The Real March Madness

Don’t you love this time of year? Spring is offering hints that it is right around the corner, the days are longer, people are generally in a better mood, and the annual college basketball tournament is imminent. Everywhere you look you are reminded that we are less than a week away from deploying your thought-out, well-planned, excuses to block off your calendar on Thursday and Friday; let’s be reasonable, you can’t work when you need to position yourself in front of a TV so you can freak out over your misguided bracket, all the while, hoping to see a Cinderella team captivate your imagination and crush the spirit of some poor team (other than yours) who didn’t see how a school they had never heard of could beat them; Nothing like a good underdog.

I have historically gone to great links to ensure I am not bothered during the first two days of the tournament. I have changed flights that posed a conflict, I have even scheduled medical procedures that ensure I will be out of pocket and unreachable. There was the year, I scheduled to have my wisdom teeth out on Wednesday afternoon knowing I would be unable to talk for the next two days. Last year, I agreed to have my knee replacement on Tuesday before the start of the tournament, again taking myself out of pocket from the outside world; I was left in bed with my remote and no other technology; good times.

However, as wild as the NCAA tournament can be, in my experience, the real madness isn’t a basketball tournament, it is what happens to our kids starting in March and how parents lose control of their schedule and lives. I like to think I was a good parent, but when my kids got to the age that playing sports was a thing, I learned quickly that their newfound activity meant they were committing to a schedule that would occupy each weekend and several evenings during the week. Whether it is softball, baseball, lacrosse, or AAU travel basketball, kids today play schedules that are extreme.

I am not sure when this began. When I was a young whippersnapper, I played Little League Baseball. We had one game on either Monday or Tuesday night, and one game on Saturday. We never played weekend tournaments or multiple games on the same day. In fact, most of our Saturdays where spent in my neighborhood, not playing organized baseball, but pursing other more interesting, less structured activities: most of the neighborhood boys collected baseball cards we received in packs of bubble gum – the unveiling of who owned what card and who we might be willing to trade with a buddy could take a good hour – I remember countless street games of baseball with a wad of tape as the ball, a stick for a bat, and no parents or coaches around. And oh yea, we rode our bikes, everywhere. After all these years, I can’t remember one game I played in, but I can remember countless memories of being a kid.

It has been some time since my kids were young and my memory of those days isn’t fresh in my mind but I do recall the madness of spending every weekend in March, April, and May traveling to some obscure, uninteresting town so my son’s basketball travel team could play against other kids whose parents looked like they wanted to skip the game and meet in the parking lot for an adult tailgate party. I am not belittling these towns, but Sumter, South Carolina or Shelby, North Carolina in Mid-April wasn’t at the top of my list for places I wanted to visit for three days. Sorry, but I learned to hate those weekends, I could tell my son was having fun, but he also wanted to be a kid; he wasn’t destined to play college ball, but his coach acted like he was preparing kids for a life of hoops. One weekend, there wasn’t anything on the calendar for the travel team; I was ecstatic. I even started to fantasize about all the things I could do on Friday and Saturday night. And then, I got an email from my son’s coach, it read, “Great news, we have a tournament this weekend in Macon, Georgia. Our first game is on Friday at 5:30. We will play Saturday morning at 8:30. After that, we will only have games if we continue to win. Tell your sons to get their minds right.” It was a silly message; I didn’t need to get my son’s head right; it was mine that needed to be convinced not to implode in Macon. What’s worse than the message is the fact that the coach obviously spent time searching the region for an opening he could plug his team into and thus fulfill his mission of consuming every waking hour of my free time. Never mind, Macon at 5:30 on Friday meant we had to drive through Atlanta on a Friday afternoon; it sounded awful then and it still does.

We went on the trip, how could we not, we had committed to playing on the team. However, it was that weekend when I decided that being a full-fledged parent means secretly pulling for your kid’s team to lose, so you can go home. And that is exactly what I did, and I wasn’t alone; other team parents seemed to sit passively, quietly, hoping if not praying, for a loss. We were a sad group of defeated adults, hopelessly trapped in travel ball hell.

When did kids become the primary focus of every family? At what point did team sports and the resulting overbooked schedule determine how families spend their time. It doesn’t seem healthy. As a child if I had told my dad he had to take me out of town so I could play in a basketball tournament, he would have grunted and said, “go mow the yard.” I believe in the value of sports, I also believe kids should be kids, coaches should teach discipline, enhance their player’s skills and have fun – coaches shouldn’t live their lost dreams through the lives of pre-pubescent teenagers -- and parents should still be the center of the family unit.

I’m not an old curmudgeon, really, I’m not. In my view, participating in sports is invaluable and the lessons learned can carry throughout your life. It can also turn kids into single-minded individuals who don’t see the breadth of the world; they see the inside of some tired gym, in the middle of nowhere, and some parents and many coaches inflate the significance of team sports. My son was eleven, he was good enough to play on a travel team, but no threat to earn a scholarship playing ball, basketball should have been constructive, not all-consuming.

There must be some balance; but we live in a world that doesn’t seem to know how to balance anything. Maybe madness isn’t exclusively a spring thing, maybe it is a year-round thing. Worry not, though, if you are trapped in parent purgatory watching your child play endless games and your only escape is if they lose; you can privately hope the official likes the other team and your team loses. No one must know, and maybe your child will be able to go home and do something outside; like catching honeybees or tying strings onto June bug’s legs.