Parents have a multitude of questions to ask themselves these days: Should it be private or public schools, milk or juice boxes and baby-sitter or day care?
Apparently, you can add orange slices or the base paths to the crucial choices.
Baseball is worried about losing young kids to the game of soccer. In a recent question and answer session at the National Press Club, the president of the baseball Hall of Fame said his sport is losing children to soccer because parents don?t want to see their kids fail.
Dale Petroskey was tackling a variety of questions on baseball when this one came about: “You have a lot of young kids playing soccer which supposedly is easier. How do you convince those kids to play baseball?”
Petroskey?s answer was basically that a child cannot hide the fact that he?s bad in baseball. If he can?t hit, he can?t hit. If he can?t catch, he?s going to get a ball square on the lip every time out. Parents watch on embarrassed, unable to deal with the failure.
Soccer, he argued, is all about aimless roaming around. Parents don?t have to deal with the embarrassment of having their kids look bad, because they can get lost in the pack running across the big fields.
The vast majority of parents don?t think that way and there are some serious holes in that argument. Sooner or later, a child will be exposed as not being very good at soccer. It could be at the age of 5 or by 9 or 10 years old, when we start separating the good from the bad on travel teams.
Parents, more often than not, let their children play what they want to play.
If your child wants to play soccer, they?ll jump up and down enough until they play soccer. If they want to play baseball, you?ll see them sleeping with their gloves under their pillows.
Take it from someone who was terrible at youth soccer, you can?t hide the fact that you?re bad.
I used to get asthma attacks that would make Darth Vader proud. I would play two minutes, beg for mercy and then sit on the sideline, sucking on those omni-present orange slices. Soccer truly is an exhaustive, masochistic sport, one that many are not cut out to play.
I was always a baseball kid. I wouldn?t be who I was today ?a 28-year-old man living off his fifth-grade glories ? without youth baseball. It?s one of those sports where you can hit 30 percent of your mark and still be considered a success.
All of the highs and all of the crushing, crushing lows are seared into my memory. I remember stealing home to win a game in sixth grade. I remember in seventh grade, bawling my eyes out because every known kid on the team was chosen to pitch, except myself, in a game.
I?m a better man for it. A psychologically damaged man, but a better man nonetheless. Of course, we?re kidding here.
A youth sport, if handled properly, can be a tool to help build character. Winning and losing is fleeting, it?s how you and your child deal with those outcomes that will define your child for the rest of their lives.
Matt Palmer is a staff writer for The Baltimore Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
