Are your actions filling their cups or drawing from them?
“The summer is 9 weeks.
Most kids are coming off sprint school sports or going directly into them in the fall.
Are your actions this summer filling your cup or drawing from it?
Are you physically preparing yourself for the demands placed upon you or just following the crowd?”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I think they are fair questions to ask oneself.
We have this inclination to “do the most” with the hopes of “not being left behind”, but I beg another question.
Do you get points for doing the most or doing the best?
The best right?
Are there points of diminishing return, especially when we apply an abundance of anything to something?
Of course. With everything from medication to eating vegetables and everything and everywhere in between.
This is especially true in the world of youth sports. Even if society would try to convince us otherwise or we don’t want it to be.
And to further compound the problem? We are asking kids to do an abundance of specific work that they don’t have the general base to support.
I could insert the multitude of statistics of youth sports injuries, burn out rates, etc, but I’ll spare you.
The reason we are where we are in this youth sporting landscape is because greedy people leveraged a net positive and rapidly and strategically dosed their marketing with FOMO.
We are where we’re at because kids (and parents) feel like they have to do (admittedly) “too much” because everyone else is and the kids (on a macro scale) just aren’t physically prepared to do the work.
It’d be like a house builder coming to you with plans and telling you he was going to start the project by installing the fancy light fixtures and then you replying with something like “ehh, that doesn’t sound like the best thing to start with, but we’ll go with it anyway.”
I find it asinine we would never condone something like that will a simple, emotionless structure, but with our kids with beating hearts we’ll subject them to “ehh, this is probably fine because everybody else is doing it.”
I mean it’s absolutely crazy to me.
Adults must weed through the BS. They must put there foot down.
These are kids. Children.
They need to enjoy their summers. Have fun. Play. Get stronger. Let off a little bit.
You think the “recruiting showcase” is beneficial for your 12-year-old? It isn’t. Not even close.
Hanging out with his friends (in-person), eating pizza, and going down slip-n-slides is what is beneficial.
They are kids.
