Sportsmanship

You can learn a lot from your kids.

Last weekend my son, Alex, attended a curling camp in Rice Lake.

Sports camps are common during the summer months with youth athletes attending them to work on skill development and get ready for the upcoming season. Given the relatively few facilities that have ice over the summer, you have to travel a bit further to get camp opportunities for curling compared to basketball, football or tennis.

There was a sizable number of campers this year ranging from middle school age to high school. A handful of entire teams were participating together and organizers tried to keep them together as they worked with them.

Throughout the weekend the attendees were kept busy working with the coaches and instructors. On Sunday afternoon they broke the participants into teams and had them put the skills learned into practice in a game situation.

They called out the names of the people who would be playing on each of the teams, noting that because the math didn’t come out even, there would be a few fiveperson teams with players swapping in and out.

The teams gathered to meet with coaches beforehand and I noticed that instead of getting assigned to a team with high schoolers, Alex was put with a group of middle schoolers. Not that it was hard to tell since he was at least 18 inches taller than the next tallest kid playing.

There are a lot of people, myself included, who would have reacted poorly to being sent to the proverbial kiddie table and seen it as a slap in the face or some lessthan- subtle commentary about playing ability or skills. I will admit that I was internally fuming on my son’s behalf and sending increasingly grumpy text messages to my wife.

Fortunately, Alex is a better sport than I am. Instead of complaining about playing with the younger kids or walking off the ice, Alex remained a team player, letting the kid who was picked as skip call the shots and took his place in the rotation, working to make the shots he was called.

As the game progressed, Alex stepped up to a leadership role, just like he does when volunteering as a student coach of the middle age school curling program here in Medford.

Between shots he talked to his teammates and offered advice. He did the same when the skip called a shot, suggesting alternatives.

Rather than have a tantrum over a perceived slight, he rose to the challenge looking at it as an opportunity to have fun playing the sport he loves and helping other people do the same. They all exchanged high-fives on good shots and you could almost hear the groans from the narrowly missed shots. But the broad smiles were genuine.

When it was his turn to be rotated off the ice, Alex remain engaged, watching intently and talking with the coach and pointing out ways they could improve how they were playing. He was focused on what they needed to do in order to win their game, not over any animosity toward their opponent, but because games are a lot more fun when you are on the winning side.

When the games ended they called the participants into the warming room and announced various awards handing out small trophies for things like most improved form or best sweeping.

It was perhaps not surprising then when Alex got called up to receive an award for sportsmanship, with the organizers noting that since they had full teams participating, Alex, along with others who were there as individuals often got bumped around. Rather than complain about it, Alex took this as an opportunity to learn more about the other participants and to keep trying his best.

As parents, we want our children to succeed and be the best they can be. We live vicariously through their triumphs and failures, trying to help them avoid the mistakes we made along the way. We push them, with the selfish hope of wanting them to be better versions of ourselves, forgetting our true job is to empower them to be the best version of themselves.

You learn a lot from your kids. In Alex’s case, this weekend I received a refresher course on sportsmanship.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.