Travel 2.0

This year I gave up news for Lent, which seems to have been good timing since so little is going on right now. However, it does mean I have to reflect inward even more so than usual, which brings us to today’s topic.

About five years ago I wrote the most controversial guest column of my entire guest columnist career. Even more provocative than abortion or taxes, this subject inspired people to approach me in public and say things like, “Thank you for writing that column; it totally captured what I’ve been trying to tell my parents for years,” and “That article was dumb, and, by extension, so are you.”

The column in question was from the spring of 2015 and it broached what was apparently the very sensitive topic of traveling youth sports. In it I suggested—only half-jokingly—that I hoped my daughter didn’t take after her mother when it came to her athletic skills, knowing that if she did my life as a person who enjoys staying home on the occasional weekend to do things like nothing would effectively be over.

The point I tried to make—after emphasizing that how people parent their own kid was not really any of my business as long as no one toilet-papered my house—was that traveling youth sports, taken to the extreme, is an enormous commitment. It is a commitment of money but more importantly time.

Some people agreed with me; many people did not, and life continued.

The birthright, of course, of all children, is to someday force their parents to eat their words, and trust me, I. Am. Bloated.

 Because at the time—five years ago—I had one daughter playing summer league softball a couple nights a week, a couple months out of the year.

She liked softball, but then she also liked basketball. And she’s also a swimmer, and so she’s on the swim team. And her brother is on the swim team, too, both in the summer and the winter, and he plays basketball and baseball, sometimes on the same night, and for about ten Saturdays in early fall he chases a soccer ball around a soccer field.

Their little sister is only four, but she will be playing t-ball this summer and will likely follow in their pruney footsteps before long by also joining the swim team. (And, if there was a sport for household furniture climbing, she would, indeed, be on that team, as well.)

So what, in Effingham, happened? What happened to the idea that my kids would avoid this America apostasy that deifies sports in general and idolizes youth sports in particular?

Part of it is just physics—inertia, specifically, coupled with momentum. After all, once you commit to one sport it’s easier to commit to another. Once you’ve purchased the equipment, it seems foolish not to use it again. Gravity, too, plays a part. Once a friend is on a team, the pull to that team only grows stronger.

Part of it is just leisure. We don’t have to grow our own food or chase random animals off our property, so we can just sit and watch children chase a ball out of bounds. Our kids, too, have leisure time, so we believe we must fill it up, and playing a healthy game of basketball is certainly better than video games, right? It’s certainly better than smoking drugs or doing beer.

The number one reason, however, that we have joined the calendar-stacked decadence that is nightly practices followed by weekend contests can be summed up with one simple idea:

I am annoying.

This is not shocking, of course, but some context is in order.

            What drew us to travel basketball initially—and I use the term “travel” loosely, as the furthest we’ve actually travelled is Mt. Zion—were the coaches, both of whom we knew well enough to know that they were also good people. They were, and are, reasonable adults that understand that sports is simply one part of life, and that how competitors—players and coaches alike—conduct themselves is much more important than the final score. The swim coaches, too, are good people who can inspire both children to burn more calories in a single hour than we can in an entire week.

These thoughtful adults, along with my son’s baseball and basketball coaches, along with their teachers and their youth group leaders, are all part of an increasingly important circle of influence. As kids grow up and begin the lifelong process of creating a self beyond their parents, we’ve learned that they will need to hear solid advice from adults with whom they do not share an address.

Why is that so important? Because, as mentioned, sometimes parents really are annoying. Sometimes we’re just a bit—extra, is the word?—and sometimes, because it’s constant, the message itself can lose its potency.

I can tell my kid to hustle to the car all Sunday morning and we’ll still sneak in three songs into the service. His coach would likely get him there in time to greet the preacher.

In closing, coaches are not surrogate parents, and it would be inappropriate to expect them to be. (As a teacher for over twenty years, the last message I want to send is that it’s OK to let other grownups do the difficult job of actual parenting.) However, it does help to have reinforcements. It is absolutely helpful to have multiple adults in a child’s life reinforcing the basics: “Hustle, work hard and listen; show up early and leave late; clean up your own mess; own your own choices.”

And equally important, according to everyone I talk to nowadays:

“Wash your dirty hands.”