To the Editor:
A parent of a grammar school basketball team member confided to me in an email that their children’s team was promised, by the coach, to all get floor time during the game the previous day. None of them got any floor time. Half of the team is very disheartened and disappointed. Are they pouting or do they deserve to be “hurt?”
What did these children learn as a result of their interaction? They learned that adults lie and that winning is what is important. More specifically they learned that the coach needed to win. The priority in this gathering of youth is for the coach to have a win.
What should be a gathering of young minds and bodies to learn about teamwork and competition turns into an expose on how dysfunctional adults can be, and how the real world they are learning about really is. Even the members of the team that did play learn that, because they are special, they get to be better than their other teammates. Their physical prowess is elevated to a higher level than it deserves.
If we are to value whole people and not just their physical abilities, how do we do so when there are not opportunities for other types of skills to excel in another endeavor? To be a “star” one must excel in a sport. No other grammar or high school endeavor regularly produces local stars, just sports.
We hold these sports as character builders, but do they really fill that role, or, in the example above, do they only serve to over inflate the egos of the “performers” and deflate the spirit and will of those that warm the bench.
Teenage rebellion is nothing more than teenagers realizing that many of the adults around them are not wise or knowledgeable or even mature. “Do as I say and not as I do” is not an acceptable way to raise children, for those children are smart enough to know when an adult is “full of it” and the result is a loss of respect for that adult. As they progress through their teen years and they encounter more adults telling them how they ought to act, by people who obviously do not know how to do so themselves, they become more and more disillusioned.
Is this how we want to raise the children in our communities? Our school sports programs can be a strong tool for the learning and maturation of our youth, but only if executed cleanly by mature adults whose motivation is the well being of the children and not the ego of the coach.
Jason Simonds, Jefferson
