Teach your children well

Yesterday, my son, Christopher, had his fall baseball tournament. The team had finished the regular season 4-2-1. Their two losses were against the green team which remained undefeated. So his team finished a solid second place. Not bad. Yesterday, we had the first tournament game and won, actually by forfeit. (But we loaned them a couple of players and played for fun and still won). As head coach, I've tried very hard to make this fun for the kids. Since we won the first game yesterday morning, at noon we had the championship game and had to face the dreaded green team, the Gators. (Side note: as an Ohio State fan it pains me to lose to any team by that name!). Anyhow, our boys did well against the Gators. They fought them hard, but despite my lighthearted demeanor and encouragement to the team, my son, was getting quite discouraged. Christopher, in typical first order nature, tends to demand much from himself. (This goes for in school too). He was getting upset that we were losing and on more than one occasion I reminded him that sports is supposed to fun! And if you lose, that's okay as long as you have fun! Sports, in my opinion, occupy too much of our lives as it is. He struggled some, but in the end, put on the sportsman's face, shook hands with the champs, and then happily accepted his second place trophy and "lovely parting gifts" from the team mom. I hope he learned a lesson.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm an OSU fan. One of the things Chris was looking forward to after the baseball games, was coming back and watching the game against Illinois. So we settled down for another OSU route at 3:30. Well, they started strong, taking two plays to score on their opening drive. Illinois, on their second play broke a running play for 70+ yards and two yards from the end zone proceeded to fumble the ball. The officials declared the runner down prior to the fumble. Well, replay showed this not to be true, and when Illinois snapped the ball before the officials blew a whistle to review the play, I was dumbfounded! But that's okay. OSU is a powerhouse, and Illinois is unrated. There was still 59 minutes to play and surely the Bucks would handle these folks like the others. By the fourth quarter however, Illinois was still up by a touchdown. Illinois had the ball on their own 20 with 8 minutes left, and proceeded to convert a 4th and inches, a 3rd and 7, a third and 11 and I don't know how many 3rd and 3s to run out the clock. All the while, I'm pacing, sighing, and snapping at my family while watching my team's national title hopes go down the drain. Somewhere in the midst of this, my lovely wife gently expressed her concern about my example. Hmmmm...well, by the end of it all, I had apologized and asked forgiveness to both my son and my wife. What is it they say about the apple not falling far from the tree? Boy, I've got some learnin' to do!

In hindsight it's kind of funny. I think my son may have learned the lesson but the question is whether I did or not.