Organized Sports Suck

I love to see my children happy. I live to see them healthy, well-adjusted and enjoying themselves. I want them to develop life-long skills now, and I want them to always feel comfortable in their own skin.

I’m a mother, after all.

But here’s the problem: I despise organized sports. If there were a magic potion they could drink every morning that would give them all of the admittedly wonderful social and physical benefits of organized sports — rather than actually playing those sports — I’d give it to them in a heartbeat. And that is saying a lot, considering that getting my kids to swallow liquid medicine that comes in delicious flavors like cotton candy and grape is like a scene out of The Exorcist.

Now, we’re not a super active family. The kids aren’t involved in 500 activities during the week and our weekends aren’t solely spent shuttling the kids from sport to sport. But, they do each pick a couple of sports that interest them and we try them out for fit. Some fit the kids better than others, but most of them don’t fit me in the least. I’m finding this whole sport thing incredibly overrated.

The drama starts at home. I swear, getting my kids ready for their Saturday morning tennis lesson is the hardest I work all week. While the kids scream, “but, I don’t wanna go” and “can’t we just skip it,” I find myself running around the house looking for the rackets that I swore were in the hall closet just 7 days ago and the socks whose mates have mysteriously disappeared.

Once we arrive at tennis, the torture continues. First, there’s all of the other people who paid good money to play tennis, under the assumption that the rotten kids in the court next to them would not be hitting balls into their space every five minutes. We lob balls their way, and they lob looks of death our way.

Then, there is always an injury, and, usually, one of my kids is behind it. Let’s just say that Ben doesn’t have the greatest depth perception and is known to swing his racket a little wide. Wide, as in right at another kid’s face.

Baseball has been no better. Neither has soccer. Both sports require that I do even more laundry than I already do. Who the hell thought white was a wise choice for baseball pants, anyway?! I’m thinking about going on strike and just letting my kids wear the same, grass-stained uniforms to their games each week. Maybe we can make a game out of it, like “name that grass stain,” where the kids have to recollect the date and place of each stain.

That would require actually being in possession of their uniforms, though. My kids, unlike their team mates, aren’t even in their approved uniforms most of the time, because we’ve inevitably lost them weeks before. For most of last fall’s soccer season, my kids wore green shirts, because they were on the green team but I had NO idea where their uniforms went. Probably the same place as the missing socks. But, a tad more expensive to replace.

Plus, no offense to my charming children, but watching them clumsily run around and miss balls is far less fascinating than my iPhone or a rest. If it were up to them, my eyes would be glued on them the whole time. If it were up to me, I’d be napping in the car.

Dreaming of weekends that didn’t involve sports.