This was the scene beside the tennis court where Dave Krueger and I were swatting tennis balls at each other this morning in one of our hardest fought matches of the year. We may have fancied ourselves as two racket-wielding warriors, but the biggest battles were being fought by an array of pee wee football teams. . . and from what I could tell, some of the roughest stuff was happening not in their games but rather in their practices. It was especially hard to ignore when a coach on the field immediately adjacent to us very loudly and angrily threw two of his players off the field for messing around – and then had to contend with their tears. Part of me wanted to run right over and give the coach a piece of my mind and tell the crying boys to go find themselves a decent team with a decent coach who wasn’t some Sgt. Carter wanna-be. I managed to suppress the urge to interfere, partly to avoid having all my teeth knocked out two weeks before my Luther class reunion, but I’m still a bit dismayed at the thought of this hot-head coach working with such young children. On the other hand, I think the boys appeared to be even younger than they actually are because of the odd sight of them in full football regalia, including football helmets that seem half as big as the rest of their bodies. In fact, as the tiny, helmeted players gathered around their coach for a last pep talk, they looked for all the world like those bubble-headed aliens gathered around Richard Dreyfus at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Someone else with some experience in sports for young children can comment more intelligently than I can on whether or not football is a good idea for really young children. To my admittedly amateur eye, there didn’t seem to be too much teamwork occurring- nor very much exercise- and obviously next-to-nothing in terms of actual football skills on display. In fact, I wonder if part of all this is driven by our amusement at the sight of little kids in full- blown football uniforms . . . something akin to the sight of seeing an 8-year-old girl dressed up in her mother’s high heel shoes. Of course this grouchy perspective is coming from someone who still can’t throw a football himself.
I suppose there is something to be said for toughening up a youngster – for encouraging obedience and attentiveness – and for getting kids outside and away from the tyranny of the television screen. . . and I hope that those little boys were deriving some meaningful benefit from what they were doing. Heck, I hope that they were just having plain old FUN. . .
I know I was having fun this morning , even on the losing end of the score 6-2. (It was closer than the score sounds- which everyone says but in this case it’s true.)