Competitive basketball saved our son

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, or see myself write it, but team sports have truly saved my kid’s life.

Really. Without team sports, he’d probably be an insecure, angry mess who might have been kicked out of his Jewish day school, a result of his interactions with an educational system that from a very early age did not know how to handle this bright, friendly, energetic, lovable boy. (You can read a bit more about his story here.)

But the quasi-redemptive kind of team sports I’m talking about isn’t the house league, everybody-makes-the-team and everyone-gets-a-trophy variety.

I’m referring to rep sports, which require you to work on your game (whatever it may be), risk rejection through a series of gruelling tryouts, and then earn your playing time (and your coach’s respect) with ongoing effort and hard work.

Before my wife and I had kids, and before we had two boys, we thought rep sports were too expensive and required too much of a commitment from both parents and kids at the expense of more important pursuits, like school. We considered rep sports and their high number of practice hours to be a drain on both time and money – two of our most precious family commodities.

I also thought of rep sports as being entirely populated by gung-ho, overly competitive, conservative parents who foolishly encourage their kids’ misguided dreams about some day playing professional sports.

But that was before our (then nine-year-old) son asked to play competitive basketball.

Some necessary background: it’s something of an understatement to say that our son can sometimes be very challenging for teachers, principals and his parents. Before basketball, he experienced periodic (and sometimes near-constant) head-butting with people who tried to discipline him, often for the crime of just being himself. It was beginning to severely, and perhaps irreparably, damage his self-esteem. (Just in case you were wondering, testing that we had done during a fit of frustration after an unsuccessful first experience at sleepover camp revealed that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD – is not his issue. This came as something of a shock to his elementary school principal, who was prone to seeing all unruly boy behaviour as a function of that overdiagnosed problem, and he didn’t believe the testing was accurate.)

Fortunately for our son’s budding basketball career – and despite having been born on Dec. 24, which usually makes him the youngest person in his grade – at 5 feet 4 inches tall, he’s big for an 11-year-old.

In school, as a tall, husky boy born very late in the calendar year, he’s always come across to teachers, principal and other parents as being, to put it charitably, rather immature. I could often sense many people wondering why this rather big boy was always acting like such a little kid.

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Basketball has taught him about teamwork and diversity, provided much-needed exercise, and helped him hone his obvious skills of learning to think quickly in real time. And overall, it has given him a sense of accomplishment in an arena other than school that he can carry over into different parts of his life.

Indeed, he has become so confident in his basketball abilities that last fall he tried out for and made a middle school team comprising kids from grades 6 to 8, and he was by far the youngest on the squad. His coach is looking to him to be a future star, and our son couldn’t be more proud of himself about that.

Although the experience has been largely positive, there are drawbacks to rep sports: it’s expensive, it does take up a lot of his time, and sometimes his schoolwork does suffer. Our son has also had run-ins with sports bullies on his own teams and others, although learning how to deal with them constructively has been a life lesson for him. And there are definitely some overzealous parents out there (myself included – I’m not entirely proud to admit that it’s hard for me not to get a bit carried away rooting for his team sometimes).

As well, we’re not under any illusions that he gives full effort at every single practice, that the coaching is always perfect (the biggest complaint some parents have is that rep coaches push the kids too hard), or that the interactions with the other players and parents are always optimal, particularly with the aforementioned sports bullies and wacky moms and dads lurking about.

In addition, his rep team loses more than it wins (his school team, however, went undefeated this year until finally losing the championship game).

But he has learned to work hard and has seen the results that can come from striving toward a goal. That’s given him a basis of self-confidence that he’s using to succeed in other parts of his life, including academics and social situations. It’s also given him something that differentiates him from his older brother, who has a reputation as being something of a brainiac.

He’s talking about playing in the NBA, and although we know the chances of that happening are small, my wife and I aren’t discouraging him. That’s because we’re happy to see that his childlike optimism has returned, and because now that we’ve seen how hard he’s capable of working when he sets a goal for himself, anything seems possible for him.

In sum, he’s happy, confident and having fun. And we have our son back – the cute, cuddly, playful, lovable kid that we’d previously only seen in spurts over the past few years.

We’ll be cheering him on for as long as he wants to play.