After soccer practice on Saturday morning, my husband, who is a coach for my middle daughter’s team, asked me if I knew about Silent Sunday.
I did not. Apparently, I’m late to the party. Silent Sunday has been a part of the soccer community for many years. So. He continued to tell me it is a day when coaches and parents are discouraged from talking to or yelling at players and officials from the sideline. They are, though, allowed to clap to show their support for the players.
This measure serves a few purposes. First, it gives officials a break from parents disagreeing with their decisions. More importantly, it give players a chance to play the game without overbearing comments from their parents and coaches, while also giving them the freedom to figure out how to play the game by themselves.
I am not a sideline yeller or talker. But this really made me want to yell and cheer and coach just to prove a point. My daughter is 11, though, and I didn’t want to have to put a dollar in the therapy jar.
In theory, Silent Sunday sounds like a really good idea. Let’s give kids a nurturing environment where they do not feel threatened by the opinions of their parents and coaches. Let’s give them the opportunity to think for themselves. Let’s give the officials a chance to call a game without being barraded.
But my question is, why does there have to be one day to do this? And will one day change the face of what we are doing as a society? Or is it just a knee jerk reaction to a bigger problem that we just don’t know how to deal with?
Sometimes I think the world my kids are growing up in is scary. Not because of all the predators, drugs or access to the internet, but because my kids are growing up in a world where we’d rather recognize a problem with a special day than really face the issue at hand.
I have to take a second to be really honest here. Some children will grow up in households with parents who are either trying to live through their child or chastise the child for not living up to their very high standards because that parent is empty. These are the parents you will find aggressively yelling at officials, coaches and players.
And in some circumstances, certainly not all, this behavior is like a wildfire between adults who cling onto one another to form the groups known as “those parents.” This behavior, though, will not be settled by a day of silence or a slogan at the entrance of a park. These parents need to recognize and deal with their emptiness before a change will be made in public or behind closed doors.
I can’t say my parents were like this, though. My dad loved sports, and I believe he genuinely loved playing sports with me. My childhood was filled with softball and basketball. And whether it was the joy I felt when playing with my dad or the exhilaration of making the big play, I woke up every day thinking about sports.
When I was in third grade, I begged my parents to let me play recreational, competitive softball. We had rules. We kept score and had tournaments. We ate at Dairy Queen after a win, and our practices were intense after a loss.
But honestly, I don’t think it was practice, a competitive program or my dad playing catch with me in the backyard that turned me into the athlete I was then.
You see, we didn’t have daily scheduled practices until I played fifth grade basketball, and even then, it was just for a short season. We played outside. That’s right. As a first through fifth grade student in Clinton, IN, I knew how to cross the street by myself and play ball with the boys.
Although I’m sure there were just as many “dangers” around, all the kids in town had games to play and exploring to do, and our parents weren’t going to follow us around. We’d cross wooden bridges that carried a railroad track to get to a creek where we played in the trees with a stray black dog who had one blue and one green eye. We climbed through the drainage pipes under the highway and jumped over haystacks in barns.
Our summers were filled with one home run derby after another. We played pickle and horse and we jumped out of swings when we felt like we could touch the clouds. I was given daily freedom to learn to think and play by myself. As I became a varsity athlete receiving college interest letters, I knew how games worked because without even knowing it, I created those situations for myself early on by playing outside with my friends.
While organized sports gave me knowledge and tools to use while playing a game, it wasn’t until I was given the freedom to have life experiences outside of structure that I was able to see how those tools worked in real life situations. I became a problem solver.
I’ve never been the most athletic or skilled person in anything. As a girl playing against stronger and faster boys, I had to use my smarts to get from point A to point B. Sometimes my shot would get shoved down my throat. But after learning how to do a pump fake at a summer camp,I learned that boys love to jump on a pump fake. Get them up in the air, then you’ll have a shot or a drive.
I understand today’s parents are trying to give children rich experiences by enrolling them in programming. There is an unspoken fear that if you don’t enroll your son in the Diamond Dog, CIYFL or Mahomet-Seymour Soccer Club at age 8, he won’t have the skills needed to compete in this sports-oriented world.
But I have to tell you, I grew up with and competed against some phenomenal athletes. A few of them went on to play ball in college, and even less became professional athletes. I am 34 now, and while one of them is a broadcaster on ESPN, the others are parents or professionals in other arenas.
They use the same skills kids today need to function as adults.
So. Someone decided the kids need a dose of real life without their parents and coaches holding their hands through every step they take. They put a gimmick to a problem, and called it Silent Sunday.
Maybe what they were really trying to say is we are not giving our children the balance they need. Some parents yell too much, and some parents just let their kids walk all over them. Some parents structure everything. And others don’t structure anything. But somewhere in all of this, kids need a voice, too.
After we inundate them with the mentality that they have to give up their childhood to focus on a sport, we give them something like Silent Sunday to remind them that they need to think on their own. But just for one day. Because when they get in the car to go home, they’ll need to go back to the other 364 days a year where they live scheduled lives with perfection standards.
This is a national problem where we place so much value on our child’s success through sports or grades that we, as parents, forget there is value outside of stats. We enroll our kids into a sport at a young age, and then commit our yearly schedule to their travel, forgetting the value of living sometimes.
The kids won’t learn that they need to think about the game (or life) on their own by just giving them one Sunday where they have control of the tempo of the game. They will learn to play the game freely when we repeatedly give them freedom to have unstructured experiences.
I believe that Silent Sunday is a knee jerk reaction to a problem that started growing before I was a child. But I don’t think the solution lies in Silent Sunday where we reflect on how we should be raising our children. The solution lies solely in parents who realize that we do have a choice and a voice in how our children are raised. That begins with what sort of balance we give them.
It’s not the responsibility of an organization, coach, teacher, village or school district to teach our kids the things they need to know. It is my job to give my children tools they can use throughout life so that they can figure some things out on their own.
But that doesn’t get coaches, teachers or organizations off the hook, either. They have roles in developing healthy atmospheres for children, too. Instead of one day where coaches and parents are silent, why don’t we develop a philosophy where we don’t treat youth sports and activities as professional development, and give the kids room to be kids.
Yes, we don’t just let our kids go outside and play without extreme limitations anymore. So, maybe coaches could tone down one or two practices a week, and let the kids play. Here is a ball. Two goals. Shoot for teams. One will be stronger. One will be weaker. And go out it. Get a bruise. Miss a pass. Knock someone down. And then get back up and do it all over again.
Because that’s real life.
Through organized sports, I did learn how to be a part of a team. I learned how the entire unit is dependent upon individuals doing their job to make the entire system work. And although a team cannot function as individuals, it is the individual’s responsibility to make sure they are doing their absolute best to fulfill each role.
