"when i was your age..."
it's raining and today's "recreational" soccer has been cancelled for kids in lowell.
"when i was your age..."
bob bigelow wrote a great book entitled "just let the kids play" in which he excoriates our present culture's obsessive excesses related to youth sports. a first-round NBA draft pick, he knows a little bit about high athletic achievement, and how it is actually and non-intuitively poorly-served by the mistakes we're making with our kids.
i think of bob's book whenever circumstance related to childrens' play is "officially" decided by any "league" or collection of adults.
"when i was your age..."
when i was young, yeah, we had little league, and, yeah, "tryouts" and "cuts" and all that nonsense were equally ridiculous as they are today, but we really didn't have organized "recreational" sports for kids as a rule--we had a million back doors and a million mothers telling us all to "go outside and play". sometimes we played something resembling a sport, (our wiffleball and street hockey marathons were epic), but mostly we just organized any sort of activity, chose sides, and PLAYED.
think about it--when you're a kid, and when the score starts to get lopsided, what do you do? do you trash talk the other team and run up the score? no! you take the best kid from the side with the upper hand, and you trade him for the worst kid on the side taking the beating, and you make things as even as you can so that the game is more fun and then you start again at zero so it can be a contest.
think about it. the first and only thing most adults try to do when organizing kids sports is try to load their team so their kids can win. but the last thing on the mind of a natural kid is rigging the game beforehand--they just want to have fun. so you have the two best kids pick alternately to make things as even as possible. (yeah, somebody gets picked last--it's the way fair works). it's a GAME, fer crissakes. and if it's raining? if you do go inside, it's to go into the basement with the street hockey sticks and put a few dents in mom's washing machine. but mostly you just get wet.
no lines.
no refs.
no leagues determining when you will or won't play.
no silly recording of scores of any kind.
"let's play to 10". "ok, but next game i get to pick first". "ok".
if you're supposedly "grown up", but you don't get all this, then, i'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but, you're an asshole.
"when i was your age..."
bob bigelow wrote a great book entitled "just let the kids play" in which he excoriates our present culture's obsessive excesses related to youth sports. a first-round NBA draft pick, he knows a little bit about high athletic achievement, and how it is actually and non-intuitively poorly-served by the mistakes we're making with our kids.
i think of bob's book whenever circumstance related to childrens' play is "officially" decided by any "league" or collection of adults.
"when i was your age..."
when i was young, yeah, we had little league, and, yeah, "tryouts" and "cuts" and all that nonsense were equally ridiculous as they are today, but we really didn't have organized "recreational" sports for kids as a rule--we had a million back doors and a million mothers telling us all to "go outside and play". sometimes we played something resembling a sport, (our wiffleball and street hockey marathons were epic), but mostly we just organized any sort of activity, chose sides, and PLAYED.
think about it--when you're a kid, and when the score starts to get lopsided, what do you do? do you trash talk the other team and run up the score? no! you take the best kid from the side with the upper hand, and you trade him for the worst kid on the side taking the beating, and you make things as even as you can so that the game is more fun and then you start again at zero so it can be a contest.
think about it. the first and only thing most adults try to do when organizing kids sports is try to load their team so their kids can win. but the last thing on the mind of a natural kid is rigging the game beforehand--they just want to have fun. so you have the two best kids pick alternately to make things as even as possible. (yeah, somebody gets picked last--it's the way fair works). it's a GAME, fer crissakes. and if it's raining? if you do go inside, it's to go into the basement with the street hockey sticks and put a few dents in mom's washing machine. but mostly you just get wet.
no lines.
no refs.
no leagues determining when you will or won't play.
no silly recording of scores of any kind.
"let's play to 10". "ok, but next game i get to pick first". "ok".
if you're supposedly "grown up", but you don't get all this, then, i'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but, you're an asshole.
posted by kad barma at 9:11 AM
1 Comments:
Well said. As I know from a previous thread, you and I are of one mind on the subject of rain (as in, we believe that humans don't melt), so the idea of kids getting some mud and grass stains sliding around on a (slightly) wet 60-something degree June morning isn't such a scary one.
Also agree that something was really lost when either because of video games, or Dateline NBC Specials, or whatever other reasons, kids became shuttered inside. There is something really pure about things like area-specific ground rules (i.e. which set of trees form the end zones in a certain backyard), and kids just playing without adults mucking it all up.
It's hard to say exactly what's lost when kids stop doing this...I guess for one, you've got the childhood obesity epidemic, for which there's no shortage of finger-pointing done by those trying to explain it. But in terms of kids' social development, it seems like something is being lost as well.
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