Focus on the Family with Jim Daly - Teaching Kids Character Through Sports

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It really does start with us as parents just taking a deep breath.

It's just a game.

It's a game that they can play and enjoy, and we can sit back as their parents and enjoy

the stage of life and watch them play and not put so pressure on them to be what we hope

they can be at 16 while they're 6 years old.

Let's Brian Smith, and he joins us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Bailey.

We're going to be talking about how sports can be an opportunity to disciple your kids.

I'm John Fuller.

John, I'm always about sports.

I love sports.

I'm probably, I hope I don't make it an idol, but it's fun.

It's fun to compete.

I love playing football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and I just love it.

In fact, you know, it became structure for me because of my structure or less home.

I lived with my brother through high school, and I didn't have a lot of boundaries, but

sports taught me so much about what it meant to do the right thing and be part of a team

and all those good things.

It was my sophomore year football coach that actually led me to the Lord through a fellowship

of Christian athletes camp.

For me, sports are huge, and spiritually, physically, and they do so much for us emotionally

too.

Both boys and girls, but to grow up with confidence and to be in the game and then the game

of life.

I had to talk with our guests today about what we need to do to be mindful of doing it

well as parents.

And I'm sure there are many parents watching and listening right now that you're part of

that high school baseball game, and you're going, wow, are these people really healthy parents?

Because it's screaming and yelling, and we want to get into some of that.

How to be a missionary in the stance, which is part of our guests' proclamations.

Yeah, indeed.

And as I said, Brian Smith and Ed Yuzinski join us.

They're both dads of kids and sports, and they're both involved in sports ministry through

athletes in action, which is the sports-focused ministry of crew.

And we'd be talking about their book called Away Game, a Christian Parents Guide to Navigating

Youth Sports.

You can learn more about our guests in this terrific book at our website, and the link

is in the show notes.

And Brian, welcome to Focus for the first time.

It's great to have you guys.

Thank you.

To be here.

Let me kick it off here.

Brian, let me aim this one at you.

So many parents have told that they have to buy the expensive sports equipment and put them

on the travel team.

I am so thankful with our two sons, Trent and Troy.

Good announcer names, right?

That's how I picked their names.

Nice.

I said, next and Trent daily.

I mean, oh, that's awesome.

That's Trent's name.

And then next and Troy daily, I was like, oh, that's good.

But Jean looked at me and said, that's pathetic.

She was teasing me.

It's you in sports?

Yeah, that's the crazy thing.

It works.

But Brian, and again, grateful that they didn't pressure us to do a travel team.

But there seems to be this proportionality with those teams.

The more you invest in your kids, the less likely they are to enjoy their sporting experience.

I don't know if that's factual, but what's your experience telling you?

Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like you actually read the study.

There has been a study.

Oh, there has been.

Like the amount of money that parents spend in youth sports is associated with that

their kid actually having a decline of joy in sports.

Wow, that's so sad, actually.

It is sad.

Why do you think that is?

What's happening?

Yeah, we've kind of just like pontificated.

It's probably you're getting the kid the most expensive thing.

You're traveling across state lines.

You're getting the expensive hotels.

You're going out to eat.

And the parents think it's really, really fun.

We're almost like professionalizing youth sports for kids.

It's fun.

We love sports.

But the kids are receiving all of this good stuff.

They know they're on the big team.

They know they're traveling across the state lines.

And they're internalizing this as pressure, so it's causing anxiety.

It's causing them to maybe not even reach their potential in sport because they're so afraid

of failure.

I want to be careful because there are success stories in that environment as well.

And some young people go on to do great things and maybe even college scholarships and all

that.

Too much of a dampening effect on that.

But what is a healthy way to kind of look at that opportunity?

So my son comes home and says, hey, the coach thinks I should be on a travel team.

Like baseball and soccer are probably the two most prevalent.

As a Christian parent, how do we avoid some of those traps?

Well, because when we talk about this all the time, when we say that if we're going to

do this well, if we're going to do you sports well, it really does.

It does start with us as parents.

You said dads, Jim, but it really is moms and dads having to kind of explore what are

the things that are going on inside of us that we're bringing into this to our kids youth

sport experience.

And so there's past regrets that we have.

There's past missed opportunities.

We feel like maybe we weren't treated fairly.

And if we just got to do this over again, it could have looked different.

It's become an idol for us.

You know, we use that word that it's become more important to us than anything else in

our life.

Sports has become that.

And so now our kid is a projection of that.

Here she is sort of an extension of that for us.

There's regrets.

There's just insecurity that I feel, right?

So there's all these different words that go with sort of an internal evaluation.

And that's the hardest thing to maybe do.

We've said that.

That's the maybe the work that we don't want to do as parents is to look inside and see

how much of our own baggage is actually being brought to bear on our kids life right

now.

Yeah, let's go into an example or two that we can all put forward.

I mean, Jean and I were talking about this.

I was traveling and my youngest son was on the baseball team at the time.

And she was, it was an away game, probably 30 miles away from Colorado Springs.

I don't recall exactly where.

But she brought her little beach chair and didn't know if the place would have a bleacher.

It did.

There were people in the bleachers, all parents, you know, it's a baseball game.

And two dads were sitting near her in chairs as well.

And she said, one of the dads was just out of control.

Like his son came up to bat and he struck out.

And he was yelling at the son from the other side of the backstop fence.

And I mean, you're just going, wow, what was going on there that is so destructive.

Think of that poor son and how he feels, you know, like a failure, not able to succeed.

What are all the erosion things that are going on and then dad's going, well, I'm trying

to make him a man or whatever excuse he's having, but how negative is that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a distorted view of manhood.

Again, we could just go on and on about it.

There's usually some fear involved, a fear that he's missing out if he's not performing

a certain way right now.

He's not going to measure up or she's not going to measure up in high school or not

going to get to the next level or whatever.

So we just, we need to look at that and Brian and I have not been in the business at all

of telling people what level they should try to play at or whether they should or shouldn't

travel.

Yeah, there's all kinds of great stuff that happens in these travel environments.

There really is.

What we're saying is we need to be a different kind of parent in the midst of whatever it is

that our kid is doing when it comes to sports.

We need to have a different set of metrics that we're bringing in terms of how we're evaluating

this experience can't just be based on performance metrics and skill metrics.

Because if it is, then this guy who's at the baseball game, he's got so much invested

in his kid, right?

He's paying top dollar for all this things and kids really can become if we can use this

language like commodities or products that we are investing in.

And what happens when you invest a lot into a commodity or a product you expect a return

and when you put that level of pressure on a 12-year-old or an eight-year-old, they're

never going to give you the return that you want.

So bad.

It really does start with us as parents just taking a deep breath.

It's just a game.

The game that they can play and enjoy and we can sit back as their parents and enjoy the

stage of life and watch them play and not put so pressure on them to be what we hope they

can be at 16 while they're six years old.

Well, that gets expected.

This idea of purpose for the Christian parent, then what are we going to sports with?

What's the attitude?

How do we create that purpose?

Yeah, it's an opportunity for us to disciple our kids.

If you think about when your kids are going to school and they get home, you ask them the

question, how is your day today?

And you're going to get the response every time.

It was good.

It was fine.

When you watch them play sports, you don't have to guess what their teacher said to them

at school or who they sat next to in the lunchroom.

You get access to everything that they're going through.

And then you as their primary disciple or get to be the one later at home or wherever

it's going to be to be the ones to say, like, hey, I noticed when the ref made that call

today, it looked like you wanted to say something.

Maybe you did say something.

Can you tell me what was going on in your heart during that time?

Yeah, that's all good.

We have all this access to this information and that's what we're arguing for.

Usports provides us a front row seat to seeing them go through all of this stuff, which

is incredible discipleship opportunities for us.

You know, Ed was talking about, you're not perfect, so Brian, I'll ask you about your

imperfect story.

Let's start with Brian.

Yeah.

That's great.

Let's start with Brian's imperfections.

It actually, it was one I talked to my wife about this morning when I woke up, read the

prep, got into the book.

And that was the referee at the end of a game who made a bad placement on a penalty call.

Go through the story and I love the outcome.

Yeah.

So it was my son's last middle school game of the year.

It was a playoff game.

I knew they were going to get crushed by this team that destroyed him earlier in the

year.

And so I went there with this expectation of, I'm just going to go and enjoy watching

him play.

I knew he wasn't going to get all the playing time in the world, but the place he was in,

I was just going to sit back and enjoy it.

And I think we were actually in the process of writing this book while this was happening.

So I even had this in mind of like, this is discipleship.

Oh, you're on track.

Yeah.

So this is even better.

The ruffs were, they were bad.

And we've all had those games where we can say, this is the worst ever.

This is what I'm always going back to is it was just not, I had more invested in the

game than they did in it showed by the calls that they made.

One call in particular though, it was, it was late in the third quarter.

It was a holding penalty, which while people know is a, it's a 10 yard penalty.

And the ref started walking it backwards.

And he passed 10 yards and he kept going to 15 yards to, to 20 yards.

And I just like instinctively without even like, I didn't think at all.

I just said, ref, holding is a 10 yard penalty, not 20 without even realize that I just

set it out loud for the entire stadium to hear from it out from the bleachers or you

projected it.

I projected it.

It was not, yeah, it was just not in my thoughts.

It came out locally.

And what did the ref say?

And the ref looked up at the stands and he said, who cares?

And that we keep saying like the everything that had taken place prior with the referees

and coaching decisions, it was like soaking the field and the stands in gasoline, just

waiting for somebody to light a match.

And I was the person to do it.

And then the crowd jumped in and it was chaos.

Like it was chaotic and it was rough started getting amplified.

The ref started making bad call, more bad calls.

And the stands on both sides started to get aggravated.

And the people that affected the most were the kids.

And that was afterwards on the drive home.

I was like, what did I?

You know, what am I doing?

How did I in that moment?

How was I the person to start the chaos?

Yeah, no, that's so true.

And it gives you a perspective, but that's where you got to be cautious about how we live

through our kids.

And the kids, they had to feel horrible.

I mean, especially even here in that, when the ref turns and says who cares, look how

bad the score is.

What it did though is it gave the kids and the coaches and the other parents permission

to act like I did.

Everyone was just waiting for somebody to say or do something stupid.

And it came from the Jesus guy and the stands to do it.

And so I went there with this expectation of, I'm going to be an ambassador for Jesus

and the stands in my secondary identity of being an ambassador for my kid.

And then even for my own school, overtook that.

I want to explore that.

And I mentioned it in the opening, this idea that you need as a Christian that's involved

as a parent to be a missionary in the bleachers.

I love that.

I would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.

And I wish I would have heard it a long time ago.

But now we're going to tell two million people, hey, here it is.

It's so good to think of it that way, because it's putting God first.

And you know, your kids are not going to appreciate really bad behavior from his mom or

dad.

I mean, that doesn't spark enthusiasm for your child.

It's embarrassment.

How am I supposed to be expected to teach my kid about self-control in the days and weeks

after I just showed that I have no self-control in the stands?

And so that is like, I'm a missionary to my own kid.

I'm a disciple of my kid.

But to everybody else in the stands, too, they're looking at me in that moment of man,

a fee.

And they know I love Jesus.

They know I'm a Christ follower.

If he acts this way, what does that say for people who love Jesus?

This is the true almost for every chapter in the book, too, as far as the virtues that

we're talking about.

We could focus on really trying to cultivate these.

So how are our kids ever appreciate what it means to love other people, to be other centered?

If we're completely self-centered about this experience, how to experience peace.

If we're always bringing anxiety into the playing arena, into the car with them, to not

be entitled when we are always talking about just getting ours.

So really again, it starts with us doing some devotional work with our own heart.

We've been saying this, like, really one of the places that we need, we need to be taken

some time outs for ourselves.

And having some devotional time is before you go into a basketball arena, before you go

into the pool, before you go into the football stadium, before you go sit by the diamond,

take a few minutes and interact with the Lord.

And when I know that my mouth is what gets me in trouble, I need to ask the Holy Spirit,

don't let me say that anymore.

When I'm feeling angry, would you convict me before it happens and help me get out of

my seat and go for a walk?

If I need to or whatever it is that my coping mechanism is to deal with myself, but we

really do.

We need to walk with God.

And instead, what too many of us do, and again, I just think this is a reminder to us

as Christian listeners, that we tend to keep our faith and our Christian life completely

separate from our sports life, whether that's being a fan of a pro or college team or what

we're doing with our kids in youth sports, they're these separate entities.

And we need to start to bring them back together again and recognize that there's really

lifetime consequences for how I'm interacting with my kid in the context of sports for their

spiritual life.

Some of the practical things, and I think you had this story in the book where your son

had a swim mate and you did some things to help prep him for that, because some kids can

get really anxious before it, I played baseball to stay in shape for football.

Now that sounds weird, because baseball, you don't run a lot.

You stand around a lot.

But it was fun.

The camaraderie was a gate.

I loved it.

I didn't bat particularly well.

I played in field.

I was a good in-fielder, but I didn't hit well.

And I would always be anxious at the plate.

I just, I don't know what the problem was.

I just didn't have that eye-hand coordination.

And you know, so parlaying that into your son's swim mate, what was something that you did

to help calm his anxiousness?

Yeah.

I think we need to get better in understanding the difference between a performance goal and

a process goal.

So a performance goal is totally tied to the end result, whether you won or lost on the

scoreboard, did you get the blue ribbon, the chest ribbon?

And a process goal is saying, well, we're actually going to look at steps along the way

to get to that place where you could actually win.

And so in this particular case, my son was going to be in the finals of a swim mate in

which he knew already ahead of time that his times were like 10 seconds slower than the

kids that were fastest in this meet.

And I could tell he was all jammed up about it before we went into the pool.

And this was one of the things that we talk about all the time, too.

I just reiterated to him that, Tray, I want you to know that I don't care whether you

win or I really don't care whether you win or lose in terms of you and me.

I just love you.

I love going to watch you do this.

So does mom.

We're going to have fun no matter what happens.

And our kids need to hear that.

Now, of course, I want him to do well.

He wants to do well.

We said, what if our goal today wasn't to worry about who comes in first or second?

What if you just beat your last best time in this?

Just see if you can beat your own time.

And why don't we see if we can catch one of those last kids?

Can you just keep up with one of the last kids?

Let's just make that a process goal.

I said, you think you can do that?

He's like, yeah, let me try to do that.

And then he ended up doing that.

He beat his old time and he was right alongside this other guy and we celebrated that.

He got smoked.

I mean, he lost by a ton.

But there was something to celebrate in that he stepped into the fear.

He kind of recalibrated his mind so that he wasn't so jammed up about the fact that

he was going to get embarrassed by the guys that won.

And he just set a different goal.

And that became a victory in and of itself that we could build on.

This is focused on the family with Jim Daly.

And you're listening to Ed Yuzinski and Brian Smith, who wrote the book, Away Game, a Christian

Parents Guide to Navigating Youth Sports.

This book is going to help you really see sports as a gateway to instill biblical values

in your child.

It's going to empower you to embrace the role of being a spiritual mentor.

And it's going to help you to counter some of the toxic culture in today's youth sports.

Set a copy when you call 800, the letter A in the word family or stop by the show notes

for the details.

You know, it's so good at times.

I think well, every time, but you see professionals who are doing the right thing, sportsmen like

behavior, whether that's in football and the opponent, you know, you're helping them

up after you just crushed them in a tackle or whatever it might be, but it always catches

my attention.

I used to point that out to my boys as if we're watching a football game or something.

That's awesome that that guy did that.

And when I coached, you know, a little bit, that was one of the things I challenged the

kids to do.

You know, when you knock somebody down, help them up and just give them a pat and then

move on to the next play because it communicates something so good, which is we're out here

having fun.

Yes.

Absolutely.

We keep using the phrase that what we celebrate our kids will replicate.

And so if we have a value system of, yeah, when you see somebody on the ground, help

them up that and we're celebrating that, like it hopefully means when we're watching

them play, we're looking for those character type moments.

And yeah, we want them to score the touchdown and hit the home run or whatever it is.

But what if we started looking at the game with new metrics?

What if we start watching to see, are they paying attention to the kid on, on the end of

the bench?

Are they helping the opponent up after they knocked them down?

And then on the back end of the game, are we celebrating those things?

So they have new categories to be like, man, mom and dad really do care about when I pick

somebody up after the game.

That's going to matter a lot more when they're 30 years old than whether or not they can

hit the outside corner.

That is so true.

And the good thing is, you feel good doing it.

I mean, that's okay.

We could play hard on the field.

And it's accessible.

Yeah.

That is accessible every practice, every game for them to show love to somebody else.

They might not catch a pass.

They might not do the thing whatever they need to do.

They have that opportunity every single practice and game to show love to somebody else.

Let me ask you this though.

You look, I mean, I'm shocked as you might scroll through or see on evening news now,

local news.

Brawls at games.

I don't remember that in the same volume when I was playing many years ago.

It seems to be a relatively new phenomenon that these parents and people in the stands

are just taking it to an entirely absurd level of actually fighting at a game over a

call over whatever.

In that context, that's a great place for the light to shine.

And back to your missionary bleacher idea.

What a great place for Christians to be, Christian parents, Christian grandparents, Christian

aunties and uncles to show up for junior or his sister's sporting event and do something

different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've said this a lot.

So what is our biggest takeaway for us even is we think about this whole sports thing.

I need to talk less.

That's what I need to do as a dad.

I need to stop spending so much energy on correction before games, during games, after games.

Talk less and connect more.

That's really what we've been saying.

Talk less, connect more.

Stop.

I've got two hours of things to say to my kid after a game about what he or she did wrong.

They don't want to hear it, especially if they lost.

Yeah.

They just don't.

They don't want to hear it.

I've already done this with three.

One left.

Now, ninth grade.

The three didn't want to hear it.

One of them want to play in college basketball.

They didn't want to hear it from me after the game.

They want me to play a different role in their life, okay?

So if I can just keep doing that, say less things.

Be present.

Be present?

Yes.

Ask, did you have fun?

Ask, who did you connect to today?

Who was it fun to play with or practice with?

I've been asking my kid the last couple of weeks.

Do you have fun with it at basketball practice that what are you talking about?

You don't even have a category for that.

You're playing a game.

Who was it fun with?

I mean, you're complaining to me about the coach.

You're complaining about all these things.

I get all that.

Was there anything fun?

Keep letting them know that you love them and that's not going to change based on how

they perform in the game.

So we want our kids to have a growing understanding of what it looks like to go out and play from

a position of love instead of for love.

It's so good.

You know, one of the other attributes is this idea of developing self-control.

I mean, young children particularly don't have great self-control.

You learn that over time.

The sooner you learn it, the better.

Yeah.

I've had multiple instances with my own kids where they have thrown lacrosstics and they've

done things that they, that would make me as the Jesus guy in the stand, just kind of

be like, I want to get out of there as soon as possible.

It's something that needs to be caught and taught.

So what I've done with my kids is I will get out sticky notes and I will, I'll put like

things that they cannot control, like the roughs calls, how much playing time they're going

to get, what their opponent does, what the fans say, and then things that they can control.

They're attitude.

They're effort.

And I'll put, I'll kind of mix them all up and I'll make two sides and say, hey, I want

you to put everything that you can control into one side and what you can't control put

into the other side.

And they'll rearrange them and then we have the conversation about it.

And so we begin to give them categories and areas in sport that they can then look

back to.

Hopefully when they're playing to go like, oh, yeah, the rough just made a bad call.

I can't control that.

What I can control though is the next five minutes of this game.

And so we're really teaching them on the, on the front end and then on the back end,

that sport is, it provides really good opportunities to grow this stuff.

Yeah.

And I think right at the end here, perhaps the last question we should cover and there's

so much good content in this book, Away Game, a Christian Parents Guide to navigating

youth sports is really good.

I wish I had it.

It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.

But this idea of, in that moment, remembering what are the eternal things?

What are the things that are going to last?

You've touched on that and Ed, you've punctuated that each time.

Like that's what they're going to need at 30.

That's what they're going to need when they're older.

And I think the question would be, how do we stay fixated on those things in a healthy

way and coach them up in a way for life, not just for a sporting event?

Yeah.

You got to do it together.

I need to, I mean, this is true for every area of my Christian life.

I need to keep getting that perspective from the end that then makes its way back into

the present.

And so what is relevant here, I'm going to stand before God and give an account for

the environment that I created for my wife and my kids.

I'm not going to give an account for whether or not I prepare them to make the varsity

team.

Yeah.

And so seriously, I keep coaching myself to say, what are the things that really matter

that I need to ask about today with my kids, even the ones that are out of the house now?

What are the topics that I need to keep bringing up to them?

What are the vulnerabilities that I need to keep sharing out of my own life and the things

that I'm messing up on or the things that I'm afraid of?

Those are conversations that I feel responsible to be having with my kid.

I have gotten too caught up in being concerned about their sports performance.

I mean, we've already set that at the beginning of this thing.

We know that we've messed that up.

Okay, let's make an adjustment.

So you know what you're listening.

You've made mistakes.

Let's make an adjustment and say, let it be different moving forward.

Maybe the first thing I need to do is go and apologize to my older kids.

I wish I had done it.

They probably love it.

Yes, I wish I had done this differently.

Here's what I was afraid of.

Here's what I wanted to happen.

And I'm sorry that I put so much pressure on.

That's really good.

Yeah, that's a great place to start.

And then guess what that does?

That's relationship.

Now, they might not even know what to do with that at first.

But that's a start to saying, okay, mom and dad are actually somebody I can trust

and that actually care about my heart more than just my performance.

This is really good.

What a great book.

And you don't see a lot written in this space.

How to be a good Christian parent at sporting events,

but we desperately need it.

To those listening, we hope this episode has equipped you

to represent Christ in sports and to teach your kids to do the same.

We need to be intentional about teaching our children to live counter culturally

instead of letting the culture of sports influence our children.

If you want to learn more about practical ways to do that with your children

or maybe your grandchildren, you'll want a copy of Brian and Ed's book, Away Game.

We have copies for you here at Focus on the Family.

And when you make a gift of any amount,

we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for supporting the ministry.

You know at Focus, we offer so many great resources for parents

to navigate the chaotic culture we live in

and raise our children in Christ, which is the goal.

Every year, we help strengthen hundreds of thousands of parents.

When you partner with us financially,

you help us to reach those parents and equip them

to build the next generation in Christ.

So be a part of what God is doing.

Donate today, request your copy of Brian and Ed's book

when you call 800-232-6459.

800, the letter A and the word family.

Or get the details, donate online

when you click the link in the show notes.

Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daley.

I'm John Fuller and fighting you back next time

as we want more help you and your family thrive in Christ.

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