When Did Their Sport Become Our Life?
THE DIFFERENT ANGLE by Let’s Go Mental
The athlete isn’t the only one growing.
I don’t know about you, but every time one of my kids starts a new sports season, I feel like I’m starting one too!
New schedule. New team chat. New coach. Old coach. New uniform…
And approximately 47 new emotions I definitely did not see on the registration form.
Welcome sports parents! This moment is for us. Grab your coffee or your aperol spritz and join me in this journey!
I sometimes wonder why they call us sports parents!
Even if we’re not the ones practicing…it feels like we are! Somehow we have our season too!
We have the schedule. The team. The coaches. The wins. The losses. The friendships. The disappointments. The expectations.
And definitely the emotions.
The first time we sign our kids up for a sport, most of us aren’t thinking about personal growth, discipline, resilience, identity, or mental performance.
What are we becoming??????
They needed to move. They needed an activity. Their friends were already doing 3 sports..and we felt we were so behind! Maybe they already love a ball, a racket, the water, gymnastics. Maybe they just wanted to watch tv! But some moms told me…This will look so good on the college résumé! (I am Italian…I was shocked! Now i understand what this mom was trying to say…😖)
It starts as something you have to do, then it transforms into something you do… And then… somehow… sport becomes part of who we are as a family.
An important part of our identity.
Becoming a parent is already this beautiful, difficult, completely new job for which nobody gives us an instruction manual.
Becoming a sports parent?
That’s like buying one of those new kitchen appliances with AI included. It looks easy. It comes with instructions. You’re convinced you’ve got this. And then you turn it on….and you have no idea how to cook an egg!
Welcome to youth sports.
Easy enough. At first, it’s practices and uniforms, then come the carpools, weekends, tournaments, competitions, early mornings, late nights, early morning, hotels, snacks, water bottles, smelly cars, eating in the car, washing the same uniform AGAIN, team chats, schedules, fees, equipment…
All while normal life apparently expects to continue, of course.
School. Work. Groceries. Cooking. Birthdays. Extracurricular activities. Volunteering. Doctor appointments. Orthodontist appointments. Family. Other siblings. Husband. Wife. Holidays…
Who exactly designed this system? It was a genius!!!! A perfect machine!
Then comes the unsexy part: the one we prefer not to talk about, or the sexy part: we love to talk about watching our athletes! because who is watching??? I chatted for most of the game and missed my kids best performance!
Coaches. New, old. Teammates. Other parents. Playing time. The bench. Selection. Not being selected. Comparison. Competition. Injuries. Changing teams. Club politics. Favoritism. Locker-room dynamics. Private sessions. Confidence. Pressure. Winning. Losing. Quitting. Not quitting. Wanting more.
Maybe wanting too much.
And somewhere between one practice and the next, sport stops being just sport.
It becomes an amplifier.
Because into this apparently simple thing called my child’s sport, we start pouring a lot of ourselves.
Our attention. Our need for control. Our expectations. Our fears. Our frustrations. Our definition of success. Our relationship with failure. Our time. Our ability—or inability—to wait, trust, let go, stay quiet, speak up, manage relationships, manage time, manage ourselves.
Our instinct as parents is not to want to see our kids fail and suffer.
Our dreams, the dreams we missed when we were their age….
Our whatever-it-is-for-you…
That’s the part we don’t realize we’re signing up for when we register them for a sport.
Our kids aren’t the only ones who enter the sport. We do too.
And sport has this incredible ability to bring things out of us that perhaps we didn’t even know were there.
It makes us dream. It makes us furious. It makes us ridiculously proud. Or ridiculously ashamed (you know what i mean). We suffer for them. Sometimes with them. We celebrate with them. We fight with the opponent. We stay upset for hours after a loss. We fight with our kids. We give them lessons in the car. We coach them. (Is this even our job!?) Their smile after practice can make our day. Their face after a terrible game can stay with us all night.
And every game, tournament, meet, tryout, or selection can somehow feel enormously important.
I can say this from experience.
I have three very sporty kids. If I add up the seasons I’ve spent on sidelines, in gyms, driving to practices, games, and competitions, I have more than 20 seasons as a soccer parent and another five in gymnastics.
Boys and girl. Different ages. Different personalities. Different levels.
Very different journeys.
And my journey as their sports parent has definitely not been linear, or always intentional.
We’ve had successes, disappointments, injuries, benches, team changes, difficult decisions, coaches we loved, coaches we didn’t understand, moments when we wanted more, moments when they wanted more, and moments when their world was falling on them, ….
Name it.
There’s a 90% chance we’ve lived it, or we’re living it right now, and if not I am happy to learn how you manage it so I can learn before it might happen!
And somewhere along the way, I started looking at sport differently. It was transforming us…
What if all these things that drive us crazy, keep us awake, make us question ourselves, make us proud, angry, scared, excited… are not only things we have to get through?
Why don’t we know what to say when they step in the car? Why are they always stressed? Why is there a pattern in how I react?
What if there is another angle?
Because if our children—and we as parents—can learn not simply to survive everything sport throws at us, but to use it, to build a better relationship with them and with ourselves… then we’re being given an extraordinary training ground.
This is why I’m starting this conversation.
Not because I have it all figured out.🫠 Not yet!
But because after all these seasons, and after becoming a parent and family coach and then a mental-performance coach, I’ve become fascinated by everything that happens within the world of sport—and obsessed with one question:
What can we do with it?
The stories. The mistakes. The emotions. The ridiculous moments. The difficult conversations. The things our kids teach us without knowing it.
And the moments when changing the angle changes everything….even if only a smile and a laugh!
So grab a coffee or an Aperol Spritz, and Let’s Go Mental together…with a Different Angle!
Barbara
Everything is trainable.