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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]An athletic kid at 10 can start a new sport and do well. This is especially true of girls, sports where there aren't huge numbers of competitors, sports where raw athletic ability outweighs technical skill (e.g. soccer and basketball), and sports where people usually start later, anyway (e.g. wrestling).

Johnny Weir got a package of group skating lessons at 10 and won the US men's figure skating title three times.

Mason Cox, a pro Australian Rules Football player from the USA, was only a couple of months from hearing the sport existed before scoring his first goal in his first game, in front of ten thousand+ fans.[/quote]

The thing that most people don't want to hear is that genetics trump hard work and dedication 9 times out of 10 in sports. A kid can constantly train and be dedicated from the earliest age possible and a naturally athletic kids who is bigger, stronger, and faster and pick up a sport and take the dedicated kid's roster spot without much effort. Around middle and especially in high school you see a lot of this. [/quote]

I accept this is true and I do because it’s ‘easier’ for me because I have a girl (also 8, like OP’s son), who had gross motor delays, where I spent most of the 6 years of her life taking her to PT, EI meetings, therapies. We enrolled her in swim lessons and have her play basketball on a girl’s team and she’s a fairly good swimmer, and can mostly keep up with the team and scored in a game, which is amazing, and even stole the ball. She’s also small for her age, though we are not particularly small folk over here. She in all likelihood will not be the star athlete in anything but she’s learned a love of water, of playing, and of really being persistent. She can ride a bike, she started an after school tennis activity 2 months ago,  having never picked up a racket, and ‘scored’ recently, whatever that means.

She may always be ‘average’ with that stuff - maybe with other stuff, I don’t know yet. She gets good grades and feedback and was invited to apply to G&T but we declined because our school is already pretty nuts. I’m typing this all out because I feel intense anxiety at times and worry about her neurology, since no cause was found for the delays, and wonder if she’ll always be one of the smallest (she’s also one of the youngest in her grade, and there’s zero red-shirting here). But when I know everything I’ve written is true, I am also so proud. She’s so cheerful and resilient and as my DH said, “balanced.” She takes things well, hiccups don’t end in tantrums, she can roll with things. I think that quality may come because of the initial adversity that is now ‘average.’ But she’s not average in the way some braggart parents would want me to feel. I don’t feel that way because I know that their opinions are meaningless and that people who scrounge and eye each other and one-up aren’t anyone I could ever actually respect. It is what it is, OP. I’m guessing we could probably connect on our experiences.

The person who said the world needs J Crew salesmen too - I hope a series of rats and squirrels chew through the wiring in hour house off and on over the next few years, at random. Bless your heart.[/quote]

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