[ 🏃🏽♂️ ] Should I have let my kid sit on the bench instead of quit?
Encouraging your kids to be big fish in small ponds
On (most) Mondays, we revisit one of the listener questions we’ve answered in a previous episode. It’s been edited for clarity & brevity here.Question
from Matthias:
My 8-year-old son was on a soccer team where the coach prioritized winning over inclusivity.
As a result, my son wasn't picked for four consecutive games and came home feeling like a bad player.
I decided to withdraw him from the team, and now he's thriving in other sports.
Was it the right choice, or should I have told him he just needed to work harder to be picked?
Answer
BEN: It was the right choice.
I know there’s a big push toward trying to get your kid on the best possible team, to get them traveling every weekend, to try and get them to compete against the best kids. But I couldn’t disagree with that more.
It’s so much better to be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse, than being a small fish in a big pond. Not only in terms of self-esteem but even just the benefits of more playing time and being a valuable member of a team.
We’re hierarchical beings, right? We want to have a sense of belonging, and we want status. Even kids know where they are on the totem pole of a team. It does not feel good to know that you’re not contributing or being valued. It’s a surefire way to burn out or lose interest altogether.
I’ve talked to other parents whose kids are traveling a lot — from Boston to Canada or Minnesota to play hockey — and they ride the bench. They’re not getting any playing time, and they’re not getting into any games.
They practice with these great kids, but most of the time is just travel and games. That’s what the majority of these teams are built around because it’s become big business, just getting these kids playing and trying to win tournaments.
So winning becomes what the coach is rewarding for, and it’s one of the big detriments of youth athletics in America right now.
It doesn’t really happen in other countries, where they prioritize practice time and development. Here, we prioritize game time and winning.
It’s this polar opposite approach.
Instead of getting lots of touches in practice, we do the opposite. We do lots and lots of games and very little practice.
So Matthias is spot on.
It's more beneficial to be a big fish in a small pond. Not only for self esteem, not only for a sense of belonging, but also your kid is going to get more touches.
If we're here for development, if we’re here to help them get better, they just need touches and touches and touches.
Game strategy, placement, spacing — all these things coaches put so much emphasis on in a sport like soccer, say, the kids are going to learn naturally. They're going to figure out how to play the game. What they will not figure out is how to become better soccer players.
There's an incredible European soccer league coach, he's one of the best soccer coaches in the world, and he's like, My job is not to make better soccer players. My job is to get them to work together as a team.
Well, it's the opposite at the youth age.
The goal with kids is to help them develop as soccer players, not to get them to win.
PATRICK: My oldest is seven, so just a bit younger than Matthias’s kid, and I can't even fathom him playing any sport with such a priority on winning.
For me, my only real priority is to make sure he’s having fun.
Not because life is all about enjoying things, but because if he ever does actually want to get good at soccer or basketball or whatever, it's only going to come on the back of years of having fun playing it.
Because when he’s having fun, he wants to do it more. He wants to play catch on the beach, or dribble in the backyard, or shoot free throws in the driveway.
When he’s having fun, he looks forward to the next game and the next season.
And if I kill that fun at seven or eight because he's not winning, or he's not playing enough, or he's not developing at some arbitrary speed, well, when he's 12 or 14 or 16, he's just not going to want to suffer through it anymore.
BEN: It's a measure what matters thing, right? What you measure gets improved.
If the coach values winning above all else, yeah, he’s not going to play the underdeveloped kid.
But if it's about the development of the team, about the development of each individual - of their character and their skills - well, it's a totally different ballgame.
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