Andy Sauer
The parents of Suffield High School’s student athletes recently attended a meeting that featured a viewing of “Parents Behaving Badly.” The video displayed characterizations of overzealous parents hyper-involved in their children’s participation in sports.
It wasn’t pretty.
There was The Big Mouth, the parent who yells at referees and coaches. There was The Bully, the parent who tries to boss the coach. There was the Wannabe Coach, the parent who shouts instructions from the stands.
Each vignette drew awkward laughs, not only for the absurd parental conduct on screen, but because the scenes hit so close to the mark. If we in attendance were to be honest, we may have recognized some of the misdeeds in our own past behavior. I am sorry to admit I did.
Sport, it has been said, is a metaphor for life, and it is an attractive one. There’s competition, which feeds our primordial cravings for triumph. There are rules and arbiters of those rules. There’s work, and the gratifying results it often yields. There are teams and the camaraderie generated by them. There’s leadership. There’s mentorship. And, there’s a romance and reverence that elevates sport to a level of mythical proportions.
However, sport is a human creation and therefore isn’t perfect or always fair. Throw your child into that not-always-tidy metaphor for life, and under the right circumstances, you can lose your cool.
As adults, we know life can be unfair or that sometimes “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11) We do our best to simultaneously shield our children from this harsh reality and prepare them for it. And, of course, a competitive pastime seems to be a great place to start.
Still, even in a game, not everything always works out the way we want it, and this is when the sport-as-metaphor belief is put to the test. As painful as they might be, the lessons taught on and off the field are meant for our young athletes. There are lessons to be learned that we may not expect or even recognize, and even if we did, we may not be the best ones to teach them. Those moments, good or bad, belong to them. This is why they play and why we encourage them to play.
At the end of play, it is still a game and not life. There is another day, and there will be more moments from which to grow.