Keeping the fun in sports

Do your kids like to play basketball? Since my son was three years old, he has always shown interest but maybe because I’ve always seen him as being the more cerebral-than-athletic type, he never really had the chance to try the sport until the summer before he turned five when I learned about Coach E Basketball School.

Though I had my qualms about enrolling him at that young age and strongly believed that the athleticism he was exhibiting at the time did not mean that he was ready for organized sports, my husband and I decided to let him try it out, and boy, did he enjoy!

What we love about Coach E is their low coach-to-student ratio, which allowed a bit of handholding for the first-timers, especially the younger kids, so they don’t get overwhelmed and lost in the sea of more experienced and older students. Our son had fun doing the drills that are part of every practice session and learned basketball fundamentals in the process.

Every semester ends with a one-day tournament called the Hoop Festival which allows the students to showcase his/her improved basketball skills to family and friends, but back then, we deemed it best not to expose our five-year-old son yet to the frustration and possibility of losing, as we felt that he may take the failure to heart.Call me over-protective but even in hindsight, I wouldn’t change a thing. One of our parenting principles is encapsulated in the biblical passage, Ecclesiastes 3:1. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

Well, now our son is eight years old and we feel differently. He is back at Coach E this semester and we intend to enroll him all-year-round so he can reap the full benefits of discipline, hard work, perseverance, teamwork and sportsmanship, that come with his commitment to practice and hone his basketball skills. He will also be joining the Hoop Festival this time around and we are looking forward to yelling and cheering for him and his teammates this coming weekend!

I guess the challenge for us, his parents, is to make sure that our son’s love for basketball (or any sport for that matter) is greater than ours so that we never become too emotionally worked up in it, to the point that we end up criticizing his game and damaging his spirit. At the end of the day, succeeding in sports should not define his identity, even if it feels that way for him (as with most kids his age). Our job as parents is to debunk that wrong notion of self-worth, show our son that sports is not the end-all-and-be-all in life, by loving and appreciating his whole being outside of any sport, achievement or failure, and by allowing him to simply play sports that he enjoys in a free and unstructured way, and just have fun!

Coach E is a basketball training program provider that offers extensive laboratory skill-based basketball training program since August 2004. To learn more, visit their website http://www.coach-e.com