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John Fuller: This is John Fuller and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs, on a podcast, app, or website.

Jim Daly: It really does start with us as parents just taking a deep breath. It's just a game, a game that they can play and enjoy. We can sit back as their parents and enjoy the stage of life and watch them play and not put so much pressure on them to be what we hope they can be at 16 while they're six years old.

John Fuller: That's Brian Smith and he joins us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. We're going to be talking about how sports can be an opportunity to disciple your kids. I'm John Fuller.

Jim Daly: John, I'm always about sports. I love sports. I probably, I hope I don't make it an idol, but it's fun. It's fun to compete. I loved playing football, basketball, and baseball in high school. I just love it.

In fact, it became structure for me because of my structureless home. I lived with my brother through high school and I didn't have a lot of boundaries, but sports taught me so much about what it meant to do the right thing and be part of a team and all those good things. It was my sophomore year football coach that actually led me to the Lord through a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp.

So for me, sports are huge spiritually, physically, and they do so much for us emotionally too, both boys and girls, to grow up with confidence and to be in the game and then the game of life. So I'm excited to talk with our guests today about what we need to do to be mindful of doing it well as parents. I'm sure there are many parents watching and listening right now that you're part of that high school baseball game and you're going, "Wow, are these people really healthy parents?" Because it's screaming and yelling and we want to get into some of that, how to be a missionary in the stands, which is part of our guests' proclamations.

John Fuller: Indeed, and as I said, Brian Smith and Ed Uszynski join us. They're both dads of kids in sports and they're both involved in sports ministry through Athletes in Action, which is the sports-focused ministry of Cru. We're going to be talking about their book called Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports. You can learn more about our guests and this terrific book at our website, and that's focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Jim Daly: Ed and Brian, welcome to Focus for the first time. It's great to have you guys.

Brian Smith: Good to be here.

Jim Daly: Let me kick it off here. Brian, let me aim this one at you. So many parents are told that they have to buy the expensive sports equipment and put them on the travel team. I am so thankful with our two sons, Trent and Troy—good announcer names, right? That's how I picked their names. I said, "Next in, Trent Daly." I went, "Oh, that's awesome. That's Trent's name." And then, "Next in, Troy Daly." I was like, "Oh, that's good." But Jean looked at me and said, "That's pathetic." She was teasing me.

But Brian, and I'm again grateful that they didn't pressure us to do a travel team, but there seems to be this proportionality with those teams. The more you invest in your kids, the less likely they are to enjoy their sporting experience. I don't know if that's factual, but what does your experience tell you?

Brian Smith: I was going to say, you sound like you actually read the study. There has been a study that has shown the amount of money that parents spend in youth sports is associated with their kid actually having a decline of joy in sports.

It is sad. We've kind of just pontificated like it's probably you're getting the kid the most expensive thing, you're traveling across state lines, you're getting the expensive hotels, you're going out to eat, and the parents think it's really fun. We're almost professionalizing youth sports for kids. It's fun, we love sports, but the kids are receiving all of this good stuff. They know they're on the big team, they know they're traveling across the state lines, and they're internalizing this as pressure. So it's causing anxiety, it's causing them to maybe not even reach their potential in sport because they're so afraid of failure.

Jim Daly: I want to be careful because there are success stories in that environment as well and some young people go on to do great things and maybe even college scholarships and all that. So I don't want to put too much of a dampening effect on that. But what is a healthy way to look at that opportunity?

So my son comes home and says, "Hey, the coach thinks I should be on a travel team." Baseball and soccer are probably the two most prevalent. How, as a Christian parent, do we avoid some of those traps?

Ed Uszynski: Well because and we talk about this all the time when we say that if we're going to do this well, if we're going to do youth sports well, it really does start with us as parents. You said dads, Jim, but it really is moms and dads having to explore what are the things that are going on inside of us that we're bringing into our kid's youth sport experience.

There are past regrets that we have. There are past missed opportunities. We feel like maybe we weren't treated fairly and if we just got to do this over again, it could have looked different. It's become an idol for us. We use that word, that it's become more important to us than anything else in our life. Sports has become that and so now our kid is a projection of that. He or she is sort of an extension of that for us. There are regrets, there's just insecurity that I feel. So there are all these different words that go with an internal evaluation and that's the hardest thing maybe to do. We've said that's maybe the work that we don't want to do as parents is to look inside and see how much of our own baggage is actually being brought to bear on our kid's life right now.

Jim Daly: Let's go into an example or two that we can all put forward. Jean and I were talking about this. I was traveling and my youngest son was on the baseball team at the time and she was—it was an away game, probably 30 miles away from Colorado Springs, I don't recall exactly where.

But she brought her little beach chair and didn't know if the place would have a bleacher. It did, and it had people in the bleachers, all parents, it's a baseball game. Two dads were sitting near her in chairs as well. She said one of the dads was just out of control. His son came up to bat and he struck out and he was yelling at the son from the other side of the backstop fence. You're just going, "Wow, what was going on there?" That is so destructive. Think of that poor son and how he feels, like a failure, not able to succeed. What are all the erosion things that are going on? And then dad's going, "Well, I'm trying to make him a man," or whatever excuse he's having, but how negative is that?

Ed Uszynski: Yeah, and it's a distorted view of manhood. Again, we could just go on and on about it. There's usually some fear involved. A fear that he's missing out, if he's not performing a certain way right now, he's not going to measure up or she's not going to measure up in high school or not going to get to the next level or whatever.

So we have not been in the business at all of telling people what level they should try to play at or whether they should or shouldn't travel. There's all kinds of great stuff that happens in these travel environments. There really is. What we're saying is we need to be a different kind of parent in the midst of whatever it is that our kid is doing when it comes to sports. We need to have a different set of metrics that we're bringing in terms of how we're evaluating this experience. It can't just be based on performance metrics and skill metrics.

Brian Smith: Because if it is, then this guy who's at the baseball game, he's got so much invested in his kid, he's paying top dollar for all of these things. Kids really can become, if we can use this language, like commodities or products that we are investing in. What happens when you invest a lot into a commodity or a product? You expect a return. When you put that level of pressure on a 12-year-old or an eight-year-old, they're never going to give you the return that you want.

It really does start with us as parents just taking a deep breath. It's just a game, a game that they can play and enjoy. We can sit back as their parents and enjoy the stage of life and watch them play and not put so much pressure on them to be what we hope they can be at 16 while they're six years old.

Jim Daly: Well, that gets back to this idea of purpose for the Christian parent then. What are we going into sports with? What's the attitude? How do we create that purpose?

Brian Smith: It's an opportunity for us to disciple our kids. If you think about when your kids are going to school and they get home, you ask them the question, "How was your day today?" And you're going to get the response every time, "It was good. It was fine."

When you watch them play sports, you don't have to guess what their teacher said to them at school or who they sat next to in the lunchroom. You get access to everything that they're going through. Then you, as their primary discipler, get to be the one later at home or wherever it's going to be, to be the one to say, "Hey, I noticed when the ref made that call today, it looked like you wanted to say something or maybe you did say something. Could you tell me what was going on in your heart during that time?" So we have all this access to this information and that's what we're arguing for. Youth sports provides us a front-row seat to seeing them go through all of this stuff, which is incredible discipleship opportunities for us.

Jim Daly: Ed was talking about you're not perfect, so Brian, I'll ask you about your imperfect story.

Brian Smith: Let's start with Brian's imperfection. It was one I talked to my wife about this morning when I woke up, read the prep, got into the book, and that was the referee at the end of a game who made a bad placement on a penalty call.

So it was my son's last middle school game of the year. It was a playoff game. We knew they were going to get crushed by this team. They had destroyed them earlier in the year. I went there with this expectation of I'm just going to go and enjoy watching him play. I knew he wasn't going to get all the playing time in the world, but the plays he was in, I was just going to sit back and enjoy it. I think we were actually in the process of writing this book while this is happening, so I even had this in mind of like, this is discipleship. I'm on track. This is even better.

The refs were bad. We've all had those games where we can say this is the worst ever. This is what I'm always going back to, it was just not... I had more invested in the game than they did and it showed by the calls that they made. One call in particular though, it was late in the third quarter. It was a holding penalty which football people would know is a 10-yard penalty. The ref started walking it backwards and he passed 10 yards and he kept going to 15 yards, to 20 yards. I just, instinctively, without even thinking, I just said, "Ref, holding is a 10-yard penalty, not 20!" Without even realizing that I just said it out loud for the entire stadium to hear.

Ed Uszynski: You boomed it out from the bleachers. You said it or you projected it towards the field?

Brian Smith: I projected it towards the field. It was not in my thoughts. It came out vocally. And the ref looked up at the stands and he said, "Who cares?"

And that, everything that had taken place prior with the referees and coaching decisions, it was like soaking the field and the stands in gasoline, just waiting for somebody to light a match. I was the person to do it. Then the crowd jumped in. It was chaos. It was chaotic. Refs started getting amplified, the refs started making more bad calls, and the stands on both sides started to get aggravated. The people that affected the most were the kids. Afterwards, on the drive home, I was like, "What am I doing? How was I in that moment? How was I the person to start the chaos?"

Jim Daly: That gives you a perspective, but that's where you've got to be cautious about how we live through our kids. The kids, they had to feel horrible, especially even hearing that when the ref turns and says, "Who cares? Look how bad the score is."

Brian Smith: What it did though is it gave the kids and the coaches and the other parents permission to act like I did. Everyone was just waiting for somebody to say or do something stupid and it came from the Jesus guy in the stands. So I went there with this expectation of I'm going to be an ambassador for Jesus in the stands and my secondary identity of being an ambassador for my kid and then even for my own school overtook that.

Jim Daly: I want to explore that and I mentioned it in the opening, this idea that you need as a Christian that's involved as a parent to be a missionary in the bleachers. I love that. That would have saved me a lot of embarrassment and I wish I would have heard it a long time ago. But now we're going to tell two million people, "Hey, here it is." It's so good to think of it that way because it's putting God first. Your kid's not going to appreciate really bad behavior from his mom or dad. That doesn't spark enthusiasm for your child, it's embarrassment.

Brian Smith: How am I supposed to be expected to teach my kid about self-control in the days and weeks after I just showed that I have no self-control in the stands? So that is, I'm a missionary to my own kid, I'm a discipler to my kid, but to everybody else in the stands too. They're looking at me in that moment and they know I love Jesus, they know I'm a Christ-follower. If he acts this way, what does that say for people who love Jesus?

Ed Uszynski: And isn't that true almost for every chapter in the book too as far as the virtues that we're talking about? We could focus on really trying to cultivate these. How will our kids ever appreciate what it means to love other people, to be other-centered if we're completely self-centered about this experience? How to experience peace if we're always bringing anxiety into the playing arena, into the car with them? To not be entitled when we are always talking about just getting ours?

It starts with us doing some devotional work with our own heart. We've been saying this, that really one of the places that we need, we need to be taking some timeouts for ourselves and having some devotional time is before you go into a basketball arena, before you go into the pool, before you go into the football stadium, before you go sit by the diamond. Take a few minutes and interact with the Lord. When I know that my mouth is what gets me in trouble, I need to ask the Holy Spirit, "Don't let me say that anymore." When I'm feeling angry, you convict me before it happens and help me get out of my seat and go for a walk if I need to or whatever it is that my coping mechanism is to deal with myself.

But we really do, we need to walk with God. Instead what too many of us do, and again I just think this is a reminder to us as Christian listeners, that we tend to keep our faith and our Christian life completely separate from our sports life. Whether that's being a fan of a pro or college team or what we're doing with our kids in youth sports, they're these separate entities. We need to start to bring them back together again and recognize that there's really lifetime consequences for how I'm interacting with my kid in the context of sports for their spiritual life.

Jim Daly: Some of the practical things, Ed, I think you had this story in the book where your son had a swim meet and you did some things to help prep him for that. Because some kids can get really anxious before it. I played baseball to stay in shape for football. Baseball you don't run much, you stand around a lot. But it was fun, the camaraderie was great, I loved it. I didn't bat particularly well. I played infield, I was a good infielder but I didn't hit well. I would always be anxious at the plate. I just, I don't know what the problem was, I just didn't have that eye-hand coordination. So parlaying that into your son's swim meet, what was something that you did to help calm his anxiousness?

Ed Uszynski: Well, and I think we need to get better in understanding the difference between a performance goal and a process goal. So a performance goal is totally tied to the end result, whether you won or lost on the scoreboard, did you get the blue ribbon? A process goal is saying, "Well, we're actually going to look at steps along the way to get to that place where you could actually win."

In this particular case, my son was going to be in the finals of a swim meet in which he knew already ahead of time that his times were 10 seconds slower than the kids that were fastest in this meet. I could tell he was all jammed up about it before we went into the pool. This is one of the things that we talk about all the time, I just reiterated to him that, "Trey, I want you to know that I don't care whether you win or lose, I really don't care whether you win or lose in terms of you and me. I just love you. I love going to watch you do this, so does mom. We're going to have fun no matter what happens." Our kids need to hear that.

Of course I want them to do well, he wants to do well. But we said, "What if our goal today wasn't to worry about who comes in first or second? What if you just beat your last best time in this? Just see if you can beat your own time and why don't we see if we can catch one of those last kids? Can you just keep up with one of the last kids? Let's just make that a process goal."

I asked, "You think you can do that?" He's like, "Yeah, let me try to do that." He ended up doing that. He beat his old time and he was right alongside this other guy and we celebrated that. He got smoked. He lost by a ton, but there was something to celebrate in that he stepped into the fear, he kind of recalibrated his mind so that he wasn't so jammed up about the fact that he was going to get embarrassed by the guys that won and he just set a different goal and that became a victory in and of itself that we could build on.

John Fuller: This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and you're listening to Ed Uszynski and Brian Smith, who wrote the book Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports. This book is going to help you see sports as a gateway to instill biblical values in your child. It's going to empower you to embrace the role of being a spiritual mentor and it's going to help you to counter some of the toxic culture in today's youth sports. Get a copy when you call 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Jim Daly: You know, it's so good at times, I think every time, but you see professionals who are doing the right thing, sportsman-like behavior, whether that's in football and the opponent helps them up after they just crushed them in a tackle or whatever it might be, but it always catches my attention. I used to point that out to my boys if we're watching a football game or something like that, that's awesome that that guy did that. When I coached a little bit, that was one of the things I challenged the kids to do. When you knock somebody down, help them up and just give them a pat and move on to the next play because it communicates something so good which is we're out here having fun.

Brian Smith: Yes, absolutely. We keep using the phrase that what we celebrate our kids will replicate. So if we have a value system of, "Yeah, when you see somebody on the ground, help them up," and we're celebrating that, it hopefully means when we're watching them play, we're looking for those character type moments.

Yeah, we want them to score the touchdown and hit the home run or whatever it is, but what if we started looking at the game with new metrics? What if we start watching to see, "Are they paying attention to the kid on the end of the bench? Are they helping the opponent up after they knock them down?" And then on the back end of the game, are we celebrating those things so they have new categories to be like, "Mom and dad really do care about when I pick somebody up after the game." That's going to matter a lot more when they're 30 years old than whether or not they can hit the outside corner.

Jim Daly: That is so true and the good thing is you feel good doing it. We can play hard on the field.

Brian Smith: That is accessible every practice, every game for them to show love to somebody else. They might not catch a pass, they might not do the thing, whatever they need to do, they have that opportunity every single practice and game to show love to somebody else.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you this though, you look... I'm shocked as you might scroll through or see on local evening news now, brawls at games. I don't remember that in the same volume when I was playing many years ago. It seems to be a relatively new phenomenon that these parents and people in the stands are just taking it to an entirely absurd level of actually fighting at a game over a call, over whatever. In that context, that's a great place for the light to shine. Back to your missionary bleacher idea, what a great place for Christians to be, Christian parents, Christian grandparents, Christian aunties and uncles, to show up for junior or his sister's sporting event and do something different.

Ed Uszynski: Yeah, we've said this a lot. What is our biggest takeaway for us even as we think about this whole sports thing? I need to talk less. That's what I need to do as a dad. I need to stop spending so much energy on correction before games, during games, after games. Talk less and connect more.

That's really what we've been saying. Stop... I've got two hours of things to say to my kid after a game about what he or she did wrong. They don't want to hear it. Especially if they lost, they just don't want to hear it. I've already done this with three, I've got one left, now in ninth grade. The three didn't want to hear it. One of them wound up playing college basketball. They didn't want to hear from me after the game. They want me to play a different role in their life.

So if I could just keep doing that, say less things, be present, yes, ask, "Did you have fun?" Ask, "Who did you connect to today? Who was it fun to play with or practice with?" I've been asking my kid that the last couple of weeks. "Who'd you have fun with at basketball practice?" "Dad, what are you talking about?" He doesn't even have a category for that. "Well, you're playing a game, who was it fun with? I hear you complaining to me about the coach, you're complaining about all these things, I get all that. Was there anything fun?"

Keep letting them know that you love them and that's not going to change based on how they perform in the game. We want our kids to have a growing understanding of what it looks like to go out and play from a position of love instead of for love.

Jim Daly: It's so good. One of the other attributes is this idea of developing self-control. Young children particularly don't have great self-control. You learn that over time, the sooner you learn it the better.

Brian Smith: I've had multiple instances with my own kids where they have thrown lacrosse sticks and they've done things that would make me as the Jesus guy in the stands just kind of be like, "I want to get out of there as soon as possible." It's something that needs to be caught and taught.

What I've done with my kids is I'll get out sticky notes and I'll put things that they cannot control, like the ref's calls, how much playing time they're going to get, what their opponent does, what the fans say. And then things that they can control, their attitude, their effort. I'll kind of mix them all up and I'll make two sides and say, "Hey, I want you to put everything that you can control into one side and what you can't control put into the other side." And they'll rearrange them and then we have the conversation about it.

We begin to give them categories and areas in sport that they can then look back to, hopefully when they're playing, to go, "Oh yeah, the ref just made a bad call, I can't control that. What I can control though is the next five minutes of this game." So we're really teaching them on the front end and then on the back end that sport provides really good opportunities to grow this stuff.

Jim Daly: Right at the end here, perhaps the last question we should cover, and there's so much good content in this book, Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, is really good. I wish I had it. It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment. But this idea of in that moment remembering what are the eternal things, what are the things that are going to last. Ed, you've punctuated that each time. That's what they're going to need at 30, that's what they're going to need when they're older. I think the question would be how do we stay fixated on those things in a healthy way and coach them up in a way for life, not just for a sporting event.

Ed Uszynski: You've got to do it together. I need to keep... this is true for every area of my Christian life. I need to keep getting that perspective from the end that then makes its way back into the present. What is relevant here? I'm going to stand before God and give an account for the environment that I created for my wife and my kids. I'm not going to give an account for whether or not I prepared them to make the varsity team.

Seriously, I keep coaching myself to say what are the things that really matter that I need to ask about today with my kid, even the ones that are out of the house now. What are the topics that I need to keep bringing up to them? What are the vulnerabilities that I need to keep sharing out of my own life and the things that I'm messing up on or the things that I'm afraid of? Those are conversations that I feel responsible to be having with my kid.

I've gotten too caught up in being concerned about their sports performance. We've already said that at the beginning of this thing, we know that we've messed that up. Okay, let's make an adjustment. So you know as you're listening, you've made mistakes. Let's make an adjustment and say, "Let it be different moving forward." Maybe the first thing I need to go do is apologize to my older kids. "I wish I had done this differently. Here's what I was afraid of, here's what I wanted to happen, and I'm sorry that I put so much pressure on you." That's a great place to start and then guess what that does? That's relationship. Now they might not even know what to do with that at first, but that's a start to saying, "Mom and dad are actually somebody I can trust and that actually care about my heart more than just my performance."

Jim Daly: This is really good. What a great book, and you don't see a lot written in this space. How to be a good Christian parent at sporting events, but we desperately need it. To those listening, we hope this episode has equipped you to represent Christ in sports and to teach your kids to do the same. We need to be intentional about teaching our children to live counter-culturally instead of letting the culture of sports influence our children.

If you want to learn more about practical ways to do that with your child or maybe your grandchild, you'll want a copy of Brian and Ed's book, Away Game. We have copies for you here at Focus on the Family and when you make a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for supporting the ministry. At Focus, we offer so many great resources for parents to navigate the chaotic culture we live in and raise our children in Christ, which is the goal. Every year we help strengthen hundreds of thousands of parents. When you partner with us financially, you help us to reach those parents and equip them to build the next generation in Christ. So be a part of what God is doing.

John Fuller: Donate today and request your copy of Brian and Ed's book when you call 800-232-6459. 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. Or get the details and donate online at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once more help you and your family thrive in Christ.