Mr. B and Mr. C have been playing with balls, bats, pucks, disks and just about anything else they can get their hands and feet on since they were very small.This week, they participated in their first T-Ball practice with their new team, The Sluggers.
As they’ve grown up, we watched many of their friends join youth sports teams. We watched from a distance with some trepidation.
Because as Americans (and especially as Texans), youth sports is often the first step to the ultimate transformation into an overscheduled child.
1. First, Some Baggage
Competitive team sports is a big part of growing up as a kid in Texas. Even if you don’t participate in team sports, you can’t avoid the culture that surrounds it.
Football still remains the reigning sport today as it did when I was 5 years old. But Texans raising children today can choose from much more than just football for their aspiring athlete to play.
The range of options now includes hockey, lacrosse, water polo, disc golf and the list goes on and on.
I grew up playing soccer for about 12 years. That was 12 years of weekly soccer practices, weekly soccer games, and weekly soccer scrimmages. I learned a great deal and made a lot of friends.
In the first four years of playing soccer I didn’t have any friends who played in multiple sports leagues but by the time I was about 9, I began to notice that I didn’t have any friends who didn’t play in multiple sports leagues.
Several of my friends began to play baseball for the city league. So I talked my parents into letting me play as well. Then some other friends began playing in a basketball league at the local recreation center, and I joined the team.
But the next year, I noticed that things became much more competitive. My soccer team decided to go select. This means the team made the choice to enter into a more competitive league of teams.
Select soccer leagues also typically require enormous time commitments each week from players, coaches and parents.
Some of the members of my YMCA basketball team signed up to do a basketball camp which would be a two-week long intensive training camp.
The level of competition in the city baseball league had ramped up significantly. I found myself swinging and missing fastballs that really were fast!
The competition was ramping up in all three of the leagues I played in. Not only were that but the seasons beginning to overlap. It was becoming possible, for example, to play soccer year-round.
This was manageable at first because each sport had its own individual season and this prevented overlap, but this segregation of youth sports to each season has all but disappeared.
My parents and I sat down and had a frank talk about what role sports should play in my life going forward and how much time I should be spending on sports. We reached a decision to drop basketball, decline moving on to select soccer, but continue playing soccer recreationally on a different team.
As much as I liked playing baseball I could see that I was reaching my limit of how competitive I could be, so I dropped that too.
I enjoyed playing soccer for several more years and I made a whole new group of friends in the process. My parents proactively prevented me from becoming overscheduled. They were motivated to preserve their own sanity and mine and maintain a realistic perspective about what the point of playing sports was for me.
But, several of my friends did not have parents who made this choice.
I saw, for example, kids who played select soccer and football. I knew plenty of kids who joined one of our middle school sports teams while also maintaining membership on 1 or 2 teams outside of school.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was seeing first-hand was a trend that was sweeping America; the trend of overscheduling kids. Over the last 20 years, this trend has entered the mainstream.
Today, kids are so overscheduled that only playing on 2 sports teams seems like a light load of extracurricular activities to many parents.
But not us.
2. Finding Moderation
So this was my own baggage, my own perspective that I brought with me as I approached the topic of Mr. B and Mr. C playing team sports.
When was the right time for them and for us?
Which sport (or sports?) would make the most sense for them to try out?
How could we ensure that we didn’t begin to slide down the same slippery slope of overscheduling that so many families succumb to?
Sarah and I tend to think about things a lot before we execute. This is a good habit, at least most of the time.
But sometimes, too much reflection and research can lead to inaction on our part. In fact, sometimes we tell ourselves we are researching to make the best decision, when we are really delaying the decision for as long as we can!
After having a talk about it, we decided that it was time to sign the boys up for T-ball. They had been showing interest for months and we felt like we had come to a place where we could balance practices once a week and games on Saturdays with the needs of our newborn Mr. A and with the priorities of spending free, unscheduled time together as a family.
We also decided to incorporate a discussion about T-ball into our weekly family meeting on Sunday evenings. This will give all of us a chance to sit down and talk, and reevaluate how it’s going and any adjustments we need to make.
This is very much a work-in-progress for our family and we are certain to make adjustments as we go forward.
But after one very enthusiastic practice, the boys and we are loving it.
How do you prevent your kids from becoming overscheduled? What is your take on the culture of youth sports in your community?