The countdown is almost over. Thursday my kids have tackle practice and Saturday they play their last game of the year. I’m excited. We started the season as a team that hadn’t lost a game since being created, tearing through the spring season in games that were hardly close. We started the fall season by losing to a team we thought we’d walk all over. It led to a series of reflections and conversations about how things might go this season. By the end of game two those conversations had manifested into a great deal of negativity, especially from me. I watched the team reduced to 2-3 ball carriers, with the offense really being centered around the coaches’ son. In truth, the offense was about all the coaches’ sons. If you touched the ball you were the son of a coach. We did have a receiver who got the occasional pass thrown his way (save for the one game where he was a huge focus–catching four of five passes thrown his way), but for the most part it was the old boys network.
I can live with that. I can fool myself into thinking the other players needed to earn their touches through work on the field. I recognized right away that this was completely false, but I could lie to myself and my boys that it was about that. What made it especially hard was watching the way coaches respond to injuries. I watched kids get knocked out of games, leave the field in tears or limping, or even carried off and then expected to come back the next play. I remember in a recent game watching our superstar coaches’ kid QB get his ankle banged up so bad that the EMT told him not to go back into the game. His mother responded by reminding the EMT that it wasn’t the EMT’s call to say that.
Well, it should be.
I learned this season that tackle football–youth sports in general–are just games kids play to have fun. When we allow it to mean so much more we take away their agency. We become the people we once made fun of as they stalked the sidelines screaming about the importance of a boy catching a ball or dropping one. We turn into coaches that make everything about the control and the win and remove the joy for the majority of the kids on the team.
My kids still want to win a championship, but above all else they just want a chance to touch the ball. Next season I’m going to find a way to make that happen–even if it means going somewhere else.