The Velcro Wall

Watching kids play sports is funny.

I’m sure as my 10-year-old gets older, it will get less funny. Or maybe not. Maybe he’ll have the same lack of coordination he’s genetically pre-disposed to.

I mean, you sign your 5 or 6 year old up for T-Ball and you take him out for practice and games with these hopes that maybe you’ve got yourself the next young baseball star. And you sit on the metal stands and watch…

And after about 10 minutes you realize you’re really just watching monkeys at the zoo. The kids on the infield are all squatted down playing with the rocks and the dirt, occasionally throwing it at each other. The kids in the outfield are playing airplane or just spinning themselves around until they get dizzy and fall down.

It’s hysterical. You sorta wonder if Barry Larkin or Brian Roberts ever did that. I can totally see Brian Roberts playing in the infield dirt.

And then you encounter the obnoxious parents and over-competitive coaches and all the fun of monkeys at the zoo sort of falls away. Well, it runs away really.

So I’ve recently signed my son up for basketball and he likes playing it but this is the first organized team circumstance he’s played in. And he’s not the only one on the team that is new to the coached, organized version of the sport.

I got to watch some of the game tonight and the team did pretty well. But the one thing I noticed was the difficulty some of them seemed to have with rebounds and with deflecting and intercepting easy passes, or snatching the ball away from either smaller kids or those with poor ball handling.

I find this funny, again, because I spent the formative years of my son’s life teaching him to play nicely with other kids, and not be selfish with the toys or equipment, and to not be a jerk and take toys away from other kids, even if they did it to you. Especially kids who were smaller than you.

Now I have to teach him to do all those things I taught him not to do. Grab the ball away from someone else getting it; bump them out of the way to get the ball; be aggressive and use those bony elbows for something useful. Within reason of course.

Tonight’s game made me think about this because they team they were playing had some players that were obviously more well versed in “having the right to the ball”. The kids on my son’s team would sort of go for the ball but when there was another player who actually went after it, they would back off. Pretty much like their parents probably taught them to do, in order to “play nice.”

So now we have to teach him differently – to go against what is his instinct in order to be successful.

I mean it’s kind of nice to see that his instinct is what I’ve tried to teach him to do. But I gotta wonder how hard it’s going to be for him to “un-learn” that behavior and then also to ONLY unlearn it for basketball.

The best I can do, I guess is to hope that I’ve done my job in bringing up my son right, so that now he can learn how to be aggressive and go for the ball, without being a jerk and without breaking the rules. And then leave all that on the court and not have it bleed over into other types of play. Hopefully I’ve laid a proper foundation for him to be able to maintain that balance.

In the meantime, let’s see if we can make some use of those bony elbows and stork-like legs and turn him into a passable basketball player.