Quote:
Originally Posted by Shark Doctor
As a parent of very young kids, I would love to hear follow ups from fellow parents who have kids who are really excelling in sports. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? What kind of obstacles did you face? etc.
Would be nice to hear
I have two kids. I've posted about our son, but he is at a top ranked JUCO playing baseball. Daughter is a high school volleyball player. She could probably play lower end D2 ball but I think she will go the academic route.
What did we do right? We held them accountable. We also didn't blindly follow what Mr or Mrs Coach said. If the coach was a jackass or in the wrong we said so. I felt like we were always honest with our kids. My family are mostly coaches. We removed our son from a bad situation in football when he was young based on the advice from my father in law. Did the same thing with our daughter in softball. If a coach is being verbally abusive to little kids, get the kids away from them. I coached my son in baseball and I coached him hard. Probably too hard at times but it prepared him to be coached hard in high school football. We put too much emphasis on sports. That could go in the bad category, but we love sports and so do our kids. Our son wanted to transfer schools going into 7th grade. We did it. We moved him into a football factory and it was the best thing we could have done. Daughter ended up doing the same thing for volleyball at the same school. It was hard and I had to drive them 30-40 minutes each way until they could drive. We spent whatever it took. For baseball we traveled the country, for volleyball it was the region. We made some great trips out of the sporting events. Throughout everything, we were there. I ran the neighborhood flag football game, the wiffle ball game, the basketball game. All of that was in our yard and I pitched, played QB or whatever. I never said no.
What did we do wrong? It's a lot harder with the first one. Once you've been through it once it's easier with the next child. I got caught up in my kids performance reflecting on me. We had a lot of dad's who played sports with big egos and it became a pissing contest at times when they were young. I was as guilty as anyone. We all matured after a few years. Youth sports are important but what is really important are high school and beyond. The problem is that you have to set your kid up early. If they aren't on a good travel team it is hard to play in high school around here. I was too hard on my son. I'm lucky I didn't ruin him. Never abusive, just practiced him too hard, demanded too much.
What would I do differently? I would have put them in dedicated strength training from about 7th grade on. Bigger/Stronger/Faster is the name of the game in Sports. Who cares if your kid is sore for a 7th grade game. They need to get strong and you will see that translate to greatly increased performance. My kids lifted on and off but never year round like they should have. Son lifts almost every day now in JUCO.
What obstacles did we face? With our daughter it was mostly smooth sailing with volleyball. She's had mostly good coaches and the ones that weren't as good were great with kids. We had one very bad softball incident with a coach which ended her softball career at 8 years old. With son it was more up and down. In football he had an arm but was gangly and awkward. We held him out of youth football for the most part and did a lot of throwing in the yard. In 8th grade he was replaced at QB right before the season started. That was tough. He didn't understand why and we didn't either. The other kid struggled and my son got the job back a few weeks later but it was a tough situation. High school football was incredible. It couldn't have been much better. High school baseball, my son had a combined ERA over 3 years of around 1.50. We got a new coach and he preferred kids who played baseball only. He proceeded to make a kid who had pitched about 5 innings in his career with a double digit ERA the #1. Lost his team before he'd ever coached a game. Covid hit and the season was cancelled 5 games in. We were probably going to face a lot of obstacles that season.
Advice to parents going through this: Don't waste your money on agility or speed training for kids. Strength training is all you should spend money or time on. Eric Cressey is a name you need to know for sports performance. Many times smaller kids dominate in the early years and the tall kids can struggle. That will usually flip by high school age. If you have tall kids, be patient. If your kid is little and dominating I have some bad news. It's probably not going to last but hopefully your kid is the exception. Don't let a jackass coach ruin your kid from a sport. Remove your kid from the situation. My kids played for probably 40 or so coaches, you are bound to find 1-2 bad ones. Academy teams will preach to you to avoid "daddy ball" There are a lot of terrible academy teams just like there are terrible daddy ball teams. The best teams we played against though were coached by dads. A lot of these young former college baseball players are terrible at coaching, terrible with kids and most importantly terrible with communication. As your kids progress it is extremely important to get them on the best teams they can play on once they are about 15. It's time to be selfish at that point. College sports are a full time job. Everyone says they want their kid to play in college. I was the same way. After seeing the hours my son puts in, I want my daughter to do whatever makes her happy but I kind of hope she goes the student only route.