Ball is life

P
arents of athletes are their children’s biggest fans, and they should be. Your child should know you are in their corner and will have their back no matter what, but sometimes having your child’s back means letting them learn life lessons on their own while being there to support them through difficult times.
This weekend, I saw a post shared on a page of a South Dakota basketball coach, and it resonated with me. It was written by a parent of a junior varsity player who rode the bench for the entirety of the contest. His team won by one point in OT, but he didn’t get in the game for a single play.
Rather than being angry about watching her son sit for 36 minutes and complaining about the coach or other players, this mother expounded the purpose of high school sports, which I found to be incredibly refreshing.
To begin, she blatantly laid out the purpose of JV and varsity level play — it is to win. She recognized that the ultimate goal of a high school team is to bring home a state championship at the end of the season, so if your constant goal in practice and in games isn’t to win, what’s the point?
Though JV teams aren’t in the running for a state championship, they are in training to take one of the spots on the varsity team to try to achieve that goal. Therefore, they need to be working on developing the winning mentality which is vitally important to being part of a winning team. 
She went on to vindicate the coach’s choice to play his best players in what was evidently a very close game from start to finish, and stressed that players earn their playing time by working hard to improve their skills in practice and outside of it as well.
“If you want to play, put in the work … Be the hardest working player on your team, in your district, in your region, and in the state … When you’re the best, they can’t ignore you. You can easily overlook decent players and there’s a lot of good players, but the best can’t be ignored. Work until you’re the best.”
This says it all. 
As a parent, complaining about a coach or other players who get more playing time does nothing but encourage your child to take on a victim mentality and does nothing to help him or her achieve their goal. It allows the child to shift the “blame” for not getting the playing time they’d like onto someone else, and that does them nothing but harm.
Rather than complaining, she talked about being one of the loudest in the cheering section and her son doing the same from the bench. Both of those actions demonstrate character, which is what participating in sports is all about. 
She invested in her son in the off season and encouraged him to train outside of practice. She did what she could to develop him as a player, which meant investing time and money into club ball to give him opportunities to get valuable court time outside of the season. 
Most important, she recognized that participating in sports provides the opportunity to acquire truly important life lessons. As she states, life is not always fair.
“Sometimes you have to work extra hard to be noticed and to earn your job, but that’s life. Be the first one to practice and the last one to leave. When you work, work hard, work from the heart, give everything you have, never want to come in second, never be okay with mediocrity, and know that no one is going to give you anything unless you work for it.”
Again, she really got down to the heart of the matter. 
Enabling your child without teaching them that they have to earn what they get simply encourages them to be weak. In the long run, it’s not about playing time it’s about learning to navigate life.