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[quote=Anonymous]Sports are all about “moments” for performance.  Similar to acting or performing music.  You may get more chances, but you do not get to repeat.  Life in general has many such moments as well.  That is one of the reasons kids sports are helpful things.  They serve as practice and help show the value of preparation.

What a parent can do is help with training and practice.  And, helping your kid see the value of practice and realize that gains in skill and ability very often take a long time and come at different times and in different ways to different people.  Kids need to learn the value of practice.

Try this with a 12 year old.  Borrow an instrument that he does not play.  A violin perhaps.  Hand it to him with the music for a decently complex piece that a high school orchestra may use.  Hand him the instrument and tell him to play it.  He will refuse of course.  Why?  He does not know how.  He has never seen someone play a violin before?  Of course he has.  Try it.  He will refuse or perhaps try and make some scratching sounds.  Show him a video of your local high school orchestra concert.  Those are kids just a few years older than him.  Perhaps older brothers and sisters of kids he knows.  They can play.  Why can’t he?  Obviously, because they took lessons and practiced and practiced and reached the point where they can play.  Now pull up a video of a young prodigy about his age.  Why is that kid so good?  Well, lots and lots of practice of course, but also lots of talent.  Is that kid also great at baseball?  Nope.  Probably his picking up a glove would be exactly like your kid picking up a violin.

Twelve is a good age for these discussions to start. They can go on for years.  What do you like?  What are you good at?  What physical abilities do you bring to the activity that help or hinder you?  And, how hard and long are you willing to work at something?  Practice and effort can make most folks competent and even successful at something, but you have to add talent at that something to become very good.  That applies to all sorts of things in life.

So - for a 12 year old with sports - how do you become “better” at something?  Practice.  In soccer there used to be a guideline that it took 10,000 hours of practice to become a reasonably skilled player.  Think about that for a second. In the US most youth travel soccer programs will have 2 practices a week, 90 minutes each, and then a game for about 30 weeks out of the year.  That’s about 150 hours of that 10,000.  What it means is that you have to work on stuff on your own.

Now, maybe your kid does not care enough about it to work on their own (practice).  That’s fine.  Work on stuff that they like and that they may have talent to excel a little bit in.  This also is a big parent role.  You need to be continually assessing and reassessing your kid’s interests, ability and talents to put them into activities that will work for them.  Always recognizing that there are lengthy learning curves involved.

So - no - it is not at all surprising that a kid who has 5 pop ups a week hit to them in practice misses up if one is hit in a game.  If the kid had caught 500 pop ups before, then 501 is in the glove.  Professional baseball teams want judge a batter over 1,000 at bats to try and get a feel for how they hit.  A 12 year old little leaguer might get 30 at bats in a season.  They need hours and hours swinging - recognizing that a kid is going to get tired and lose his form after about 30 swings.  A kid who is walking up to the plate with the equivalent of 200 at bats behind him in the last couple months is going to be miles ahead of a kid walking up there with the 10 at bats.

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