Summer vacation has come and gone. These days my kids are all grown but I remember that driving kids to soccer practice, taekwondo, or to T-ball was always a pain in the back. However, as I approach my eighties and see my adult children prosper, I do not regret any of those wearisome drives. Instead, I regret the ones I missed.
Sports helped all my children to the extent that they played. My oldest daughter went to college on an athletic scholarship and became a national champion. All the others either played a sport or had to learn sports lessons somewhere else. The single most obvious thing sports taught my children was never to be defeated by a defeat, never to quit because of a loss. However, that lesson was only one of many.
Sports can keep a child focused, out of trouble, and provide a context to learn fair play and courtesy. At the same time that sports foster a striving attitude, they give children the opportunity to show grace in defeat and humility in victory. Sports teach boys and girls to display style and chivalry when they are under pressure and all such lessons serve them well as adults.
Sports not only teach kids to play but also to compete. That is important because playing is developmental and fun, but competing in our modern world is vital. By accepting, the challenge of competition kids get a chance to evaluate design and build themselves, then test and improve themselves. When they are through with soccer and t-ball, the habits of examining, designing, building, testing and improving will remain.
Sports teach a child even more than how to compete, they teach against whom to compete. Sports familiarize children with the habit of doing as well as they can each time, then reviewing their performance so they can do better next time. Win or lose, sport nurtures that habit by pointing out those occasions during the game that they did not better a past performance. The player the child was yesterday is the player to beat. The critical competition is with the person they were, so they can become who they intend to be.
Winning and loosing
Sports teach kids what winning means. Winning is a taste of sugar and a glorious green crown of laurel leaves that always shrivels in a week. Years later they will understand that winning might also be a cash bonus to spend and forget, a seat at a banquet table or even a line on a resume. Winning is ephemeral.
Sports teach kids what losing can mean. Losing is a forced opportunity to see what needs to be improved. Losing a contest forces a competitor to analyze, to plan, to rebuild and to try harder. Sport is a safe context to teach kids to become energized by failure and not to fear it. If a child wins a contest, then the training, the plans and the tactics do not need to improve and often will not be. Loosing is the stuff that forces growth and improvement.
Sports introduce the idea that the planning, the struggle, the growing and the journey, are everything. They learn that winning and loosing are things that happen along the way and no particular win or loss defines them.
Sport can be the place to overcome that paralyzing fear of failure that keeps so many girls and boys in the shadows all their lives. Sport can be a safe context to learn many of the lessons that adult life requires. For example, a kid who plays a sport will learn when a particular physical pain signifies an injury or is merely a barrier to overcome. Mastering inconsequential pain and distraction, regardless of intensity, may be a competitor's most important carry-over skill.
Title Nine
My daughter got to play sports like my sons did but my mother did not. Because of the Title 9 Federal law forcing schools to promote woman’s athletics equally, many of our daughters learned the same lessons our sons learned on the field. Lessons like, Don’t sweat the small stuff, Keep your eyes on the prize, Never let them see you sweat, are just words to non-players.
Today girl players learn these lessons in their bones just like boys. A deep understanding of teamwork is probably why our American businesswomen today are the best in the world. Many enter the job market with the same instincts and training as our men. Look at any nation in the world that permanently places its women in a second class position and you will see a nation that cannot keep up. That nation has given up half its brainpower and is doomed to mediocrity.
Children move on, lessons stay
When your children move on in life, they may not understand the lessons their sport taught them. Children seldom discuss ideas. The lessons sports teach are not verbal things, but those lessons will remain inside, stuck tight. Sports teach lessons on a physical level so that when children become adults and their intellect becomes ready, they will have mental pegs where the intellect can hang ideas. Someone who has competed can remember, understand and believe. I suppose others can learn some other way. I do not know.
Some poor kids are never exposed to the lessons of sport. Road rage, street shooting and other such stupid acts of violence that come from being “dissed,” are the behaviors of kids who never learned the unimportance of loosing a single contest. Kids that resort to violence when they are “disrespected” do not know how to pick their battles. Sadly, professional athletics seems to introduce a level of hubris that overshadows almost all sport’s useful lessons. With the exception of few dozen heroic individuals, professional athletes seem quickly to unlearn all the lessons of amateur sports.
The real sports legacies, the important rewards, are not the trophies but the attitudes and the life habits. Attitudes remain. Like seeds, they germinate then blossom. The lessons your children learn in sports will help them prosper. Your kids will use those lessons every day as they move into adulthood and then nurture kids of their own. So drive them to soccer, attend their sporting events and do not worry if they loose. If they keep playing, they will win the big game.
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