What Are We Really Teaching Through Youth Sports?

Our family loves sports. Our five kids started out on swim teams, and then there was the baseball phase. Some of our girls loved ballet and tap, and some of our kids loved cross-country running. We loved the fun, the structure, the family connection, the exercise, and all the lessons kids learn through sports about teamwork, fairness, hard work, and good sportsmanship. And we didn't hate it that our kids were pretty good, actually. That was a new experience for these Engineer and Math Teacher parents. 😂

When it came time for this southern family to make our inevitable foray into football, we started at our children’s public school in North Atlanta. Our boys were new to the sport, and we fully expected them to spend some time on the bench. Playing time is a privilege earned through hard work and dedication, we told them.

Where we started to struggle was when the 6th grade team was already up by 40 points in the fourth quarter, and beginner players still never made it onto the field.

We started asking ourselves: What are the goals of this program? Once victory is already assured, is it more valuable to humiliate the other team than to give your own players an opportunity to develop and grow?

More deeply than that, we were troubled by the behavior being modeled for children. The coach spent practices and games screaming profanities at 11-year-old boys — many of whom had been training year-round for this breathtakingly expensive sport since before kindergarten.

Maybe that’s what it takes to raise a future college athlete. I honestly don’t know.

But I couldn’t see why we would spend hundreds of evenings and thousands of dollars investing in a program that wasn’t helping shape our boys into the kind of men we hoped they would become. I never wanted my sons to believe it was acceptable to disrespect the “little guy” as long as you’re a winner.

We found the right program for our family at Warner Christian Academy. 

The atmosphere was relaxed and fun. The coaches modeled the kind of character I wanted my children to imitate. Call the school and ask for a meeting with the athletic director, and you will see for yourself that it comes straight from the top. Best of all, we saw coaches emphasizing moral character enough to bench a high-performing athlete (ahem…my child) for talking back to a teacher at school.

For us, that was one of the first ways we truly understood what “partnership with parents” means.

It means reinforcing the values parents are already trying to teach at home matters more than whether a child can throw a ball.

It means sports are a tool we use to raise great adults — not just great athletes.

At WCA, we’ve watched our children compete at a high level in cross country, even qualifying for state championship meets. We’ve also watched our 5-foot-tall daughter decide it might be fun to try basketball for the very first time.

Whether they were killing it or getting killed, we saw them in an environment that celebrated hustle, growth, dignity, and sportsmanship.