Youth Sports (i.e. the thing we all loved which parents have now ruined)

lol .... "Pack your stuff kids! Dad's taking us to the local pot festival!"

I guess when we were kids, everyone just played in their local rec league, and this wasn't an issue. I know we've got a lot of two-sons families, and they play on two different teams in the same org (and they try to keep the org together on game day).

But there's also a lot of players with non-football playing kids. I guess they get to spectate.

 

We have room for the kids and my mom in our Subaru Forester.

Pot: Fun for the whole family!

 

I saw this all the time in my junior hockey days. One of the siblings, who has already occupied a lot of his parents' time and money to get to the OHL, steps it up to another level and the whole family now follows him all over Ontario, driving hours home on a weeknight so mom and dad can be at work the next day and the younger kids can be in school. I remember the younger sister of one of our players, who had spent years following her brother to hockey rinks, doing her homework or reading in the stands during the game or, more often than not, sleeping. Always seemed to me like her brother's life was her life whether she wanted it or not.

The question in that link could have easily been written by my wife's brother and his wife. They have often talked about the massive amounts of time and money they have invested in their older son's travel baseball but they keep writing checks and spending weekends away from home racking up hotel, gas and meal bills (their younger son plays AAA in Toronto so the family is almost always split on weekends as each parent takes one of the kids out of town) in the hopes it will land him a scholarship. It will not.

And oh yeah, the answer was shit, too.

 

I guess for some people that's the life they want to lead?

 

I only have one child and he wasn't an elite athlete, but he tried a lot of sports and the years he did swim and wrestling involved a lot of weekend travel. I recall going to his first swim meet and seeing that he was in heats 3, 8 and 12, or something like that, and saying "cool, we'll be out of here by noon." His mom, who swam competitively, rolled her eyes and laughed at me pointing out that each heat had multiple races based on age and gender. Heat 1A, 1B, etc. So heat 3 was really race 15 or so. We were there til 4 and he spent maybe 3 minutes racing.

 

You are honest with them and balance it out no matter what, even if you don’t make it to “the big game/meet/comp”. In the end it’s about relationships with your kids not the sport.

 

Wow, this brings up a memory. Middle school track meet. My daughter is selected for the team. It's about a half-hour away. I follow the bus. My kid ran one leg of one relay, maybe 60 yards. I was there 4 hours, got sunburned, she participated for all of 10 seconds. The things we do for our kids.

 

Sure, guess so. The hockey player I referenced never made a dime playing pro, he is a CPA now. Always was a bright kid.

My son was approached to do the travel team thing too and while I can acknowledge parents wanting their kids to experience stuff like this, our thought always was, if we are paying for it, both financially (and as much as anything these teams prioritize people who will pay) and trying to juggle busy jobs on top of it to deal with the time commitment, we, not the kid, will decide. We always turned them down and none of us regretted it, he won more championships and had a lot more fun playing rep locally than he ever would have in travel ball. Others' mileage may vary.

 

I feel terrible for swim parents, and I'm glad my kid likes to swim, but not on swim teams.

My BFF tells me all the time about having to go to all-day meets, volunteer as a timer or something, and then watch his kid swim one or two times. At least she swims the 500 free to maximize time in the pool!

 

We have a pretty set philosophy, four kids, if they want to do something within reason they get to do it. For the most part no two-sport seasons, stuff like that, but if they are separate activities -- music, sports, scouts -- we go for it. It can be insane but we make it work. No one child is emphasized over another. We also almost always have at least one parent at every event.

Now we are lucky in that for the most part the age gap with our kids -- 10 years from oldest to youngest -- means the spread makes a lot of commitment levels manageable. Also, with older kids they can often get to things on their own or figure it out but then they can watch younger kids if we need that too. For a while before the older ones could help more in that area, we actually hired a babysitter to help as well when needed.

Additionally, we long ago stopped making events whole family things. We tried and we want everyone to support each other, but with multiple activities and definitely with teenage attitudes, it isn't worth the fight to make the 17-year-old go to the 7-year-old's 8 a.m. soccer game. There is also no need to drag everyone to an all-day baseball tournament when they would be miserable in the longrun.

We have a highly involved arts kid (theater, music), a competitive runner and also cheerleader, a competitive baseball, football, basketball player, and the youngest who is just trying to still figure crap out. We do travel baseball, which is obviously a slog, but the theater stuff can take hours and hours and a bunch of driving too. It's just organization and planning and most of the time it works!

I don't know if we are in the minority or not, but my wife has long said no one child will get to prioritize activities so much that a sibling gets left out. We have seen it. I do think some parents get super focused on the abilities of one kid and go with it. But they all have abilities if you let them. It is up to the parents to figure the logistics out and let the kids grow and have fun.

 

Volleyball was different. Club had the tournaments on Saturdays or Sundays. You were in a 4-team pod and you played each of the other three. So 3 matches, best-of-5. Each match took about an hour. It took 6 hours, so with drive time and warmup, it was an 8-hour day. High school matches were also about an hour, but just one match.

 

Hey a big 13-0 win today against for sure the best opponent we've played. .. and before @NNDman asks, "John Champe High School, up in Loudon."