Summer?

Whatever happened to summer?

I'm not talking about the weather either.

Whatever happened to a kid having the summer off to do kid things? Bike around. Swim at the pool. Hang out at a friend's house. Read a book. Get into mischief. All the things a kid is suppose to do.

Suddenly, we want to train them as if they were going to be serious athletes, rather than high school athletes.

Here's KoKo's schedule: 6-7:30 am M-W-F Sports Excel; Softball practice 9:30-11:30 am M-W with games on Thursday evenings. Now she just got a text stating that if she wanted to be in basketball she should seriously consider going to the gym to shoot three nights a week.

No wonder a significant amount of parents in RLF are wondering, when did sports stop being fun?

An excellent point.

I think part of it is that sports have stopped being about play (see the TED video I'll attach to an upcoming blog post). I loved every single day of practice for two reasons. One, I got to work on becoming better at my craft (and that is the one single life skill I took away from sports - I'd focus on getting better with each rep) and horsing around with my friends and coaches. Man, that was fun! But a lot of the credit there has to go to the coaches who actually made practice fun - or at least allowed us to make it fun. I'll never forget going to the pool one day for football practice and doing about a dozen back flops off the diving board as I tried to do a flip, or ending summer practice by having to 'crush' the entire field - from the back of one end zone to another - the only 'break' we got was that once we passed the 50 yard line we could begin to take off our pads. I'll never forget Colin stripping down to just his jock! That was hilarious. In hockey, after coming back from a two goal deficit to beat DL, our coach piped music in to our next practice. And these are just a couple things off the top of my head. But they made practice fun.

That is something that is sorely missing these days. Maybe it's because coaches treat practice like it's college. Well, very few if any of these athletes are going on to college. To put it bluntly, very few of these kids have even played on winning teams. Why not let them have a bit of fun at least.

As Kristie pointed out to me, why did the team that lost the most games (the boys basketball team) seem to have the most fun. There's only one answer here: the coach. He made it fun.

Do our kids need to devote so much time to sports?

Now to be fair, I'd rather have KoKo involved in a plethora of activities than sitting on the computer or watching TV all day. But then it becomes my job as a parent (a job that it seems many are not qualified for given how they want to use summer rec as a baby sitting service) to make sure that she does something constructive and meaningful (like spending several weeks in SD with her grandparents last summer).

But I can't blame kids for backing out of being in so many things.

We were out walking Kenzie one night and KoKo's softball coach stopped us to sign some papers for an upcoming tournament.

Kristie inquired as to why so few were out for sports excell, to which he replied, "Ahh, some of those girls just don't want to do anything."

Well, last night we got the other side of the story as Kristie talked to some of those girls who weren't out for sports excell. Their resposne? "We want to have a life. It's summer. Basketball season doesn't run all year long."

To which I say, "Amen!"

Now, again, to be fair I've been guilty of urging Casey in summers past to get up and go to sports excel. "Do you know how lucky you are? I wish they would have had these types of programs when I was young. We had to sneak into the weight room in the afternoons because they couldn't even afford someone to open it and then supervise us."

And that's true.

But on the other hand, I lived 10 miles out in the country. I had nothing else going on. Given the chance to go to sports excel or bale hay. Well, that would have been an easy choice. Rather, it would have been no choice at all, for I would have had to go to sports excel and then bale hay in the afternoon. I'm not sure, if I'm being totally honest here, how wild I would have been about that.

I enjoyed my afternoons - when Dad was gone on the road in the truck and the farm work was all done (or rather, again if I'm being totally honest, pushed off to the very last minute) reading on the porch, taking trips to town to pick up new library books with Mom, and writing the afternoons away up in my room.

Which skills am I still using in my life every day? Which passions have made an impact on my life? What skills have allowed me to find a job that is perfect for me and feels like no work at all?

I know coaches, and remember I am one (well, barely. I just coach freshmen) will say we have to have these summer programs to keep up with the competition.

I know that's true. But how nice would it be for the whole competition to go back to the good old days when you had fall sports JUST in the fall, winter sports JUST in the winter, and spring sports JUST in the spring?

This week there is a basketball camp going on thirty yards from my house. Now I know the kids love it. We probably have dozens of kids from RLF there. Yet, if basketball is such a great, important, life changing activity, why will there only be two or three of those players on the team when they are seniors?

I can't help but think two things when I see the coaches and kids over there - if they only matched the work and passion they pour into that camp with the work and passion they put into teaching or studying, what would they really be able to accomplish? What real skills and passions would they develop that would actually have an impact on their lives 20 years from now?

Just think how concerned parents and coaches are that athletes will lose their edge in the off season. But when are they ever concerned that students will lose their edge in academics over the summer?

That, of course, is part of the problem with our education system. We (teachers, parents, and students) don't focus enough on the education part.