Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Pressure We Put On Our Kids

We may as well consider this to be a placeholder post, as I have plenty of thoughts bouncing around in my thick skull right now but no time to let them all loose in a sensible fashion until after an assignment is done, but I wanted to point out this article from the UK about what is happening with kids who just want to play football (soccer) for fun, and then I wanted to point to the Canadian Soccer Association's page about their new program called Wellness to World Cup, which attempts to deal with some of these very issues.

More soon. I'd been thinking about these very things (among others) before I read this, but it brings it all to the forefront for me.

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Comments:
This reminds me of when Sara was in competitive swimming. She loved it, had a lot of friends, loved going to swim meets across the province, and was an absolute machine in the water. The club held a marathon, and she raised a hell of a lot of money by swimming some ungodly number of laps, never slowing, never showing any strain, just steadily going, going, going.

But although she was an excellent swimmer, she never won first-place ribbons. Didn't matter to her - she was in it for the fun. She wasn't Olympic material, and didn't lose a wink of sleep over the fact.

But her coaches... There is a special place in hell for someone who pushes kids so hard in a sport that they suck all the fun out of it. I'll never forget the look on Sara's face - trying to be casual, trying so hard to pretend she didn't care - when she said she wanted to quit because it just wasn't fun anymore.

I applaud the people who started Give Us Back Our Game.
 
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