Paying tribute to our strong children

‘IT’S not the same though, it doesn’t mean anything,’ said one of my sons the other day when I was asking him to come out to the garden to do some hurling.

As we chatted, he explained to me that as entertaining as it must surely be to fire shots past his father, it’s just not the same as playing games or training with his friends, and nothing else will come close, not our games together, not Facebook skill competitions, not WhatsApp group challenges.

He’s tried them all and I can see it before my eyes that he’s drifting closer to Fortnite and the iPod than to his beloved hurling and football. Same with the younger lad. With Fortnite you have competition, you have engagement, you have the rush. Without the sense of competition, the urgency, the physical demands, all the temporary replacements since the arrival of Covid-19 pale in comparison.

The old saying, ‘it’s not the winning but the taking part that counts’ rings true for me here. I was always skeptical about that adage. Surely winning is one of the most important things in life, but I understood that for young kids it should be about enjoyment and learning the skills.

In these strange times it has become abundantly clear that it’s the taking part that counts, and if the GAA or any other sporting organisation could somehow make it possible to open up the pitches as Jess Brennan has so eloquently made the case for elsewhere in this sports section, then I believe that thousands upon thousands of children will benefit hugely. If not I fear that we may be doing untold damage in terms of their sporting development.

You have to hand it to the children, though. You have to give them massive credit for how they’ve handled this situation for the most part. Working on the (perhaps dangerous) assumption that every house is kind of like my house, then there have been the rows, the tantrums, the door slamming and the storming off right across the country – and that’s just the parents.

But the children have lost almost everything they knew, so bad moods and the occasional flare up are perfectly normal in my book. School... gone, friends... gone, more or less. Again, WhatsApp and Facetime are just not good enough as substitutes. You must have the eye contact, the physical presence, the reality. Sport... gone, hobbies... gone, holidays... gone. Everything wiped out in a matter of moments.

To me, the children are the unsung heroes along with the frontline workers. They’ve had to try and work out the magnitude and the reality of this through snatched snippets of conversation inevitably heard between adults or glimpsed moments of news on TV or conversations on Snapchat or Facetime or WhatsApp on their phones with friends as well as the measured conversation you try to have with them as a parent.

It’s the children who are watching helplessly as their incredibly important years slip by. Players of Féile age never to know the magic of that experience, players at all underage grades who would have been in their ‘strong’ year will have missed out on that chance to develop their skills, their instincts that will serve them well come the next age and eventually adult sport. If, and that’s still an if, contact sport comes back by next year they will find themselves in the starting year of that age group. If the nightmare scenario of contact sport not returning comes true then that’s two years of sporting development lost and unless there is a new way of coaching and training implemented then I can’t see how WhatsApp groups can save the day. They certainly haven’t in my house.

I have to applaud the children. I see it in houses around me and in my own family. They’re there and they are somehow able to manage in these weird times where mammy or daddy or both are now the teachers and the parents and the friends and the arch enemies, and all within the same five minutes on occasion. As mad as that madness might seem to adults, imagine how hard it must be for the child to come to terms with that.

But they will, and they do, and they will probably do it a lot quicker and smoother than most adults. They’ll grab the hurl or the ball or whatever and head outside and play that imaginary game in their heads like my youngest does. He’ll hear that beautiful roar of the crowd as the ball sails between the sticks and lands on my newly planted vegetable seeds and he’ll glance nervously towards the house expecting to be reprimanded.

But I’m trying not to give out. They’ve enough to endure without listening to me lamenting the loss of some vegetables. I can live without a row of peas. They’re living without everything they once knew to be almost their entire worlds.