FamilyLife Today®

Brian Smith: Those moments when our kids don't perform are great gospel opportunities for us to say, "I know it was not great, but I still love you and I'm still proud of you. Let's figure out how we can get better next year."

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: Brian and Ed are back to talk about youth sports and how you can navigate that as a Christian parent. We need this so badly.

Ann Wilson: I think this is going to be a great conversation.

Dave Wilson: So let's dive in. You talk about an idol, and we throw that word around. One of the characteristics of an idol, and why we hold it up as an idol, is that we think it's going to give us something that's going to fill a hole in us or it makes promises to us.

If you'll bow down to me, I will bring you some kind of satisfaction. Isn't that true for all idols, things that we make into idols?

Brian Smith: This is what we are trying to do for people. We all get it. What we want to say is the youth sport idol is lying to you. It's not going to deliver what it promises to deliver. Just enjoy; let your kid play this sport that they enjoy. It's a game.

You worry more about paying attention to what it means for them to walk with Jesus in the midst of it. First, you make sure you're walking with Jesus in the midst of it—we need to keep saying that—and then you're going to be in a position to look for more ways for them to walk with Jesus in the midst of it. What we're doing in the book is just offering up practical ways. Here are things to look for; here are questions to ask.

Ann Wilson: Give us a few questions, like on the drive to or from the game.

Brian Smith: Did you have fun today?

Ann Wilson: What if they say no? "The coach was..."

Brian Smith: That's great. Tell me why not. They do say no. Do you want to talk more about why it wasn't fun? Sometimes they'll just say no.

The last two years with my kids, on the drive home, they get in the car and I ask, "Is there anything that happened today in the game that you want to talk about?" Can you guess what they say 99 percent of the time? No.

And there are so many things I want to talk about. I've got two hours of stuff I've been sitting here with. I have all the answers. I know why you're not getting passes thrown your way. It's because you should be running the five-yard out and you're running the seven instead. Change your body language! You sit over there and pout the whole game. I wouldn't put you in either. Go stand next to the coach when he's putting kids in instead of sitting on the edge of the bench.

Ann Wilson: So do you say that stuff, like about their attitude?

Brian Smith: Not on the car ride home. And here's why. Seventy percent of kids are quitting youth sports by the age of 13. Kids are saying this—this is the data—because it's not fun anymore. Many kids are pinning "it's not fun" to this car-ride-home experience.

Again, well-intentioned parents who are disciplined by an ESPN over-analyzing culture, we want to coach, critique, counsel, criticize. What our kids need from us in those spaces is just to connect instead of trying to fix everything that was broken.

There's a psychological term called the "peak-end rule" which essentially says this is how we remember events in our life: by the peak moment of that event, but also how the moment ends. Imagine, let's go back to the soccer field. Something doesn't have to be a great moment, just some big moment in the game that they're going to remember it by. They score a goal, or maybe their friend scores a goal, or they get knocked down by somebody.

How does every single youth sport game or competition end? It's the car ride home. Most car rides home are well-intentioned parents saying, "Hey, maybe next time try standing next to the coach or try running a little bit faster to the ball." What's happening with our kids is they're remembering the youth sport experience largely by this car ride home where it didn't seem like I lived up to what they wanted me to do.

Ed Uszynski: And it almost never goes well. Has it ever gone well? Has Trey ever said, "Man, Dad, thank you so much for that feedback. I'm for sure going to do that next time"? No.

My oldest son, Eric, was the first one to get "unsanctified Dad." I hit him with everything. I was his coach in basketball, too. So that's another thing: it's my sport, I'm the coach, and I'm the dad. That just is like a trifecta of "this is going to be bad." He wouldn't say anything back to me. He would not respond to any of my statements, my questions, my harassment.

Ann Wilson: Give us a just a picture of that conversation, of how you would bring it up.

Ed Uszynski: "Why are you being so passive on the court? You're never going to get the ball. I've been telling you this for literally weeks now. They're not going to pass it to you. And if they don't pass it to you, you're never going to get to shoot. You've got to get yourself open."

I'm not yelling; I'm coaching. But that's pretty stern. I'm driving; I'm looking straight ahead. It's exasperated. It's Dad saying, "I'm starting to struggle watching this. I hate watching this in my son." It's also true. And you're well-intentioned.

Brian Smith: This is what I don't like about what your mom did. I want to love what your mom did, but let's just say this: I want your mom to say, "Yeah, you were bad today. But I still love you. Two for 12 is lousy, but let's go get ice cream." I love you. Do you need to have a little session? Can I go cry somewhere? But let's do both.

Ed Uszynski: I'm not getting any response. Nothing. So now I'm looking at him: "Do you have anything you want to say? No? Well, why not? Do you not care? Are you okay with never getting the ball? Because you know what's coming next: you're not even going to be on the court anymore, because we can get anybody just to run up and down passively. That's another thing: you could get rebounds. You're one of the taller kids." This is what it turns into. It just keeps going.

Ann Wilson: This was my life with every brother in sport after every single game. This was the conversation.

Ed Uszynski: So I got silence from Eric. We've worked through all this. He's 25 now. We have a great relationship. I have apologized a lot. We all feel like we've done this wrong. What do you do with it? You start with apologizing. Just like you do in your marriage, you repent. "Eric, I'm sorry I did that. This is what I was afraid of for you."

Ann Wilson: What does he say now about it?

Ed Uszynski: Every kid's different. He loves me for being honest with him. He actually ended up playing college. Again, a completely different route; it wasn't because I harassed him. That's a whole other story. So we have a great relationship. He was already a person of few words, but he sure wasn't going to process any of this right after the game.

Now my daughter, Maria, and Jack, they had different variations on "Why don't you just stop talking to me right now? This is none of your business. Why do you want to talk about anything that just happened? The game is over, Dad. Leave it alone." I would get that from both of them.

Ann Wilson: My second grader, I think I just said, "I think when you're batting, if you had your elbows up..." He goes, "Mom, I don't want you ever to say anything to me." He's my verbal one; he's the youngest. Thank goodness.

And he goes, "I don't want you to ever say anything to me about anything in sports." I'm like, "Well, I'm just trying to help you." He said, "Whatever you think that I did wrong, I'm thinking it a million times more than you are." He could express that, and I was like, "Whoa." So your kids, they're verbalizing all kinds of stuff.

Ed Uszynski: So I'm on the fourth, and I'm listening to all of them. I don't yell stuff at him anymore. You can change. We don't have to keep repeating the same mistakes. He has asked me not to do it.

Ann Wilson: That's a great question to ask. "What do you want from me during games? How do you want me to be present for you at games?" They might not even have an answer right away.

Brian Smith: "Is there anything I can say during the game? How do you want me to cheer for you? What can I say?" Same thing about on the drive there and after. "What do you need? Do you want me to say nothing before the game? Would you like me to pray?" Anything. Maybe prayer puts pressure on them, too.

Ed Uszynski: We don't want our silence to be indifference either. "Lord, I pray that Eric today would play with aggressiveness. I pray that he would catch and shoot quickly and under 0.5 seconds." That's called a passive-aggressive prayer.

Brian Smith: Would you say, though, now that you're fixing things with Trey, even as he is just getting down with his golf season, have you enjoyed this version of Ed as you show up at the course more? Or do you still have this inner angst of "I want to say all these things"?

Ed Uszynski: Oh, both, for sure. The reason why I'm enjoying it, though, is I know it's true. I really believe what we're saying here right now. We're not just saying it. We've seen it. We work with college athletes.

This is not going to end well. My harassment of him is not going to end well for him or me or us. So I can make a different choice right now because what I want is for him to come home at 25 for Thanksgiving because we're still in relationship with each other. I don't want him to resent me through his 20s. We don't realize this, but over a decade's worth of this kind of pressure causes our kids to not want to come to us with anything when they get in their 20s.

Brian Smith: It feels abusive. Youth sports, because we're spending so much time in youth sports, it's shaping our relationship.

Dave Wilson: That fact shows how critical it is that we do this right as parents. If your son or daughter in their 20s doesn't want to come home, or even comes home but sort of sighs, "Ugh," that's something we've done wrong.

Ed Uszynski: I probably am treating them in other areas of life the same way I treat them in sports. So I'm this way with their boyfriend or girlfriend, I'm this way with their grades, I'm this way with their college choice. It's the same pattern. Constant disappointment, constant pressure, constant "you're not quite measuring up to what I want you to do." Again, it's this imagined future that I have for you and you're not pulling your end of it. And they just feel that.

Brian Smith: Parents are pushing back. They're like, "So we say nothing?" It doesn't mean we say nothing. It means what we say has a tone and posture of grace.

I really want my kids, when they inevitably mess up in life, when relationships don't go well, when they look at things on the internet maybe that they shouldn't, I want them to know that they can come to Mom and Dad and just say, "Hey, this happened," and not have a history of us screaming at them during their youth sports games and competitions where every time they messed up, Mom and Dad were really upset or disappointed or let down.

Because what's happening, again, is we're teaching them that when you mess up in sport, we're going to respond with this older brother mentality. I do want to use words. I do want to talk. But I want to save the most words probably for when they're the worst at sport. When it goes the most poorly, I want to let them know that they're loved. Like, "Hey, you and Coach may not be good right now, but me and you, we're good. I still love you. Here's what you did well today. I know you went two for 12."

Ed Uszynski: Can I train myself to say, "You were two for 12," and again, this isn't a cop-out. We do sports; we hang out with people at a high level of sports. You were lousy in the game today, but your preparation was great. I watched you during warmups. You did everything that you could have done in warmups to be ready. You had a lousy day; that happens.

And not this, which parents do: "You're two for 12 because the guy ran the wrong routes and he dropped three of your balls. Those guys are losers, man. You were great." That's what parents do. They blame the coaches; they blame the other players.

Dave Wilson: In some ways, and again, when I read your book, I thought this is what you're saying: the sport, whatever sport it is, is a vehicle. It is a vehicle for your goal for your son or daughter to become like Christ. It's just a vehicle.

We know this: 90 or 95 percent of all these kids, even at high school level, are never playing at the next level. They're not gifted enough to play on a full Division I or II or III scholarship. But they have other gifts. But we are so into the sport that we don't think, "Wait, wait, the sport is a gift from God as a vehicle to help get to the Christ-like character we want." When you say it should be play and fun, that should be the goal. This should be fun for them.

Ann Wilson: And if they have a coach that's a horrible coach and mean, like Ed said earlier, it's like, okay, maybe there's something they can learn about playing for somebody that's unreasonable. Or they're better than the kid that's playing in front of them, and it drives you crazy. Guess what? They're going to learn. Rather than, "We're leaving this school, we're going to another school," which is now the deal with NIL.

Dave Wilson: Those are painful times when your kid doesn't start when you feel like they should be. But to let God in it and to say and to pray, "Lord, we don't know what you're doing, and it feels frustrating for our son or whatever, but we can grow in this. You can grow in this."

Brian Smith: We need to have those phrases ahead of time so when it comes, we know what to say. I'm a high school cross-country coach. We just got done with the state championship. Our team took eighth; we were projected to be top five. We had one runner who just didn't have the best day.

As a coach, this is my opportunity as I'm meeting with him right after the race ends. He's coming towards me. What's my posture like? What's my tone like? What are my words like? I have an opportunity to actually embody the gospel to him without actually sharing the gospel.

So I can look him in the eyes, which is what I did. I just grabbed him by the shoulders. I said, "Man, I am so proud of the effort you gave today. I know it didn't go as well as you wanted it to, but man, I love you. I'm so proud of the season that you had today." That's gospel-type posture and language for somebody who's like, "Ugh, I didn't perform," but my coach had a different metric that day for me.

I'm still bummed that we didn't take top five, but those moments when our kids don't perform are great gospel opportunities for us to say, "I know it was not great, but I still love you and I'm still proud of you. Let's figure out how we can get better next year."

Ed Uszynski: That sticks and shapes his life. He won't remember what place they came in 25 years from now, probably. The kid won't. But he probably will remember at least the feeling that came from a coach that said, "Here's grace. Yeah, we weren't as good today; here's what grace feels like. Now go on, let's keep living life."

Sport provides so many opportunities for that. Again, hopefully, people are hearing we're not saying you put your head in the sand; we're not saying there's never any place for correction. Listen, if my kid is disrespectful to a referee, he's getting snatched up before we leave the gym, because he or she is going to go over and actually apologize because we're not going to come back to this moment. You need to go find them right now and you need to look them in the face and say, "I'm sorry I was disrespectful."

Ann Wilson: We're talking character things.

Ed Uszynski: We're doing that right now. What we're saying is most of what we wind up doing has something to do with performance, sport performance, lack of skill execution. That's what we're saying just needs to be lessened.

Ann Wilson: If you're married and maybe you're the culprit that's like, "Oh man, this is so convicting," but a lot of times we can hear this for our spouse. Like, "My husband or wife, they're out of control." So it would be the temptation: "I'm going to send this to them," which could be good. But what are your suggestions?

Ed Uszynski: Read a lot of marriage books. This is a conversation we can have, like maybe we do listen to it together or send it to each other.

Dave Wilson: We had this conversation when Ann was barking at our eight-year-old playing basketball. In the car, it was like, "Honey, it's eight-year-olds playing basketball. It doesn't really matter that much. What is going on here?" So we had a conversation. I'm not saying I was right or wrong, but it was like we wanted to confront it. You don't want your spouse to be that parent.

Ann Wilson: Just asking, what's going on? What do you feel?

Ed Uszynski: What is the communication climate in our relationship right now? This is sensitive, and it's tapping into lots of emotional spots inside of our bodies, lots of wounds and triggers and idols. We've used a lot of big language. So there's probably a lot more going on that does need to be talked about.

But if we don't have a communication climate already in our marriage where we can talk about sensitive things, then no, I probably wouldn't just send the podcast over to them, because that's not going to go well. There needs to be some other healing that needs to take place in other areas of our relationship so that we can have these kinds of conversations.

If you do have a communication climate where we can say, "Hey, I heard a podcast the other day or there was a book written, I think we should read it together and see if we can have this conversation together," then that's why we wrote the book.

Ann Wilson: I was going to say, have you had couples or small groups go through this? Because I'm thinking a small group in a community of people, that would be helpful.

Brian Smith: We're starting to get stories of small groups of churches doing it, Christian schools who are giving it to all the parents who are signing up for a sport that year. That's really good.

To get back to your question, sports has this weird, almost brings out our true self. As a fellow Lions fan, I'm normally like a seven to three, that's my emotional range. But the Lions can bring me to a ten. And the more I've thought about it, that's actually who I am: the ten.

Sports can actually bring out the truer version of Brian than just about anything else in life. If my wife, Lindsay, does not have permission to explore what's going on, like, "Man, why were you so intense today? Do you know your son, after they just lost the playoff game, is crying in bed? Do you know he's probably doing that because he's learned to love the Lions as much as you seem..."

To have this climate where she has permission to say that to me, it's an idol, but it's not just affecting me; I'm actually discipling my kids to care way too much about how this team dressed in blue performs on the screen and it's causing him to cry. That's a problem. But I'm almost blind to it. I need somebody like Lindsay to be able to come at me and give me this blend of grace and truth that'll help me to see that.

Dave Wilson: And a brother. Ask a brother; ask a sister. This would be a great question: "Hey, how do you think I do at my son's games? My daughter's games? How do you experience me? Am I doing a good job? I want you to just tell me I'm an idiot or I'm doing fine."

Ann Wilson: Dave has done that with friends. You called a friend and just said, "Dude, you were an idiot at that game."

Dave Wilson: I sat beside my best friend, played football at Iowa, great guy. His daughter was playing high school basketball where I coach, and he coached with me. Anyway, we're sitting there and he is belligerent toward this ref. It's a little gym, so everybody there heard it. I'm sitting beside him thinking, "This is embarrassing."

He didn't stop doing it. I hit him a couple of times; he just kept doing it because he was at a ten. I called him after the game. I said, "Dude, I'm going to be a brother to you. You were not Christ-like at all. It was embarrassing. Your daughter was embarrassed. The referee thought you were a jerk, and you're supposed to represent..." I just said, "Dude, I'm just telling you, that was... I was embarrassed to sit beside you."

It got real quiet. I'm like, "Okay, this could go really bad." He goes, "You're right. I needed to hear that. I need to apologize to my daughter. If I find that ref..." In the moment he missed it, but he responded and he was different for the rest of his daughter's high school career sitting beside me.

Ed Uszynski: Good for you to take the initiative. We need more of that. That's a takeaway: to have the courage to initiate those kinds of conversations and good for him to have the humility to realize he was being a bit of an idiot.

Can we do that with each other? We need help. That's why we wrote the book in the first place; we realized we needed an intervention. We realized we needed help. So let's admit that. I've got stuff going on in my life that brings out the worst, and it's heading towards our kids.

So let's check that together. And then again, how do we be on the offensive now? That's really what this is, is let's go on the offensive every day that we show up. There's something good happening in here for us to grab onto as parents. Let's find the language to use. Let's keep reiterating our values and what's important to us.

Because our six-year-old's not going to notice the kid on the end of the bench, maybe. But after hearing that for five years, maybe it just becomes part of who he or she is. That's why Hudson is getting asked to pray, because prayer is a part of their life together. And the ninth grader actually has the capacity to replicate what his parents have modeled, what Brian and Lindsay have modeled. Hudson wasn't doing that five years ago, but just constantly living amongst that kind of language and "this is how we operate," it starts to show up hopefully in their life.

Brian Smith: Maybe that kid, Hudson, will be the Detroit Lions chaplain someday. They need somebody praying for them.

Dave Wilson: Let me say this. You guys want people to buy your book, right?

Brian Smith: We absolutely do.

Dave Wilson: Tell them how they can get your book at FamilyLife Today.

Ed Uszynski: They can get it at really any online retailer, so the most common one is just Amazon.

Dave Wilson: I was going to look at the camera and say you can go to FamilyLifeToday.com, click on the link in the show notes, and you can buy their book there. Or you can go to Amazon and get their books there as well. You can get it anywhere books are sold, right? Guys, this is so good. It's so needed. I feel like we're floundering right now in our culture when it comes to youth sports and being a believer. How does that all tie together? This book does that.

Ed Uszynski: We're trying to give people permission to have these conversations. So hopefully it'll start. And people are not having this conversation. That's why I got so excited to endorse it.

Honestly, guys, I thought it'd be just a cute little book. I'm not kidding. I didn't know it was going to go theologically deep. You go through a history of how we got here and I was like, "Oh my goodness, we don't even know this." We could do this for days, talking about this.

So get it. The book is called Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports. Click the link in the show notes at FamilyLifeToday.com.

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Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry. Fifty years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.