Overzealous sports parents

[Floppin]

On 6/11/2022 at 1:31 PM, LinvilleGorge said:

Gotcha. So if you're really good and you live somewhere with local golf courses then you can play for free. Yeah, acknowledged. But how many poor people have that initial exposure to golf? How many underprivileged inner city kids have ANY exposure to golf. 

There's a reason golf has it's reputation. Same as skiing. There's a huge bias toward toward the wealthy because the poo ain't cheap.

Not to belabor the point, but you don't have to be good to join the high school golf teams. They'll let anyone join. So even if you suck ass you can play for free every year you're in high school (and middle school if you live somewhere were they have teams.) But yeah, I wasn't trying to argue that it's not stigmatized or inaccessible for certain populations (inner city, extremely rural, etc) but you don't necessarily need money to start, just desire.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Floppin

[Cuttinedge]

In the small town I live in we have had a pretty good run of young hs players going on to play college golf and everyone one of them grew up on the country club course their houses are either on the course or a block away. With that being said anyone can play on HS team but how demoralizing would it be to go out and play with hand me down clubs against kids that have the best equipment and have been playing since they could walk and are scratch golfers 
High school kids can be  mean don’t see a lot of kids setting themselves up for that ridicule but there are exceptions.   

[Cuttinedge]

But back to the point of overzealous parents.  My brother in law is that way he coached his sons travel baseball team. We go to the beach every year with them so I had plenty of chances over the years to throw and catch with his kid and mine on beach. The difference between my kid who didn’t play travel ball and his kids hand eye coordination was night and day.
 

I told my wife he’s gonna get that kid hurt playing him at 3rd base well  sure enough nephew got lit the fk up one game and made a trip to er luckily nothing broken in his face   Since then he’s took  up swimming

[LinvilleGorge]

I just don't understand setting kids up for disappointment and failure trying to live vicariously through them. I'm all about getting your kids involved in sports. I think it's great for both physical, mental, and emotional development. But keep it fun. Having an eight year old kid prioritizing baseball over everything else and filling his head with bullshit about playing professional baseball is just wildly irresponsible parenting. Even if the kid was a prodigious athlete the odds of playing pro sports is still slim to none. All those guys in the pros were prodigious athletes. Tons of guys who never made it were too. It just never came together for them for whatever reason be it injuries, off field stuff, choosing other pursuits, or working their asses off all their lives just to find out that despite how good they are they're still not quite good enough. And that's the prodigious athletes. If you're an average athlete like this kid, you literally better off spending all that money you're pissing away on baseball development on scratch off lottery tickets.

[thefuzz]

2 hours ago, Cuttinedge said:

In the small town I live in we have had a pretty good run of young hs players going on to play college golf and everyone one of them grew up on the country club course their houses are either on the course or a block away. With that being said anyone can play on HS team but how demoralizing would it be to go out and play with hand me down clubs against kids that have the best equipment and have been playing since they could walk and are scratch golfers 
High school kids can be  mean don’t see a lot of kids setting themselves up for that ridicule but there are exceptions.   

This is BS.

No different than saying that the short guy shouldn't try out for the BB team, or the slender guy for the football team.

Golfers in general are some of the nicest athletes I've ever been around.

[LinvilleGorge]

15 minutes ago, thefuzz said:

This is BS.

No different than saying that the short guy shouldn't try out for the BB team, or the slender guy for the football team.

Golfers in general are some of the nicest athletes I've ever been around.

Your personal experience isn't universal. That seems to be the disconnect you're having here.

Based on what I can gather, it seems to be quite the exception in fact.

[thefuzz]

4 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

Your personal experience isn't universal. That seems to be the disconnect you're having here.

Based on what I can gather, it seems to be quite the exception in fact.

How often have you been around golf?  How often do you golf?

You are describing your experience with golf, and me mine.  There were 4 cheap/free courses within 15-20 miles of where I grew up, as a kid, you could play them for free or close to it...they wanted future players and members...why not get the kids hooked young?

I chose not to play much back then, enjoyed other sports, but it was there...and when I was in high school...again, I chose not to play for the school team, but could have for "free" once again.

Then I took a $9.00 per hour job (first job out of college) working closely with a golf and housing development...again, all the golf I could play...free.

I'm not saying that my experience isn't unique, my entire point is that you absolutely DO NOT have to be RICH to be good at golf.  The best player I knew growing up didn't own a pair of golf shoes until he was on the high school team...he played semi pro after high school.

[LinvilleGorge]

You don't have to be rich but it is certainly extremely helpful. I bet the average net worth of the families of PGA golfers is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than that of most if not all other professional sports. Golf is expensive.

[Cuttinedge]

I play golf almost every day now since I retired and I don’t know where u grew up but there isn’t a golf course any where close to me that lets kids play free.  Now if they on HS team they get to play free but as far as kids getting on free around here it ain’t happening. 
and  that’s the exact reason years ago I couldn’t afford to take both my sons at the same time to play. It would cost me over $100 on the weekend and that was 18 years ago. 
now the courses at the beach when we went on vacation would let them on free with me.  Never made sense to me when people talk about promoting the sport but then charge a father extraordinary amount for their kids to play 18 holes. 
Your experience is yours. I know and have met a lot of great people thru golf. Also met plenty of azz holes that act  like their chit didn’t stink and everyone was below them.  

[thefuzz]

On 6/25/2022 at 8:32 AM, Cuttinedge said:

I play golf almost every day now since I retired and I don’t know where u grew up but there isn’t a golf course any where close to me that lets kids play free.  Now if they on HS team they get to play free but as far as kids getting on free around here it ain’t happening. 
and  that’s the exact reason years ago I couldn’t afford to take both my sons at the same time to play. It would cost me over $100 on the weekend and that was 18 years ago. 
now the courses at the beach when we went on vacation would let them on free with me.  Never made sense to me when people talk about promoting the sport but then charge a father extraordinary amount for their kids to play 18 holes. 
Your experience is yours. I know and have met a lot of great people thru golf. Also met plenty of azz holes that act  like their chit didn’t stink and everyone was below them.  

I live at the beach.

I'm sitting about 100 yards from a tee box.  I grew up in the 80's and 90's.  Courses close by me would let the younger folks play for free or very close to it.  You had to walk, but who cares.  They were trying to promote the courses, sell some Coke's and get you hooked on golf so they had a revenue stream going forward.

Again, this was all talking about not having to be RICH to play golf or be good at it, but I understand that my experience with golf is different.

[KSpan]

3 hours ago, thefuzz said:

I live at the beach.

I'm sitting about 100 yards from a tee box.  I grew up in the 80's and 90's.  Courses close by me would let the younger folks play for free or very close to it.  You had to walk, but who cares.  They were trying to promote the courses, sell some Coke's and get you hooked on golf so they had a revenue stream going forward.

Again, this was all talking about not having to be RICH to play golf or be good at it, but I understand that my experience with golf is different.

Yeah, that's not the norm at all.

[Skack25]

So glad my kid didn't pick up interest in baseball.  I love the sport at the professional level, but want nothing to do with youth baseball whatsoever, and this is the reason.  Dudes like this one who are complete chuds.

Probably patrols the fence with a quarter zip warm up top and turf shoes on.

[LinvilleGorge]

On 6/3/2022 at 3:10 PM, LinvilleGorge said:

Holy poo...

My sister in law has an 8 year old son. Her husband is trying to live vicariously through this kid. He was never the cool jock and he desperately wants this kid to be that. Everything revolves around this kid's baseball. He's homeschooled because school schedule was getting in the way of his baseball schedule. He does ninja training to improve his balance and core strength for baseball. He's on every travel team he can be on. He has ninja, baseball practice, baseball clinics, or baseball games everyday. He's on a specific baseball diet. Dad gets excited because the kid gets "invited" to all these clinics and travel teams with no realization that it's simply to get money out of them. Baseball, baseball, baseball. Everything else is an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the kid is ADHD as fug and an absolute brat because he gets everything he wants. I've watched dad repeatedly tell him this week "If you want to be a professional baseball player you have to..." while laughing off any and all of mom's efforts to correct behaviours.

The sad part is that the kid is a very average athlete. He's not one of the better players on any of his teams. They're really fuging this kid up. They're setting him up for abysmal disappointment. Well, it's dad but mom won't stand up to any of it even though she understands all of this. Once he gets to middle school and kids that didn't have this huge push from their parents actually start picking up sports in school and blow by him in a matter of months because they have real talent I'm afraid it's just going to be an absolute shock to him and dad is going to put it all on him for not working hard enough.

It's crazy to watch. Dad is controlling as fug and likely has undiagnosed Asperger's. Mom just folds and goes along with everything because she's too busy being the primary bread winner and isn't willing to deal with dad's bullshit. It's wild to watch and just sad.

Anyway... basically just venting.

They had the kid playing in some baseball league against kids several years older despite my wife's father urging them not to do it. I say "them" but it's really just the dad.

Well, they're heading to the hospital now. The kid broke his leg playing catcher when a much bigger older kid obliterated him going for home.

Poor kid.

[Davidson Deac II]

My son played high school basketball.  He was decent, but it was a very small high school, so it was easy to make the team, especially since he was 6ft 5 inches.  I never pushed him into it, but I fully supported him once he made the decision.  And for the most part, I enjoyed going to the games. 

Most of the Parents were cool, but there were a few who should not have been allowed to go to the games.  And in fact, I saw a couple of them get banned from games.  I will never understand people who get that obsessed over it.