Kids are asking to do too many sports, do you limit?
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Anonymous
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My kids is asking to play 4+ sports a season.
Basketball, Lax, Flag football, Baseball and tennis. best advice in these situations? Kid is 8. How do we start narrowing down? |
Anonymous
| Which does he like best. You can’t be on that many teams. It’s not fair to the other teammates. Flag is typically a fall sport. Baseball and lax are spring, so pick one tennis lessons if he has time. Basketball is a winter sport. |
Anonymous
| 1 team sport a season for an 8 year old. Don’t do travel where you are expected to play year round. He has to pick between baseball and lax for spring. Tennis you can probably do at the same time. |
Anonymous
| At that age my kid did soccer, flag and base spring and fall. It was a lot having three games on a Saturday. Once he switched to travel baseball, House games were Sundays and rec baseball and soccer and flag were Saturday. Winter was easy basketball only. Now that he’s. 12, he’s stopped soccer and spring flag, but travel base takes a lot of time. |
Anonymous
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My 9 year old is in three right now- flag, basketball and swim. He is obsessed with flag, and I want to be sure he does a mix of sports, so we actually encourage at least 2 a season. I honestly think he would quit everything else and do flag 7 days/week if it were possible.
We try to balance letting him do what he loves with knowing that different sports is better for his body and mind. If there are conflicts, we let him prioritize what to go to. That got a lot harder with my older kids in upper elementary, as participation was usually required. So we'll see how long we can keep this up! |
Anonymous
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You limit based on your families capacity. It is possible to play 4 sports in one season if they are casual 1x week obligations, your kid enjoys them, and you dont have any or many other kids. If you cannot support his transportation needs, or it interferes with other family obligations, or if he is tired or grumpy or complains about going to any of them, or if the team schedules conflict and he wouldn't be able to be dedicated to all, you put limits in place.
I have a 10 year old only child who has at times played 4 sports in one season. It was soccer, flag, tennis, and hockey. Soccer was twice weekly the rest were once weekly and none interfered. Tennis and hockey were lessons/clinics so didnt involve game times. But it meant he couldn't do as many other social things and so naturally he cut it down. Most seasons now he plays 2 sports at a time, and they are more competitive with multiple practices or games. If your child has one more competitive sport that usually means you won't be able to do much else. Look at the different seasons when things are offered and different places too, and maybe he cant be on teams for all of the sports but he could do a clinic or camp instead. You can offer to sign him up for a lax spring break camp instead of a full time team. |
Anonymous
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Man. That's a lot especially if all the same season. My kids played different sports and different activities but they didn't overlap.
DD did dance year round and then soccer in the fall/spring and hoops in the winter. As she got older, she totally committed to soccer. DS did soccer and basketball, but basketball was in the winter/summer and soccer in the fall/spring. |
Anonymous
I don’t get it. Those seasons don’t all overlap? |
Anonymous
| be the parent. Just say no. Teach your kid to honor their commitments. The only way they can do that is to play 1 team sport a season. The suggestion above for the overlapping seasons to do one sport as a camp is a good one. |
Anonymous
| Humble brag say wut? |
Anonymous
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What's the goal?
They're going to have to choose and prioritize. At 8 I think it's perfectly okay to not play yearround and kids should explore and do different sports and things. But in particular sports, unless you're just doing classes, are going to conflict with each other. Chances are there will be games on the weekends and a high chance they'll overlap. Once you go to higher level, one team can have multiple practices per week and every coach/sport wants kids to play yearround. Like I said, at 8 you can resist that for now. In the baseball rec league my kids played in and from what I can tell from a similar league, I'm not a fan of Fall ball. It's kind of unofficial and actually might not even have practices and just have games one day a week. Part of the issue is that the fall season gets really dark fast in the evenings and cold. So I just don't see the value in Fall ball. Spring there is more value. But by that I mean, at the rec level we did, there were two practices per week and can be three games a week, with some games during the weekdays and going past 10 pm. With make up games, some weeks we had four or five games for a particular week. It would be a full week of baseball. MAYBE you can look at it as due to the high volume, you can miss it once in a while. But as other poster said, it won't be fair to the other people on the team if your family did that. Basketball depends on the level and I think there might 8u or 9u yearround options. There are more rec league options in the winter though, such as the city and county teams and can be a great value and experience. Some aau teams only play a couple of tournaments during the nonwinter season. ie you might have two practices a week and then four or five weekends in the season with full weekend tournaments. This type of schedule is a little bit easier to coordinate. Tennis lessons were a bit easier to fit in if we really wanted to. Like I said, classes for all sports are more of a fixed schedule that you know every week. I was considering private lessons for my kid which were about $60/hour. But was glad that they changed their mind about their interest in it. And I don't really know anything about flag football or lacrosse. The thing on top of all of this is, depending on the goal, your kid will need to practice at home too. Or else they're just going to be there and won't have much growth from season to season. It's like homework, coaches and other families can tell which kids practice at home and improve throughout the season. Kids don't improve by just going to team practice and games and not picking up the ball or glove in between. If your kid is 8 and you're asking about this, I'm assuming you all are just starting out and exploring. If doing this I recommend doing rec for now and can play each sport in it's traditional seasons And when you know your game and practice schedules for each season, maybe you can add in classes for one of the other sports. And just a warning, I think a lot of first time parents are kind of shocked to find out that for a lot of teams, you sign up first and won't know your practice or game schedule until a week before it starts. Part of this is due to leagues needing to have their final/full registration to be able to assign teams, practice permits and accomodate game schedule requests. Once your child and your family starts to narrow down the focus, you can maybe decide which ones you want to do yearround. And possibly juggle other sports and activities with it. To a certain extent, I'm not a fan of it but know other families that successfully does it. Oh yeah, there are some groups of families that go sport to sport each season. ie in the fall their group of kids form a soccer team, in the fall they all play basketball together and in the spring play baseball. Maybe you can look for something like that. Also in some of those cases they do play some sports yearround. But since the parents are coaches, they're usually able to arrange and request a schedule so the different sports don't conflict with each other. Although sometimes you see jump in a caravan together immediately after one game to rush to another. Hope your family has fun and enjoys the experience! |
Anonymous
| One sport per season only. |
Anonymous
| No sports. Tell them to do something productive. |
Anonymous
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this would be crazy!
one sport per season! we did two basketball leagues one season and it SUCKED! |
Anonymous
| Show him how much they conflict with each other schedule-wise and have him pick. When a kid wants to be active, let them. |