Netting excellence

My kids have played sports since they were five years old. Naomi was in gymnastics until the mother of a friend of ours—a woman whose parenting I trusted enormously—said, “I think it’s time for Naomi to be on a team sport.” We signed Naomi up for soccer and never looked back. When Aidan was big enough, he signed up for soccer too, and then autumn Saturdays became a matter of schlepping from one field to the next—both in DC and now here in New Zealand. My kids are competent players—neither the best nor the worst on the team—and so I’ve been a middle-of-the-pack mom, hoping they’d play well enough to please themselves, counseling them not to be too hard on themselves when they lost and reminding them that they mustn’t be too hard on the other team when they won.

I have, of course, known the parents of the best and worst players on the team, the parents whose children are more responsible for the wins and losses on the board. Naomi had a friend whose biggest achievement was when she didn’t panic and kick the ball towards her own goal; missing it was an improvement. Aidan’s best friend in DC for a while was a boy who was a sports genius, a boy whose every move was skillful and intuitive, who scored most of the goals on the team and also somehow had a hand in our best defense, too. I talked to his parents admiringly about what it was like to have a brilliant player like that, and saw both the glory and the misery of it. This little boy was already being recruited to play on travel teams (which are no picnic for parents) and was very hard on himself for those times when he didn’t excel.

I have never been related to these children though (except for my cousin Garvey who has been a brilliant hockey player his whole life). That might have changed.

This year Naomi has given up soccer and traded it in for netball, a Commonwealth game related to basketball but with a funky set of rules. (For more on those rules, click here.) I was bummed when she gave up soccer—she was getting better each year, and I liked the team she played on as well as enjoying the crisp Saturday mornings at emerald green fields across the region. But she had been urged by the coach and some friends to give netball a try, and now she’s done it. Because it’s her first year, she’s been put with the younger kids, many of whom have been playing a year or two already. For a variety of reasons, I’ve not seen any of these games yet. On Saturday I promised her I’d go and watch her, and so I found myself in the vast netball complex in Paraparaumu at 8.45 in the morning, the early morning sun (remember, it’s winter here) slanting over court after court of chilly girls bouncing or jogging to keep warm in their polo shirts and netball skirts.

When the game started, I saw something I’ve never seen before. My kid was the best one on the court. Naomi reaches out for the ball and it comes to her like magic; she passes it and it flies straight and true into the hands of her teammate. She positions her body beautifully, watching the play, anticipating the ball. Instead of the little jangle of nervousness I feel whenever one of my kids controls a soccer ball (will he keep control of it? will she pass it when she needs to?), I felt a calm assurance when the ball was momentarily in Naomi’s hands. It would all be ok. For this moment, the ball was going to move smoothly up the court towards the net.

Afterwards, I was the parent the other parents made comments to. “I bet you’re pretty proud of your daughter!” one told me. “She’s amazing—how many years has she been playing?” another asked. Her coach talked about the easy and natural skills Naomi brought to the team. Everyone is shocked that not only has Naomi never played netball before, she’s never played basketball either. She’s never played a sport with her hands at all. To go from middle-of-the-pack in a sport you’ve played for years to the best on the team in a sport you’ve never played is quite a distance traveled. She takes it easily, smiling with the praise and knowing that she’s not the best at all on the team with the kids her age who have been playing for years. She practices with both the younger and the older team, and really cares about sharpening her skills. It’s all new to me.

I was noticing the ways this changes my experience of watching sport. One data point in a kids’ game isn’t going to change anyone’s life, but I have been wondering about how this could continue. Really skilled kids are the ones on the travel teams, they’re the ones who practice several times a week, and put pictures of sport stars rather than movie stars on their walls (this would be an improvement). Parents need to think differently about these kids and decide how to support them. This is a common experience for parents all over the world, but it’s a new experience for me. While there are no new questions for me to ask yet, there is the potential for new questions down the road, the potential for a variety of new decisions that middle-of-the-pack moms don’t need to make. And then there’s the bizarre moment of pride when MY kid plucks the ball out of an arc high above her head and passes it neatly to a waiting teammate who tries and tries to put it in the net. (Why on earth would I be proud of that? I did nothing to make that pass happen. It has fully nothing to do with me…)

We came home from the game Saturday and I made her a second breakfast, which we shared in the bright morning sun. “I love you so much,” I told her, watching this big girl of mine, her endlessly long arms and legs with no hint of the rolls of fat from her spherical baby days. “You know Mom,” she told me earnestly, “I love you every bit as much as you love me.” We beamed at each other in this calm before the adolescent storm. A tie is my favourite score.