Sure, alright, but is your kid an ath-a-lete?

a conundrum without an answer

We’ve had our three-year-old in soccer for a few months now. It’s the first time he’s been in a “competitive” sport. Not that there’s anything competitive about it. Just a few kids kicking around a ball with their parents and a twenty-something we all call Coach Maggie.

Really, you pay for the experience. Like Disneyland or an internship at the White House. Our kid isn’t actually learning to play soccer but we love it, especially the informality. And I thought it was all hunky-dory until I saw a single spark of talent in my son and in that single spark, I began to spin an unwitting fantasy. I began to ask the question, as many fathers do — is my kid a gifted ath-a-lete? (spoiler: he’s not. he almost never is.)

I made the obvious decision before he was born that my kid won’t play football. I love football. We watch it every Sunday. But my kid isn’t going to play. Have you seen the statistics? Christ, there are more concussions than players on the field. My dad isn’t happy about this. He wants an NFL tight end.

Not that he would admit it, of course. And it’s not even that he actually wants an NFL tight end. He wants his grandson to be happy. But there’s this inborn idea we have. Fathers, I mean, we’re born with this idea in the back of our heads that our kid will turn out to be some kind of generational talent. And actually all parents have this idea in the back of their heads, but with fathers it’s so often isolated to sports.

Everybody knows the stereotype of the nutjob sports dad. And everybody hates that guy. It’s Randy Marsh fist-fighting his way through the Little League World Series, except in real life, it’s less funny and more sad. I saw that guy all the time growing up and I hate him too. I’m pretty determined not to be him.

And yet, we kind of need our kid to play sports. Because our kid is nuts. Any room you put him in, he’s the wildest kid in that room. We need something to wear him out. I mentioned this to my grandmother (who raised five boys) and she nodded stoically and muttered “sometimes, you’ve just got to run him. Like a horse.”

Sports are the best way to run him, certainly the most socially acceptable way. And I want him to play sports. Soccer, wrestling, tennis, pickleball, water polo, I don’t care. (just not football, motocross, or competitive base-jumping). And, here’s the rub: I want him to be good at sports. Firstly, because if you’re going to do anything, you might as well do it well. But secondly, because it’s hard to be young. As a social endeavor, high school sucks. However, if you’re the star athlete at your high school, the whole experiment is remarkably easier. You might almost call it enjoyable.

The star athlete doesn’t have to worry about bullies or crippling anonymity. Sure, some people pigeonhole him as a dumb jock, but that’s not a particularly difficult narrative to shed. And baby, this is America, we worship the high school jock. It’s Remember the Titans and Friday Night Lights and Breakfast Club. It’s such a fundamental aspect of our society that they literally threw Vivek Ramaswamy out of the White House when he suggested we might be glorifying the jock too much.

So I face this conundrum, don’t I? I want my kid to be good at sports. But I want him to be good for his sake, not for my own. I know he’s probably not an innately gifted athlete. So I’ll have to push him every once in a while. Because the world may be crumbling around us, but iPhones aren’t getting any less addicting. And we’re a decade away from that interaction but it’s still something I’m wrestling with. What do I say? How do I say it? And when? Where’s the line between encouraging my kid and nutjob sports dad? And how fine is that line?

They really don’t tell you any of this stuff in the parenting books, you know.