It’s amazing how many of these posts wind up being about what’s happening inside my head when my sons are playing. Actually, maybe it’s not that amazing at all.
Last week I was out with my family watching one of the kids play. His team, which usually does very well and tends to overwhelm its opponents, was struggling. They were consistently a step slow and just weren’t making most of the plays they typically make easily.
In the midst of all this, I couldn’t help but think, “If only they would let my boy show what he can do. Give him a chance, he can make those plays!” I managed to keep all that to myself, but it wasn’t easy.
Over the years in my role as a coach, I’ve had my share of conversations with what I used to consider “crazy sports parents”. They would come to me, sometimes politely, sometimes not, with questions about playing time, playcalling, and other types of decision making. In my mind, many of these conversations bordered on the absurd, and I would wonder, “Don’t these people understand that I coach this team with 30 kids in mind, while they watch us play basically focusing on only one child?” Reality is, they don’t stop to realize that. They just feel the frustration of unmet expectations or some other kind of disappointment while watching their own son or daughter. If they thought about it, they would almost certainly realize what it’s like to be the coach of all rather than the parent of one, and probably not bother to have that conversation with me. But they don’t think about it.
In the past, I didn’t understand that. It was all too easy for me to fail to consider what it’s like to be a parent. To love that kid so much and want great things for them so badly that it causes us to lose sight of things that might otherwise be obvious. So as a coach, maybe I need to approach those “crazy sports parents” with some understanding, even if they are coming at me with hostility.
And as a parent who loves his kids, I need to remember that there are a lot of boys on that team, not just my son, and that’s it’s ridiculous of me to think that it would be a good idea for a coach to call a game and make decisions with a level of focus on my child that’s equal to mine.