Doting Parents Need To Learn Sports’ Purpose

Most parents know how great their kids are, but sometimes that just isn’t enough.

Sometimes it seems agonizingly important that others know it too.

That seems to be the point of a few e-mail messages that have appeared under my cyber-door recently. Each extolled the basketball virtues of children the e-mail authors believed were not receiving the recognition due them.

One player, a father wrote, is overlooked because he is a star in a mediocre program. Another father described his son as a sensational passer, under appreciated because passing is not one of basketball’s glamour skills.
There is a degree of truth in both messages. Good teams and good scorers usually hog the ink.

Neither writer seemed shrill nor deranged enough to believe his kid Is headed for the Big Ten or the NBA–and believe me, there’s plenty of the latter kind of parent.

Parents, in fact, often are a coach’s worst migraine, usually because of complaints about their offsprings’ (lack of) playing time.

“It’s a real difficult situation, it really is,” said one basketball coach who asked to remain anonymous because, “this could cost me my job. Seriously.

“I get parents who want to talk about why their kids are not playing or why their son is better than the person playing in front of him,” the coach continued. “I get it all the time.”

So do we. We get letters, calls and e-mails charging that a player isn’t starting because a coach has a personal vendetta against him, or blasting us for writing about one player instead of a teammate.

When we write about players who leave high school teams to focus on outside competition, we invariably field calls from parents accusing us of wasting newsprint on “quitters.”

A few years ago, we got letters from a group of parents who, while acknowledging that a particular baseball player was the team’s star, wondered why we couldn’t write about the other players responsible for the team’s success too.

Many of these complaints stem from a misunderstanding of the role newspapers– particularly daily metropolitan newspapers–play in covering high school sports. Our role is not to recognize deserving players, even though that is a frequent and happy by-product of what we do. Our job rather is to cover the news and write stories we believe will most interest our readers, all within the limits of space, manpower and deadlines.

Sometimes those stories involve unsung players; oftentimes they don’t. And while we occasionally rely on stars as a convenient reporting crutch and miss a better story, coverage is usually dictated by events and interest.

Parents’ complaints also at times stem from losing sight of the purpose of prep sports. Publicity is great, but it should be far down the list of reasons for participating.

“I don’t think we’re in this for the media coverage we can get for our high school teams,” one basketball coach said. “That’s where I think parents and sometimes we as coaches and players get things thrown out of what they should be. We’re in this No. 1 for the fun we’re having and competing in athletics.”

As coverage of sports–high school through pros–mushrooms and the phenomenon of the athlete as celebrity grows with it, however, the idea of sports for sports’ sake increasingly gets lost.

A generation ago, a kid dreamed of hitting a home run to win the World Series, or sinking the title-clinching shot in the NBA Finals. He still dreams about doing that, but now the dream also includes a TV appearance with Jay Leno and a series of Nike commercials.

Athletes used to play simply because they loved the game; now some play mainly to become famous.

Free college educations and zillion-dollar pro contracts also have increasingly become ends in themselves for players and parents, who mistakenly see publicity as helping them reach those goals.

One e-mail correspondent asked what he can do to help his overlooked son. My answer is, don’t worry about recognition and teach him to do the same.

The main value of high school sports is to prepare kids for life, and one of the great truths of life is you often don’t get recognized for doing a good job.

Life isn’t fair. The boss doesn't always appreciate you, nor does the coach. Officials don’t always make the right calls either.

Learning to be part of a team means learning the team functions best when no one worries about who’s getting credit for it. That’s so true it has become a sports cliche’.

Athletes learn–or should, anyway–to worry only about what they can control and to develop their own sense of satisfaction in a job, well done. Parents rightfully wrapped up in their kids’ accomplishments have trouble realizing that sometimes has to be enough.

Recognition should be a pleasant surprise, not an objective.

—Barry Temkin
Barry Temkin is a sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune