It's the Taking Part That Counts
Children's sports and the fine line between supportive parent and dickhead dad.
This is a new standalone piece. I’m also serialising my book, The Flagging Dad, every Thursday on Substack.
I love sport.
Well, not all sport. When I was 13, my mate asked me if I could “fill in on the wing” for his rugby team who were short on players one weekend. When I arrived at the churned-up pitch, on a Baltic February morning, to see a member of the opposition had tattoos and a BEARD, I did not hesitate in my decision.
“I’m not doing it. You can’t make me. I’m going home.”
Football and racket sports are more my bag despite being, whisper this quietly, not all that good at either. I have played football for 30+ years and still pull on my 2011 Anderlecht away shirt and faded yellow socks every Thursday night to play with a bunch of men of a similar age (with the exception of one guy’s teenage son who is approximately 12x faster than me, and whenever he darts past, I feel a strong urge to ankle tap him.)
Despite my modest abilities, I think football is marvellous and will play until I am no longer physically able. I am out for no more than two hours, it still sparks a childlike excitement, and I return reset, a better version of myself.
That said, I recently burst into the house, hyped up on Lucozade.
“Let me tell you about my goal, Louise! So, the ball went out wide, then…”
As I was talking, I noticed her eyes hadn’t moved from The Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives, and it dawned on me that I don’t think anyone has ever cared less about what another person is saying. Ever.
I have also sporadically played tennis, badminton and squash throughout my life and recently jumped on the Padel bandwagon, playing weekly with a bunch of old schoolmates. I can confirm it is loads of fun and fully deserving of the hype. It is also far less damaging than other midlife crisis options available.
Anyway, enough about me. If you want an aging man reliving his (very) amateur sporting history in minute detail, you can go to any pub in any town at any time. So, before I get into a blow-by-blow account of the time I played left-back against Aaron Lennon who would go on to play for England (we lost 10-1, he scored 6), let’s move on.
This piece is about my experiences with children’s sports classes. And being a parent.
Our boys are now 5 and 7 and embarking on their own sporting careers, something I am both excited and nervous about. The next few years will no doubt bring euphoric highs, crushing lows, and, perhaps most worryingly, hours upon hours of touchline small talk with other parents in pissing rain.
Here are some things that have happened so far:
Football
I was, perhaps (definitely), too keen to get the boys into football from a young age and started taking Joshua to Soccer Tots approximately four days after he’d learned to walk. The coach, a man who I can only assume didn’t have children of his own, had wildly unrealistic expectations, trying to teach stepovers and Cruyff turns when most of the class were more interested in eating the footballs and we soon sacked it off.
Learning from the error of my ways, I waited until Jacob had been walking for a few months until I took him to Diddy Kicks (they will need to rebrand that, won’t they?). We had marginally better results. Unfortunately, because I’d forgotten to fill a form or something, the only space available was in a church hall at the other side of Leeds for a 9 a.m. start every Saturday. Jacob generally spent these classes toddling around the hall, shouting, and attempting to pull down the curtains. All things he could easily do at home. We lasted one term.
Fast forward a few years, and they are now playing at the local Goals every Saturday lunchtime. It’s going fairly well. The coaches are great - enthusiastic and encouraging - and the boys seem happy enough (especially if they get a shiny card at the end.)
Despite my love of football, I have made a pact with myself that I will never become a man who shouts things like “GET STUCK IN!” and remain mostly silent, offering occasional thumb’s ups and OK signs. I have also reached a pleasant unspoken agreement with the other parents that a nod and a smile will suffice. There is no obligation to ask, “So, have you guys got anything on for the rest of the weekend?”
We are enjoying playing together at home, too. Last week, the boys invented a game where you have to kick a giant pink ball past various pieces of garden furniture and into a small net. Each time you pass a level, new obstacles are added. They called it Obstakick, and I genuinely think it might be the best game ever invented.
Louise, who came home to discover a four-man wall made of filthy sofa cushions, does not think Obstakick is the best game ever invented.
Tennis
Joshua has also been playing tennis every weekend for the past two years and appears to be enjoying it (notwithstanding the time last year when he looked me in the eye and said, “I am not enjoying tennis, Daddy.”) A few weeks ago, we took part in a Lads and Dads doubles tournament, his first competitive action. It was all very cordial to start with; smiling parents patting the ball back over the net and the focus being, as it should be, on the children.
However, in the tournament decider, there was a significant gear shift.
With the game tightly poised, the other kid’s dad, a man well into his 40s, suddenly whipped a topspin forehand down the line. Any shred of doubt that he’d accidentally overhit it evaporated when, in the next rally, he pulled an inch-perfect sliced dropshot out of the bag and gave his son a stern nod. Part of me was thinking, “C’mon, man? They’re children,” but another (much worse) part of me now really, REALLY wanted to beat them.
As parenting books provide no advice whatsoever on this kind of thing, here’s how I dealt with the predicament: I started trying slightly harder than acceptable, but not quite hard enough to win the game. As we trudged off the court trophyless, Joshua was disappointed we hadn’t won the tournament and I felt a deep sense of shame that I had, at one point, deliberately lobbed a seven-year-old.
Gymnastics
I am as flexible as a fridge. Louise, however, enjoyed gymnastics when she was younger (and can touch her toes) and rightly thought the boys would benefit from going to classes from a young age. In the early years, she took them to a weekly session run by a lovely woman who was, I think, better with children than anyone I have ever met in my life. There’s no doubt in my mind the boys would have accepted a straight swap in our household. Me for her.
This past year, I have taken the gymnastics baton, and take them to the local leisure centre every Wednesday to watch them rolling around, balancing on beams, and jumping onto mats. Well, I say “watch” - the competition for spots by the viewing windows is fierce and I often end up shoved in the corner of a waiting room so humid an island of sweat forms on my back whatever the time of year.
A couple of months ago, in the subtropical waiting room, a woman mistook me for my brother (this happens a lot). After establishing that I am not, in fact, my brother, we still made small talk for 20 minutes and now feel obliged to chat every week. She is very nice and all, but this hallowed window of tweaking my Fantasy Football team or reading Substack has gone forever and, really, it shouldn’t even be me.
THIS IS MY BROTHER’S JOB.
Anyway, on the occasions I can get a window view, the boys seem to be coming along nicely. As well as being physically and mentally good for them, I am hopeful they will stick it out long enough to learn a party trick that will serve them in later life. A friend of mine can walk on his hands and would pull this out of the bag at every teenage house party we ever went to with alarming success (lots of girls fancied him).
Cycling and Swimming
For teaching our children these essential life skills, I can claim no credit. No credit at all. Louise has done the heavy lifting with both. In my defence, I’m at work when they go to swimming classes and also not a member of the fancy health club Louise takes them to (something I’m ABSOLUTLEY FINE about, by the way). Not in my defence, my attempts at teaching them to ride a bike were nothing short of pathetic. I simply didn’t have it in me to let go of a child on a bike who literally did not know how to ride a bike and walked alongside them, hunched, grabbing tightly to the saddle, sweating. This technique does not work and you get a bad back.
Sports Day
It was school sports day a couple of weeks ago and Louise and I went to watch the boys participate in egg and spoon races, relays and carrot counting(?). They both won a couple of medals (stickers), and it was a lovely morning. Just as we were getting ready to leave, though, something horrific happened.
The headteacher took to the microphone and said:
“Right then! Time for the parents’ races!”
I looked at Louise, hoping for an out. Could I blame my tight hamstrings?
“We’ve got to do it, Andy,” she said, “What kind of an example is it if we bottle it?”
Honestly, the peer pressure to participate was more intense than the time my friend’s brother made me smoke a cigarette in a ginnel aged 12.
Louise stepped up for the Year 2 mum’s race and, obviously, she won. She won the bloody race.
WELL DONE, LOUISE.
Next up, with every member of my family proudly comparing their shiny stickers, it was the dad’s race. Taking my place on the start line and glancing across at some competitors who I know, for a fact (Strava), are faster than me, my childhood anxieties came flooding back. Tight knot forming in my stomach, I was telling myself to “take a breath, it’s just a bit of fun…” when I noticed I was the only person still standing still.
I hadn’t heard the f*cking whistle.
Long and short of it: the only thing that stopped me finishing last was another dad falling over and I sincerely wished I’d taken the same stance I had done at that rugby pitch quarter of a century ago.
“I’m not doing it. You can’t make me. I’m going home.”
Thanks for reading. I was planning on taking a break from the Monday post while I try to get the book thing off the ground but the sports day humiliation sewed a seed so I decided to write this. Clearly I can’t keep away.
Anyway, please do share tales of your own sporting triumphs or disasters, and any thoughts on how best to navigate kids’ sports.
I’m not planning to add paid subscriptions anytime soon, but after nearly a year of writing on Substack, I’ve finally plucked up the courage to add a Buy Me a Coffee button:
Chapter 4 of The Flagging Dad will be up on Thursday.
Cheers!
Andy
I would never join the parents races never ! One year so many mums fell over , that someone broke both their wrists and someone sprained their ankle , so they banned parents races🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️😂😂
The spectre of school sports' day is about 40% of why I never had kids. Noping all the way out of that ritual torment!