Backyard Sports Timeout – Where our coaches field parents’ questions about Team Sports and offer ways to make it the Fun, Enriching Experience it’s supposed to be
Q: My son plays soccer and he was recently cut from the team. He is crushed and so am I. Should I speak to the coach – how should I deal with my child?
A: No one wants to be cut from a team. Whether you’re in elementary school or a full grown adult, nobody ever wants to hear that they aren’t good enough for that sport or company team. However, it’s a consequence that kids have to face quite often as the pressure to try out for travel, school and town teams intensifies. They also need to learn at an early age that if you try out for a sports team with a limited number of openings, not every child will make the team. How you prepare your child for that disappointment is a crucial life lesson they will always remember.
When kids are cut from a sports team, especially if they have been training for a few weeks with the team and think they’re doing well, the child is upset but very often the parents are so upset that they take this personally as their own failure, especially when the children are young. In the midst of their own disappointment, they don’t know how to console their child and they often question if they should fight the coach over the decision, trying to change the outcome for their child.
When this happens to kids in their developmental years, between the ages of 7 and 13 years old, I believe that the community is cutting kids at too young an age. When a kid gets cut, it’s out there for everyone to see, so a parent feels very badly about it. They think the kid is shortchanged in the public eye. The big question is: Do we really want to be stratifying kids during their developmental years? We’d never allow this in a classroom. Can you imagine in a third or fourth grade class, if all of a sudden the kids were segmented based on their reading ability? Or they were pulled out of classes based on their mathematical ability and bumped up or bumped down? Parents would never stand for it. But it’s happening in sports, which is kind of unfortunate.
The Big Takeaway: Given the fact that it’s happening within a community, parents have a choice. They can either put their kids on a team, they can wait another year, or they can find a less competitive team. There are many reasons to wait, especially if the parent doesn’t think the child has the maturation yet to be part of a highly-competitive system. But it’s an extremely difficult thing for parents to do, because there’s that fear that if they don’t include them now, somehow they’re going to fall behind. One thing you have to ask yourself is, “If my child is going to try out, can they accept the consequence – positive or negative?”
The second thing is, at what point are the parents going to manipulate the coaches? How far are they willing to go to give the child what they want? We need to help the kids understand that they might not make the team. They need to understand consequences, and if the parent, at a very, very early age, doesn’t start listing the consequences, then that results in very upset and entitled kids who think the world revolves around them.
Unfortunately, we assign a certain success to kids being on a travel team. There’s a certain badge of honor that we associate with that. What’s happening in a lot of cases is that the kid isn’t making the community travel teams so we try to fix it. We’ll try to put a band-aid on it, like starting our own team, and this leads to a lot of complicated things because now all of a sudden you’re not going to all the community sports anymore. The parents now become a general manager. The well-meaning parent is manufacturing an opportunity for their child, but is this really beneficial for him or her?
Backyard Sports provides weekend and after school sports instruction and game play for boys and girls ages 4-16 years old. Our programs are designed for EVERY child who desires a positive and healthy sports experience. #CompetitiveSportsDoneRight