06/02/08

Kids’ Sports

My son is off playing hockey today at our neighborhood ice skating rink. He’s been there for hours, just like he was yesterday.

This is not a common thing with him. Sports are something he enjoys only when he gets around to actually doing them, which is not that often. They don’t come naturally to him and if any kind of competition is involved, he immediately wants out.

But this hockey thing is just a bunch of kids from the neighborhood playing for fun and it seems to be more his style.

He did judo for awhile. He started with his friend in the 2^nd grade and liked it for 2 years. In those first years, judo is about learning a lot of different moves. The teacher shows you the moves, you practice them with the group, and once in awhile you show your teacher how much you’ve learned.

As long as it was that, he liked it. But then they started competing and that was it, he didn’t want to have anything more to do with it.

I didn’t blame him. When I was young I was only OK at sports. I was coordinated so I could do the moves and make it look good. But if you had to be strong or do something fast, that’s when I lost it. I was in a lot of sports just because everyone else was doing them, including my friends.

I had a theory that got me through it all – if people like you, you don’t really have to be good at anything. So in some ways I had fun, but very often during the games I really hated the whole thing.

A couple of years ago some people at work got me to play floor hockey with them. The minute the game started I got the same old feeling from when I was young. I was not helping the team much. In fact I was pretty bad. The others didn’t seem to care and said nice things to me, but I knew the truth: I just couldn’t hack it.

2 things amazed me: it surprised me that it could still feel so bad even though I was now an adult. And it amazed me that we parents would ever push our kids into situations where they’d have the same feeling. Are we crazy or something?

There were a few good things when I was young, one of which was a genius thing called intramural sports. That was when they put together several teams from the same school and we just played each other. Sure, it was for those people who weren’t good enough for the real teams. But it was a lot of exercise and a lot of fun with almost no stress to be good.

Isn’t that what kids’ sports should be about? 

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When I grew up I realized that there were all kinds of sports like my son’s first years of judo: a bunch of people get in a room, practice some things together, then go home feeling great. And sports where you go outside, run around a bunch, then go home feeling great.

I can’t help thinking, why don’t we have sports like that for kids? Why do they only get to do that stuff when they’re grown up? 

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VOCABULARY: Ice skating rink: luistelurata, Competition: kilpailu, Blame: moittia, floor hockey: sähly, Couldn’t hack it: minusta ei ollut siihen