I came up with a thought in the shower. I was thinking that I wanted to teach my kids how to play QB. I thought about it in terms of how the world reacts to people–simply out of habit. See, my youngest started playing tackle about a year ago. In his first two seasons he was completely overlooked as a QB. When I asked coaches why (I was literally on staff for one of the teams) I was informed that the kid did not know how to play QB. It reminded of the old experience conundrum: you cannot get hired because you don’t have experience, but you cannot get experience until you get hired.
And then I let it go.
That is where I failed as a father and a coach. My son was 7 at the time. What was the expected level of experience? No, what really unfolded there was that the coaches did not want to teach the kid how to be a QB and wanted to use him elsewhere. They closed the door on him because it was inconvenient to leave it open. I think that was the moment I started to build a slow seething dislike for coaching. I started to recognize what was really at stake for them and why they didn’t give the kid a real opportunity–why I often don’t do the same. There simply isn’t enough time to train a single kid. You look for the people who already know enough. You try to put something together that works vs. teaching all you can, because that is often all you can do.
That, or you’re a daddy coach who plays favorites.
Both of those things are true of a lot of coaches and in the end the politics of a thing tend to shape a thing. So now my kids have zero thoughts that they can ever play that particular position. I wondered how that ‘loss of wonder’ translated into other areas of their life. I feel like there are a lot of doors that have been shut already beyond sports. They don’t read certain types of things, consider certain career paths viable, etc. Their lives, like my own, like a story, have been a series of narrowing options. Maybe it is on me to add a few.