We've always wanted Aubree to be well-rounded, so we have encouraged her to play other sports. Aubree is playing soccer and running track and that leaves precious little time to hit, but her mom and I had been on her that she needed to be in the garage working on the tee every spare moment she had. She wasn't doing that and we knew it.
At the time I am writing this, AO1 has played three tournaments and will play our fourth this weekend. Our team has done well with an 8-6 record that included two second place finishes. As we looked over Gamechanger stats to make our line-up for the finals, it was impossible to ignore that Aubree was batting .000 through three tournaments. Everyone goes through slumps, but she wasn't even close. Most of the at-bats were bad and when she did hit the ball, she put it in really bad spots.
To say I was frustrated is an understatement. She was just waving at pitches. She was watching good pitches. When she was slapping and did put the ball into play, her bad mechanics and timidness to really put the bat on the ball had almost every contacted ball going to the right side of the field. After each at-bat, I was on her, reminding her that the lack of preparation was showing. Bad mechanics, not seeing the ball, poor pitch selection, and timidness at the plate. These are things we can't fix at a tournament. We have to do these things Monday through Friday and she wasn't doing these things. Those daily excuses of why she wasn't hitting at home had built up in my mind and the anger and frustration was bubbling over.
I have a very bad trait and I know it's there. I can't let things go, especially in situations like this where I feel it could have been avoided. I get angry and I yell. I have terrible body language and despite everything that may be going right for the team, I just can't let it go. I finally had that moment of clarity that I had to change something when I found myself yelling at her and kicking rocks before she was even out at first base. Literally, the second baseman hasn't even fielded the ball to throw to first and Aubree and I are arguing about it before she was even called out. We get a second place finish and play excellent and all I can do on the ride home is steam about her performance and how that makes both of us look.
My sister came to our last tournament because the tournament was five minutes from her house and we were going to spend a couple of days over spring break with her. As she heard me lament on Aubree's preparation and performance, she said something to me that really made me just stop and shut up. Essentially, she asked how Aubree could be expected to play to my expectations when she was playing two other sports, struggling in school, and trying to just be a kid. It was also the way that she said it, without being accusatory or really even with the intent to make a point that was striking. It was just an observation. It was absolutely true.
As a coach, I want the best performance I can get out of every single player and that goes double for my kid. But what are my goals as a parent? Isn't that more important? Is it fair to expect her to be as good as the other girls when she is playing two other sports and they are not? Wasn't our goal always for her to be well-rounded?
One of the things that I give my parents a lot of credit for is making sure I was a well-rounded person. I did just as many off-the-field things as I did on the field. When it came to sports, I played all of them. Did that come at a price? Certainly. I was never great at any sport, but I was good at them all. Maybe that cost me a chance to do bigger things. Maybe not. We will never know. What we do know is that the focus on playing different sports put me around a lot of different people over the course of my life. I fostered different friendships and thus different outlooks on life that would not have been possible had I just focused on just one sport. I can promise you that the football team, soccer team, baseball team, and wrestling team was comprised of many different socio-economic and diverse backgrounds, which was influential in my upbringing to identify with all walks of life, for which I still believe I do. I wanted that for my kids, even if it meant they weren't as good as they could be at just one thing.
There are a lot of people that will read that, who have a kid that just plays one sport, who are completely devoted to getting that kid to the next level that will disagree with me, here. That's perfectly fine. I know a lot of people who focus on one sport and they practice that sport each and every single day. I hope every one of them gets the reward they seek because they deserve it. Don't misunderstand me and think I am not trying to get my kid into college. I am absolutely trying to do that. Even if you do achieve your goal of getting your child on a college roster, college lasts only a few short years and there is a lot of life after sports. Now, think about that in terms of the relationships they will make with others. By playing one sport, they are around just one group of people and you limit their exposure to other walks of life.
To bring this full circle, after thinking long and hard about what my sister had said, I sat down with Aubree before our last game in the finals of the tournament. I told her that I was being too hard on her to expect the same level of play of the rest of the team who were practicing every day when she was playing two other sports. I had started a vicious cycle that led to a lot of pressure on her, which was affecting her performance and my attitude as a coach. She needed to just go play her best and we would get back to working hard on her hitting when soccer and track were done.
Lastly, while I want her to still hit when she could, I understood that when she did get home from a whole day of school and practicing another sport, that it wasn't fair to rob her of time to just relax and be a kid. If she wants to hit, she should. If she needs to relax, she should. Lord knows she needs more time to study, anyway.
We live in an age of specialization. You don't even have to look at it in terms of specializing in particular sports. Even within softball we have a ton of specialization. There is no doubt that doing so produces terrific players and it is really, really hard to compete with that, as much as it pains me to say that as a coach. As a coach, I want to win every game. I want kids to fulfill their dreams of playing in college, especially my own kid. Yet that is such a small piece of the pie.
We need to take a step back and realize that even the goal of every softball player out there is likely to end at college and playing in college should be an means to an ends to get a great education. Let's face it, life really begins after sports and isn't it important that these kids enter the real world well-rounded individuals? They won't work around former softball players for the rest of their lives. It is important to venture out of the world of like-minded people and experience the bigger world out there, even if it comes at the expense of not being quite as good as you would like in a sport.
This is the struggle in the age of specialization. We, as sports parents, want our kids to be great for the sake of being great. We like to tell ourselves it's about the future and goals, but it's more about the pride of being the parent of a great athlete, of being the best player on the field. That's a problem with our society, I believe. Sports careers will come and go, some of them will last longer than others, but life goes on. Can we afford to shortchange our kids and limit their personal growth for the small amount of time they will play on the field?
