- submitted by G. Clark on 10/27/2008
If I Wanted My Kid Torn Apart, I'd Send Him To Iraq Not Rec-Soccer
By Geri Clark
This weekend I put my son to bed with an ice pack for his shoulder and Neosporin on his face. He was all torn up from a soccer game, with abrasions and bruises and what amounts to bad grass rash all over his body. That day, an opponent tackled him -- on purpose -- and when he did, the opponents' teammates piled on and bounced my son into the ground.
They gleefully yelled, "We got him!" as they jumped on. When they were pulled off, my son lay motionless on the ground. He did eventually get up and was okay, but hurting, both in body and in spirit.
Oh yes. These kids are first graders.
If that doesn't piss you off, there is something wrong with you. These kids are six and seven years old. And they are competitive, aggressive, and can be brutally mean. I think it's because no one is stopping them.
When my kid was ground into the grass, the opposing team's coach said not a word to the kids, even after the kid who started it went on to tackle several of our other players.
The only apology that was offered came after another mom heard my son get upset about how they said "We got him!" as they piled on and he went on to cry to me that they wanted to hurt him. And that apology? The offending child came over and said, "I didn't mean to hit you, I meant to hit that other kid on your team." His coach replied, "That's okay, buddy. You didn't mean it." His mother walked away and stood at the other end of the field.
If that was the team my own husband coaches, the kid would've been warned and then benched for the rest of the game. If it was my child who hurt another so badly and intentionally I would have stepped in if the coach didn't.
But I am starting to think that we are outliers among adults involved in youth sports -- the ones who want the kids to have fun, to play, to learn a little something about a sport and about being a better person.
The norm seems to lean more toward giving the kids an appetite for winning and aggression -- the fast, athletic kids are praised and favored. Individual glory is sought (in team sports). The parents stand on the sidelines oohing and aahing over how fast Jake is and how Bobby steals the ball all the time. The only show of sportsmanship is the choreographed, fake, team-on-team handshake at the end of the game where most of the kids don't bother to make eye contact.
I wish I could feel confident that we just had a bad day, a one-off in an otherwise happy world of youth sports. But I can't quite convince myself of that.
Last spring I saw t-ball coaches revving up their kindergarteners, telling them, "These other guys are losers. You can take ‘em!" and "Kill ‘em, buddy!" I've seen kids shunned from pickup schoolyard games because, "You're so slow," or "He never gets a goal."
I rarely see kids encourage one another or praise one another for a job well done. Of course I partly give the kids a pass -- they're kids. They're not done learning how to be good teammates or good sportsmen or just good people. (I don't fully excuse them because they are starting to be old enough to know better.) But I do not at all excuse the adults who are there, watching and teaching.
Everyone talks about how great sports are for kids; how much they learn from being on a team. So far, though, what I see them learning isn't stuff I want for my kid. I don't want to raise a competitive, aggressive meathead of a man who picks on people who are smaller or not as physically gifted as he is.
I find it ironic that many women I know bemoan the fact that more men aren't sensitive and gentle and easy to get along with. But then they go and instill in their sons the very values that ensure that they will never be those men.
I can intellectualize all of this. I can rant about it. But I am not a six-year-old boy who went to bed with a hurt shoulder and, as he says, "a hurt heart." I fear that all he learned this weekend was that hurting people is okay if it helps us win.
Geri Clark is a science and medical writer and former producer at ABC News/Discovery Channel. She is also the author of two upcoming nonfiction books for children.
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