Reply to Can someone explain Saturday morning soccer to me?

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[quote=Anonymous]OK I think a couple posters wondered, "What is it with team sports?" I think I can answer this Q. I grew up playing sports - yes, hiking and skiing, but also team soccer and basketball (and swim team, but oh my goodness, I loathed it!). Anyways, soccer was and is super special for me. I grew up in the 70s and we were really one of the first generations of girls to have access to team sports. And soccer was kind of new in this country at the time. I had an AMAZING coach - one of the moms - who took an interest in all of us. Her daughter was a completely natural athlete and ridiculously good looking, a total alpha type with potential to be a mean girl, and yet she NEVER acted badly to her teammates. I was friends with every kind of kid on that team. Different SES, races, neighborhoods. We all worked our asses off to accomplish goals and we really supported each other. It made my high school experience so much richer to know these girls. I didn't play in college although I did walk on to my D3 school's team. Decided I didn't want to dedicate the time to playing. I have wanted to share that experience with my kids. They both play (girl and boy). Different levels of play. I do not have my kids play so they can get into college. I think soccer is so omnipresent it truly would be hard to distinguish yourself in that sport. However, I absolutely love the discipline, the camaraderie, the toughness I learned from playing sports. When your team's place in a tournament is on the line, can you play well even though 2 of your toenails have fallen off? My mental toughness 100% comes from playing sports. Also my sense of how to work with others, how to ensure that the goal at hand (eg winning the game or scoring) happens -- sometimes at great cost (learning to pace oneself, and the need for bursts of work to accomplish said goal). But most of all it's nostalgia for me. I also am an early riser. But my H absolutely is not. Yet we both love to go watch our kids play. I would recommend translating whatever I said about team sports to whatever activity it is you enjoy the most and feel most nostalgic about, and then share that with your kids. I also wax pretty nostalgic about backcountry camping, so I think the hiking sounds great. If it's not in your DNA, it's not and you don't need to force it. There are other team sports opps that won't require you to give up Saturday mornings. It is a lovely social bonding experience for kids with their peers but by no means the only one.[/quote]

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