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Learning lessons of resilience on a basketball court

JOHN DEMONT jdemont@herald.ca @CH_coalblackhrt

My reaction to this 2023 sequence of events is the same as it was 15 years earlier: parents do their kid a disservice by coddling them.

I coached kids' basketball for 15 years, sometimes for two different teams during the run of a season.

In all that time, I had, to my knowledge, one parental complaint. It was after a practice where I made the players run the same “killer drills” my coaches made my teammates and I run when we acted up: starting under one end of the court, without stopping, everyone ran and touched the lines progressively further down the gymnasium, returning to the starting spot between each trip. It was meant to leave the players gassed, hence the name.

My memory is that my long-ago order was born out of frustration.

The boys on the team were goofing around, as teenaged boys tend to do, refusing to listen to their volunteer coach (me).

Brandon MacInnis, on the other hand, had an actual policy: players who were late for practice for the Hantsport School junior high boys' basketball team ran what he called “line drills,” which sound an awful lot like what I just described.

A few weeks ago, some boys on his team were indulging in a little locker room horseplay, ensuring practice got underway a little late. When they stepped into the gym, I understand that Coach MacInnis told the boys to get running.

A day later, the long-time volunteer was unceremoniously dismissed from his coaching position by school officials who said only that they disagreed with his disciplinary measures.

Now, I don't know any more about the situation than what I have read on SaltWire, but I suspect some parent was outraged about MacInnis ordering their little darling to run up and down the basketball court a few times.

My reaction to this 2023 sequence of events is the same as it was 15 years earlier: parents do their kid a disservice by coddling them.

By that I mean the attitude that their son or daughter, by virtue of simply being their son or daughter, is exceptional and deserving of special treatment. That all of the speed bumps must be removed, and all risks eradicated from their lives.

LACK OF RESILIENCE

There are those who feel that kids today — did I really just type that? — are “bubble-wrapped,” to borrow a term Dalhousie social work professor Michael Ungar uses to describe a generation of children that, due to helicopter parenting or whatever other term you choose, lack the necessary resilience to rebound when things fail to go their way.

I'm no social worker, but anyone can see that something has changed.

In the early 1960s, when I attended the school standing next door to our current Halifax home, I recall just one student being met by their parents when classes ended for the day.

Like pint-sized Sir Edmund Hillarys and Tenzing Norgays, the rest of us put our heads down and resolutely plodded the few blocks home without adult supervision, or, if I am not mistaken, the help of a single crossing guard.

Now, when the kids come streaking out of the doors at lunchtime and after school, dozens of parents are waiting to help them safely negotiate Halifax's mean streets.

After school, I have observed, if kids hang around to use the playground equipment, mom or dad is almost always standing vigilantly nearby.

This is admirable. It is human nature for parents to want to look after their offspring.

Social media makes a child abduction in Slovenia feel like it happened just down the block.

MORE FRIGHTENING WORLD

The world seems like a scarier place today than when I was growing up, and the most that a Protestant kid from Lemarchant Elementary had to fear was getting a puck in the mouth from one of the Catholic kids who attended nearby Saint Thomas Aquinas school.

Schools today are way more cosmopolitan and inclusive than they once were. Mercifully the afterschool sectarian battles of my neighbourhood are gone too.

Except you have to wonder what is lost when kids aren't given more leeway to go their own way, to make their own mistakes, to live up to their own responsibilities.

Youth sports is as good an example as any.

An article last month in Psychology Today pointed to research that shows that 70 per cent of children drop out of sports before the age of 13 because they are not having fun, partly due to “the forced, time-consuming, unbalanced life imposed by adults” who “have turned fun and joy into a bore, snore and chore.”

There's a lot of parental ego at play at the hockey rink and basketball gymnasiums, the piece says, a lot of moms and dads living vicariously through their child's performance.

That's too bad, because sports can teach so much: about the relationship between effort and reward, the value of teamwork, ethics and morals. And, of course, about the value of being resilient.

ROLE MODELS

Do not take my word for it.

“I have failed over and over and over again, and that is why I succeed,” said Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school basketball team.

“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again,” said Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for opposing South Africa's apartheid system.

“If you are going through hell, keep going,” counseled Winston Churchill, who, with the nazis just days away from entering Paris, stood in the British House of Commons and promised the world that “We shall never surrender!”

We mere mortals benefit from that kind of durability, too. Daily life knocks us down. The only victory is to keep getting up, to endure.

It is good to know that from the very beginning.

Just as it is good to understand, as adults do, that weekends are appreciated because of the Monday-Friday weeks, as surely as warm summer is because of frigid winter. And that doing something hard and all on your own, is sweet, indeed, because it was difficult and you had no one to depend upon but yourself.

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2023-03-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

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