Knowing when to quit

The Q-word shouldn’t scare anyone into thinking they will become a nobody, writes David McGlynn

MY son, Galen, had been shooting hoops since he was 4, barely big enough to hold the ball. Now 11, he’s 1.7m, a head taller than his mum, and light and agile on his feet.

He could sink a basket from anywhere on the driveway, including a shot that passed between the branches of the maple tree on its way to the net. Basketball, I’d long believed, was his destiny.

Galen was a standout his first season at the YMCA, when he was 8.

The next year we signed up for the club team, which turned our six-week league season into six months of intense tournament play.

When it became clear that every player on his team had been a YMCA standout (or had bypassed the Y league altogether), I arranged for him to take private lessons with the captain of the basketball team at the college where I teach.

He played in a three-on-three league over the summer and, at the conclusion of the club season the following spring, he began playing with an Amateur Athletic Union team, a national youth sports organisation that, in addition to increasing the level of competition also expanded our travel radius to a tristate region.

Three weekends a month, from October to July, we crisscrossed the Upper Midwest travelling to tournaments.

All the parents complained about the endless driving, the lost weekends, the hours spent in the bleachers, yet all agreed the sacrifices were worth it. They were the cost of success.

THE POWER OF SPORTS

I was no stranger to the world of hyperintense sports. I’d grown up swimming and had spent my share of weekends camped out in stifling, chlorinated natatoriums.

I was good enough to swim, on scholarship, at a large Division I university where I routinely lost to swimmers who’d go on to win Olympic medals.

Twenty years later, I still swam every morning and I still believed in the power of sports — to focus both body and mind, release stress-busting endorphins, forge lifelong friendships.

Even the defeats were useful. Anyone who’s ever loved a sport has learnt the hard way that sometimes life isn’t fair.

But while I (most of the time) looked forward to swimming practices and meets, the chance to test my mettle against my peers, basketball tournaments made Galen nothing but miserable.

He’d punish himself for days over missed shots and flubbed passes, even if his team prevailed in the end.

Whenever a shot went in, he looked more relieved than happy, grateful not to have screwed up again.

During the lulls between games, he sat by himself, brooding into his iPad. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even me.

For a while I thought I was the problem. I was failing my son by not loving his sport enough for the both of us — until the Saturday I took a seat on the bleachers beside another dad.

He told me his older children had also played competitive basketball; he’d been coming to tournaments for 15 years and figured he had at least a decade more to go.

When I asked if his oldest daughter still played, he laughed and said: “By the end of high school, she was so burnt out she never wanted to see a basketball again. She won’t even watch it on TV with her brothers.”

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

“Builds character,” he said, half-grinning.

I could tell he didn’t believe it, not all the way. I’d begun to wonder whether it was even true.

Did youth sports really impart discipline and determination in ways that other activities — like learning Greek, or taking long hikes in the backcountry, or painting a fence — could not? How often does a childhood sacrificed on the altar of sports really confer advantages in adult life?

“Did she have fun at least?” I asked the dad.

“Some of the time,” he said. “But it wasn’t really about fun.”

To me, it should be, and John Engh, executive director of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, agreed. “Children need diversity both socially and athletically,” he said in an email.

“When their main outlet for both becomes the same activity, then a bad (or even a mediocre) experience can leave them disliking not only their sport but also physical activity of any kind.”

TIME TO QUIT

Driving home from Galen’s final tournament, after nearly a year of constant practices and games, I made a radical proposal.

“Maybe it’s time to quit,” I said. “Basketball isn’t making you happy.”

I’d been afraid to utter the Q-word for months. Saying it felt a little like suggesting we rob a bank.

“If I quit basketball, what sport do I play?” Galen asked.

“How about NO sport,” I said. “At least not for a while. You can play basketball with friends all you want but you don’t have to play on a team. We can spend our weekends camping and backpacking, skiing in the winter. You know, things we actually enjoy.”

He hesitated. “Every kid at my school plays something.”

If he didn’t have a sport, he continued, “I’ll be a nobody.”

“I’m only trying to consider how our light is spent,” I told Galen.

He looked at me. “What’s that mean? Is that poetry?”

“It’s John Milton,” I said. I’d taught a few of his sonnets the previous spring. “It’s about accepting who we are.”

Galen rolled his eyes. “I just want to go home.”

Over the weeks and months that followed, the idea grew on Galen. Freed from practice, he took to riding his bike and skateboard for hours, turning into the driveway as the last of the dusklight drained from the sky, his cheeks ruddy and his shoulders relaxed.

He spent far more time outside without basketball weighing on his mind and schedule. He didn’t become a nobody or stop being an athlete.

Instead, both his definition of sports and his circle of friendships expanded.

In the fall, he signed up for a kayaking class and went out for the junior high crosscountry team, a far more reasonable eightweek season. When the snow fell, he joined a skiing club.

Each new activity introduced him to new friends, and in some cases gave him a chance to hang out with his old basketball teammates without the pressure to win a game.

This summer he’s heading to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota for a week-long canoeing trip.

Now that the weather’s warm, Galen’s back to shooting hoops in the driveway.

More than once, I’ve looked out the kitchen window and spotted him dribbling the ball between his legs while talking trash to an imaginary adversary.

He fakes right, spins to the left, stops on a dime, swishes a jumper from behind the garbage cans. When he exultantly raises his arms above his head, full of joy and confidence, I know the decision to quit was the right one. A slam dunk.