “your kids coach doesn’t need a second coach.”  Nothing truer has ever been stated in the youth sports world.  Many a time while coaching a game I would be giving instruction to my players only to have a parent on the sideline contradict me and tell their child to do something else. In my preseason meeting with my parents and players I made it clear that during my practices and games the children had my permission NOT to listen to their parents but to listen to me.  Now, I was not delusional enough to think that young children would not listen to their parents, but it was a nice way of trying to tell the parents to leave the coaching to me, butt out and not to contradict what I was trying to get across to my team. 

Finally, “the best sports parents know when to say less.”  Again, in my opinion, this one is very important as too many times parents are constantly talking to their children about the game, the at bat, the play in the field and what they could have done differently, and all this is being done right after the game without giving the child a chance to decompress.  I can think of many times I came home from a bad day at work and the last thing that I wanted to do was talk about the day.  Eventually I would talk about the day, but the last thing I wanted to do was to relive the rotten day that just finished so, as an adult I knew that I needed time to decompress what would make us think that young children want to talk about a bad game that they might have just had right after walking off the field.  When growing up and playing youth sports my parents came to all my games and my father, who was an exceptional athlete, NEVER said a word while I played, he let my coaches coach me and did not interfere with what the coach was doing.  In fact, the only advice that he gave me in all my years of playing youth sports was to move up in the batter’s box when the pitcher was throwing a curve ball.  Now I am sure that he could have gotten much more involved in giving me advice, but he chose to stay in the background and let me have my fun, and for that I will always be grateful. 

Honestly, I would love to see more organizations like Mr. Snider’s 3aathletics around the country to help spread the word that youth sports are just that “youth sports”, not mini-professional athletes who should be playing for college scholarships or possible professional careers that will most likely never materialize, but rather for the fun of playing with their friends and learning the important lessons that my friends and I learned when we played youth sports many year ago…how to win and lose gracefully, how to work as a team and how to learn to become productive members of society.