I spent today being angry a lot. I wasn’t angry at my players. I was angry at myself and at a handful of coaches and parents. The tipping point was when a coach from my boys’ former team explained that they put my 68 lb son on the o-line and d-line so he would know what he’d be doing when he got older. My son is a sprinter–a rail thin speedster who wants to run. He isn’t a lineman.
I don’t know why that hurt me so much but it did.
The fact remains it is so easy to get caught up in the anger and the ego and the mess of our own failures that we neglect to see that we are playing out these home movies on the screens of our children and they are learning from us. They are learning our pride, our wishes, our egos. And in teaching them our needs we all too often make these things a part of their DNA. We all too often, as a result of this, push them and put them in situations that are more about us than about them. We all too often find value in their victories as a reflection of our victories. They are not so.