Sporting chance
THERE is a saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Our house, like many of yours, is a sport-filled house. Over the years I have complained about the number of sporting commitments we have found ourselves signed up for with our children. I have also complained about the time and kilometres spent driving them to their sporting commitments and watching sport, sport and more sport from the sidelines.
But then COVID-19 happened and sport stopped.
In the past three months there has been respite from the chaos and the kilometres. There has also been a realisation about how important sport is to our house and how much it gives to us.
Within a week of scheduled sport ceasing, each of our children had created a training plan for themselves. It wasn’t the grownups setting the plans, it was them. Sport has taught them many things including discipline and commitment and the importance of personal health and fitness. They know they must do the work to achieve their personal and team goals.
Sport has also provided support and community. Within a week of COVID-19 shutting sport down, City West Falcons, a Victorian Netball League club based in Altona with whom our daughter Bella is a training partner, provided her with a weekly fitness schedule. It involved running commitments but also required attendance at multiple Zoom training sessions a week. The Falcons were really generous and extended participation in these sessions to siblings and house mates.
For our house that was an amazing contribution to not only the ease w i th which our children were able to support their fitness. It provided company and a training partner for Bella while doing the sessions at home. It also gave her siblings a shared experience not only during the workout but the next day when their arms or legs were sore from the workout!
The Zoom sessions were pretty vocal and participants who performed well and gave 100 per cent to the workout would often get a shout out. In the alternative if you were slacking off you would be likely to receive some prompt and refreshing feedback.
Our younger two children participated regularly and soon the people conducting the workout learnt their names. They were immune from neither the praise nor the feedback and when they got a shout out, it made their day. Imagine the joy of a 10-year-old getting a shout out mid routine from a VNL championship player. It was heaven for her. Watching them have fun with sport, even if it was via a screen, was heaven for me.
For all my complaints about driving endlessly, I realised that sport gave me time in the car with our children to talk. We all know that teenagers are often not as chatty as we would like and the opportunity to be in the car with them for an hour, one on one and talk about school and work and family and life has been missed.
Sport also has provided a group of friends, not just for the children but for us grown-ups as well. You find yourself spending a lot of time with other parents on the sidelines. There are children who our son Harvey has played basketball with since prep who are still in his team in year 7. That is eight years of carpooling and getting to know each other and spending time together every week of the sporting year. They are not just Harvey’s mates but ours as well. I have missed their company and camaraderie on the sidelines.
Yesterday, contact sport, training and competition was able to resume for people 18 years or younger due to the lower rate of COVID-19 transmission among younger people.
For our house all of the children’s sporting commitments have been given a green light, even though their resumption is in a limited way or a shorter season or without us parents being able to cheer them on the sidelines.
Yesterday was not only a good day in sport but a good day for all those families who have missed it, much more than they ever thought they would.
Rachel Schutze is a principal lawyer at Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. (Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.)