Those are the objectives, but our current actions will never accomplish them.
“The objective is to increase athleticism, develop skillsets, & have fun.
And we have kids mindlessly, robotically playing in meaningless constellation games when they want to be at the pool with their friends.
It doesn’t build mental toughness.
It compounds resentment.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
When we get away from the main thing being the main thing, we must very quickly, rapidly, and intently steer the ship back on to the proper course.
If we don’t, those seemingly small navigational errors that we let slide, compound into nearly irrecoverable errors manifesting into a problem that looks to be too tough to tackle.
While that’s about the extent of my knowledge as it relates to maritime matters, I know the sentiment parallels to do something I do know a lot about: the current youth sports landscape.
The reason we are where we are today is because we let seemingly small matters slide and once the manipulative, dollar driven folks saw and understood the consumers habits and lack of willingness to verify validity, they exploited the consumer, using FOMO and children as hostages to acquire capital.
You can say that sounds harsh and to be honest, I’d agree with you. But if you can put it to me any other way and back your claim, I am 100% down for a discussion on the matter.
Have fun. Increase athleticism. Develop skillsets.
Those were the main objectives of youth sports, in that order, too.
Not only do we have the paradigm completely ass backwards in America, we’re doing a damn fine job of baking the two most important constructs out of this whole gig which again are having fun and increasing athleticism.
We are rapidly turning into a skill-centric species and while niching down is a great practice for elite athletes and businesses, this emphasis on skill, at the expense of having fun and developing general athleticism is doing our kids quite literally the biggest disservice we could possibly do them.
What we are doing as parents is not only tolerating, but encouraging the placement of the cart (well beyond) the horse.
We are literally stealing from their development and robbing them of fun without even knowing or understanding it.
It’s because of a lack of education on what real development looks like.
In order to maximize our children’s experiences, we cannot just blindly follow the crowd, we must take their development into our own hands and do things the right way.
And often the right way is the exact opposite of what pop culture and the current narrative is feeding them.
