I never played team sports but im sure everyone can relate to feeling left out. Good points around winning not being the only or even primary goal when it comes to children’s sport. How many kids were discouraged from sport early on. Would be interested in others experiences. Any coaches acting like they were in the premier leagues etc?!
My son was told by a “coach” when he went out at lunch to play hurling that “he’s crap and should just go and sit inside with the girls” he was 10 when this happened and hasn’t played a team sport since, it killed him inside. He lost out on friendships with the boys that were deemed good enough. I don’t care if they give up their free time to do this it doesn’t give some of them a free ride to ruin any child’s confidance. Unfortunately this behaviour is rife in all sports and countries.
What happens on the pitch as young person does really have lasting effects.
When I was 9/10 I went to my first GAA training. I was absolutely useless, but continued on to the end of the session.
Half way through a fella bit older than me came up from behind me and said: “I’m sorry you’re so shit.”
I laugh about it now, cause I was shit. But jesus it completely ruined my confidence. It stopped me playing and I never went back training again with that team.
I think up until your late teens the emphasis should really be about inclusion and then winning.
The person who tried to bully me out of my sport ended up ending his own life years later. He himself had been bullied for taking part in the sport as it was considered “feminine”. Its devastating what happened to him. Obviously his situation has layers but something he was incredibly gifted at and should have been a source of joy and confidence was torn at.
I think part of the problem is as a nation we take the piss out of each other but a safe line doesn’t exist. We need to be kinder and more accepting. We all need more empathy.
I’m 39 I remember the day we were running for a place on a comparition on school four of us wanted it only 3 got to go, the teacher ran the race again and again till I lost, every time an excuse for running again, he looked behind him he shouldn’t do that, oh ue did again,. Soon as I lost oh we have our three, still hold the resentment and honestly loved running till that point
On the other hand I was utter shite at football but showed up every year for the local team and trained relentlessly. I didn’t get any better. The odd time I got a run out at a challenge match of it numbers were low and we were winning well. The coaches didn’t know what to do with me. Not everyone is cut out for it. As long as the coaches aren’t being cunts then there isn’t much else they can do.
So sad for a child that age to have to suffer that level of confidence shattering experience
I was a sub every week for the two football teams I played with from the ages of 8-15. It never really phased me that I played an average of 10 -20 minutes a game because I knew I wasn’t strong or fast enough to earn a place on the team. I could also understand that this decision was for the greater benefit of the team.
What did get to me was when I was dropped from my team at 15 just before the season began. This was after a lengthy pre-season, of which there were no indications that they had intended to kick me off the team. Still get slagged by mates to this day about it.
That’s typical GAA, all about the best team, fuck the people who turn up to every training and match, Johnnys lad is good so we better give him the game even tho he only shows up at finals.
Anyone who thinks a match played by children is about winning is kidding themselves. The idea of sports is to get people moving, get their hearts pumping, get their energy out, while simultaneously making strategies and (in team sports) learning to work with other people. Hopefully to enjoy it as well. Winning is waaay down the list.
Our town seems to have a good mix, they have “travel” teams where the more mature/better athletic girls and boys play a more competitive schedule against other towns and a recreational league where the less advanced/less athletic kids get to play.
The rec league has guaranteed playing time so all kids get similar playing times. Many/just about all of the “travel” kids play in the rec leagues because it’s tremendous fun playing with/against all the kids you know. Rec leagues have playoffs with again guaranteed playing time and the kids get super competitive over it.
This goes all the way to high school age (18 yrs) for baseball, basketball and soccer.
The High School championship in basketball for the rec league is super crazy and tons of kids show up to watch it.
It’s a seriously great program, all run by parent volunteers and fields and insurance are paid for by the town.
10/10 would recommend.
All team sports should just be having a laugh with less emphasis on winning until you turn 15/16. Then go fucking mental with competition if you want. Develop skills as the body is growing etc and don’t have tiny little insecure fucks that have done nothing with their lives mentally fuck up children.
I think they may do it that way in Germany with football.
Loved the GAA and football growing up and was actually decent but the demented coaches and soccer moms just ruined the joy for me and induced really awful anxiety before matches to the extent where I dropped it all just before leaving cert.
I know I’m not alone in feeling like that. That ‘parish and county’ culture is like a borderline cult in rural Ireland and before you even turn 15 everything is intensely competitive. Needs to be talked about more because sport is such a valuable tool for socialising for young people but these projecting twats are driving people away from it.
Think i’ve told this story before.
Back in the 90s when i was 9, i went to play for my local soccer team. Or so i thought but it turns out a kid doesn’t just show up and play soccer… no, no, no…. You have to make it through trials.
Over the course of a couple of weeks i was honing my skills, running around the garden, practicing volleys but mostly badgering my Da to take me to the park and pass the ball around.
Anyways the the big day finally arrives and i put on my fresh boots and went to the club. We were split into individual teams of maybe 5 or 6 and had a tournament where each team would play each team. At the end we were all lined up (in the middle of the park). Names were called from a list, one after another people would stand forward and move to a group of people opposite the original line. Maybe 35 names were called in total… mine wasn’t.
I was fucking crushed at 9 years old my dreams of being a soccer player were over. I honestly had no idea what to do. I walked back to the car with my Dad and apparently cried on the way home (i don’t remember this, might be embellished)
Few weeks later my neighbour who was also my aged asked if i wanted to go play rugby one weekend. I knew who Lomu was, but that was about the extent of it… nonetheless i agreed because well…. i was a kid.
So i show up to the club where the coaches split maybe 40 kids up into separate groups and do drills. Followed by a game of tag. And the best part of the whole day was after all the running around we went up to the club house bar where a BBQ was on and every kid got a hamburger and lemonade. That was it… every single kid was welcome back next week, didn’t matter how good or bad we were it was just about having fun and learning the game.
So that was why i played rugby for 20 years and not soccer.
Those “GAA is so inclusive and for everyone” ads and slogans annoy me so much because as a young disabled kid I knew it wasn’t true. This wasn’t even a proper team, it was some local coach coming into my primary school. There was no reason for it to be so competitive.
I feel there’s too much emphasis on team sports for kids anyways. Many kids are members of multiple teams both inside and outside of school. Usually the more teams you’re on the better.
There needs to be more emphasis on how exercise and being fit doesn’t just have to be something you can do as a team, but something you can do on your own. Or that physical activity isn’t all about being competitive, but rather a it’s important to keep our bodies healthy.
I’m crap at teams sports and at school I used to hate PE because it was always some sort of sport like basketball, volleyball, soccer etc. when I was younger I was never active or athletic and always assumed that’s how I’d always be.
When I was about 20 I started walking regularly, which I still do 10 years later. I go to the gym, enjoy hiking, camping etc. I would say I’m more active now than most people my age (or at least I’m on par with the average). But when I was younger I just never thought it was possible for someone like myself, who wasn’t good at sports, to grow into an active person.
My auld fella was mad into football and even played for the county so naturally I had to play football. I didn’t mind the actual game itself but I hated it because of him. I remember one under 12s match he was going mental on the side lines screaming at me to work harder to the point the ref stopped the match and actually told him to leave the pitch altogether. Needless to say over the season I became less and less interested in football because I was so embarrassed about it. This on top of always being told how soft I was led me to dropping out of sport altogether until I started kickboxing when I was 16. I think that even though it was only a few years I missed out on so much because I hated sport.
I think many of us have had this kind of experience. I love Gaelic football and always speak up for it in my predominantly hurling county and parish. I haven’t played since the under-9s because I was the kid whose boots would be given to whichever good player didn’t have them. I knew I wasn’t good, but I was trying to get better. Those Pumas were the only reason they had me at the club, and when my parents copped it they pulled me out straight away. I ended up getting into Tae Kwon Do, and later running, but I would’ve loved to have played GAA. Years later I was working in a pub and some guys tried to get me to come and play junior with them but my confidence was still shattered.
Not wanting to join the chorus of GAA bashers, I’d like to say that our local club is fantastically inclusive for kids. The most recent stories I’ve heard about this sort of thing were in soccer clubs: one which made a 6-year-old do a trial and another which texted half the parents of their under-12s at the end of the season to wish their sons the best of luck at whatever club they would be training with next year.
The best way to deal with these types of coaches is to take the Roy Keane approach and tell your kid the next time he says something derogatory to them their response should be ‘show us your medals, what have you ever won’. They wont be expecting that from a kid and it’ll put them back in their box poste haste. Bonus points if your kid can say this in front of the entire team, the coach will think twice before he picks on anyone else.
I see this in junior soccer a lot. Ruthless bastards some of them.
Grown adults taking a kids’ game entirelty too seriously is the story of most small village teams in Ireland.
It’s a massive problem with all sport In Ireland. There was a coach doing under 16s soccer in Connemara who shouldn’t have been let near them lads. Screaming and roaring at them. What’s the point when half them quit before senior soccer
When you’re one of the last to be picked for a team in P.E all the time, it’s a crushing feeling.
So I just stopped bringing my kit and done lines with the other unsportly students.
Had it myself at a young age but I didn’t let them win. Worked my ass off to get onto the team and got there a year or two later. Coaching hurling to kids now for the past few years and no matter what they all get to play. I’ll gladly take a loss instead of the look on a kids the face who spent an hour watching his mates playing. Kids sport is for fun. Too many clubs and coaches have completely lost sight of it.
My ol’ man was very into soccer when he was a lad so signed myself and my younger brother up to a local soccer team when we were 8-10ish can’t really remember but I do remember 2 things very clearly:
1. One week the coaches lined us up to shoot at the goal. You queued up and when you go to the front of the line you took your shot then went to the back. If you missed every single lad would taunt you as they passed you on their way to the back of the line. This was encouraged by the coaches. I know cause I was one of ones who missed. This event, the pitch, the weather, every little sarcastic jeer, everything is burned into my memory.
2. The head coach’s son played for the team and was the captain and star player of course. One match he made a mistake and it cost us the match. His dad/coach reacted by picking him up by the collar and shook him berating his playing. Not one single dad stopped him or saw anything wrong with this as they equally yelled at the kid when he messed up.
Maybe your experience was different but standing in the rain early on Sunday morning watching grown ass men traumatize and yell at little kids, encouraging a toxically competitive atmosphere, making sure that the only way to win daddy’s love and pride is to win hence bringing up a whole new generation of emotionally stunted man child “sports” men, this has killed my enjoyment of any form of football.
Played football when younger and again to get on the teams it was who you where in the town talent never came into it, used to score for fun during training, didn’t do to much running but was always in the right place and right time to get a goal, cross comes in I was able to pick out a lose ball and get a goal,
Like it still hurts me to this day that I wasn’t good enough for the team but no idea what didn’t make me good enough,
A few years later was playing in soccer bitz London of thing and was asked to come back playing as I moved back from playing up front to playing in defensive and scored quite a few free kicks from the 1/2 way line that day,
Like even just before covid I went back playing football 7 a side with work and I still had it, my team lost 1 game out of 10 and I played in 9 of the 10 matches and I might not have been able to run much but I was still able to tackle and clear a ball,
So yah not being good enough for the local team still hurts me badly and still think about it to this day Newley 20 years later
However I took up taekwondo to replace football full time when I was younger ended up with a 2nd degree black belt and endless amounts of medals so it kind of worked out in the end but I still love football and would have loved to have made the team and kept playing 11 aside when I was younger
My primary school art teacher told me I’d never be good and to just stick with maths. Got an A1 in the leaving and have sold 3 paintings.
27 comments
I never played team sports but im sure everyone can relate to feeling left out. Good points around winning not being the only or even primary goal when it comes to children’s sport. How many kids were discouraged from sport early on. Would be interested in others experiences. Any coaches acting like they were in the premier leagues etc?!
My son was told by a “coach” when he went out at lunch to play hurling that “he’s crap and should just go and sit inside with the girls” he was 10 when this happened and hasn’t played a team sport since, it killed him inside. He lost out on friendships with the boys that were deemed good enough. I don’t care if they give up their free time to do this it doesn’t give some of them a free ride to ruin any child’s confidance. Unfortunately this behaviour is rife in all sports and countries.
What happens on the pitch as young person does really have lasting effects.
When I was 9/10 I went to my first GAA training. I was absolutely useless, but continued on to the end of the session.
Half way through a fella bit older than me came up from behind me and said: “I’m sorry you’re so shit.”
I laugh about it now, cause I was shit. But jesus it completely ruined my confidence. It stopped me playing and I never went back training again with that team.
I think up until your late teens the emphasis should really be about inclusion and then winning.
The person who tried to bully me out of my sport ended up ending his own life years later. He himself had been bullied for taking part in the sport as it was considered “feminine”. Its devastating what happened to him. Obviously his situation has layers but something he was incredibly gifted at and should have been a source of joy and confidence was torn at.
I think part of the problem is as a nation we take the piss out of each other but a safe line doesn’t exist. We need to be kinder and more accepting. We all need more empathy.
I’m 39 I remember the day we were running for a place on a comparition on school four of us wanted it only 3 got to go, the teacher ran the race again and again till I lost, every time an excuse for running again, he looked behind him he shouldn’t do that, oh ue did again,. Soon as I lost oh we have our three, still hold the resentment and honestly loved running till that point
On the other hand I was utter shite at football but showed up every year for the local team and trained relentlessly. I didn’t get any better. The odd time I got a run out at a challenge match of it numbers were low and we were winning well. The coaches didn’t know what to do with me. Not everyone is cut out for it. As long as the coaches aren’t being cunts then there isn’t much else they can do.
So sad for a child that age to have to suffer that level of confidence shattering experience
I was a sub every week for the two football teams I played with from the ages of 8-15. It never really phased me that I played an average of 10 -20 minutes a game because I knew I wasn’t strong or fast enough to earn a place on the team. I could also understand that this decision was for the greater benefit of the team.
What did get to me was when I was dropped from my team at 15 just before the season began. This was after a lengthy pre-season, of which there were no indications that they had intended to kick me off the team. Still get slagged by mates to this day about it.
That’s typical GAA, all about the best team, fuck the people who turn up to every training and match, Johnnys lad is good so we better give him the game even tho he only shows up at finals.
Anyone who thinks a match played by children is about winning is kidding themselves. The idea of sports is to get people moving, get their hearts pumping, get their energy out, while simultaneously making strategies and (in team sports) learning to work with other people. Hopefully to enjoy it as well. Winning is waaay down the list.
Our town seems to have a good mix, they have “travel” teams where the more mature/better athletic girls and boys play a more competitive schedule against other towns and a recreational league where the less advanced/less athletic kids get to play.
The rec league has guaranteed playing time so all kids get similar playing times. Many/just about all of the “travel” kids play in the rec leagues because it’s tremendous fun playing with/against all the kids you know. Rec leagues have playoffs with again guaranteed playing time and the kids get super competitive over it.
This goes all the way to high school age (18 yrs) for baseball, basketball and soccer.
The High School championship in basketball for the rec league is super crazy and tons of kids show up to watch it.
It’s a seriously great program, all run by parent volunteers and fields and insurance are paid for by the town.
10/10 would recommend.
All team sports should just be having a laugh with less emphasis on winning until you turn 15/16. Then go fucking mental with competition if you want. Develop skills as the body is growing etc and don’t have tiny little insecure fucks that have done nothing with their lives mentally fuck up children.
I think they may do it that way in Germany with football.
Loved the GAA and football growing up and was actually decent but the demented coaches and soccer moms just ruined the joy for me and induced really awful anxiety before matches to the extent where I dropped it all just before leaving cert.
I know I’m not alone in feeling like that. That ‘parish and county’ culture is like a borderline cult in rural Ireland and before you even turn 15 everything is intensely competitive. Needs to be talked about more because sport is such a valuable tool for socialising for young people but these projecting twats are driving people away from it.
Think i’ve told this story before.
Back in the 90s when i was 9, i went to play for my local soccer team. Or so i thought but it turns out a kid doesn’t just show up and play soccer… no, no, no…. You have to make it through trials.
Over the course of a couple of weeks i was honing my skills, running around the garden, practicing volleys but mostly badgering my Da to take me to the park and pass the ball around.
Anyways the the big day finally arrives and i put on my fresh boots and went to the club. We were split into individual teams of maybe 5 or 6 and had a tournament where each team would play each team. At the end we were all lined up (in the middle of the park). Names were called from a list, one after another people would stand forward and move to a group of people opposite the original line. Maybe 35 names were called in total… mine wasn’t.
I was fucking crushed at 9 years old my dreams of being a soccer player were over. I honestly had no idea what to do. I walked back to the car with my Dad and apparently cried on the way home (i don’t remember this, might be embellished)
Few weeks later my neighbour who was also my aged asked if i wanted to go play rugby one weekend. I knew who Lomu was, but that was about the extent of it… nonetheless i agreed because well…. i was a kid.
So i show up to the club where the coaches split maybe 40 kids up into separate groups and do drills. Followed by a game of tag. And the best part of the whole day was after all the running around we went up to the club house bar where a BBQ was on and every kid got a hamburger and lemonade. That was it… every single kid was welcome back next week, didn’t matter how good or bad we were it was just about having fun and learning the game.
So that was why i played rugby for 20 years and not soccer.
Those “GAA is so inclusive and for everyone” ads and slogans annoy me so much because as a young disabled kid I knew it wasn’t true. This wasn’t even a proper team, it was some local coach coming into my primary school. There was no reason for it to be so competitive.
I feel there’s too much emphasis on team sports for kids anyways. Many kids are members of multiple teams both inside and outside of school. Usually the more teams you’re on the better.
There needs to be more emphasis on how exercise and being fit doesn’t just have to be something you can do as a team, but something you can do on your own. Or that physical activity isn’t all about being competitive, but rather a it’s important to keep our bodies healthy.
I’m crap at teams sports and at school I used to hate PE because it was always some sort of sport like basketball, volleyball, soccer etc. when I was younger I was never active or athletic and always assumed that’s how I’d always be.
When I was about 20 I started walking regularly, which I still do 10 years later. I go to the gym, enjoy hiking, camping etc. I would say I’m more active now than most people my age (or at least I’m on par with the average). But when I was younger I just never thought it was possible for someone like myself, who wasn’t good at sports, to grow into an active person.
My auld fella was mad into football and even played for the county so naturally I had to play football. I didn’t mind the actual game itself but I hated it because of him. I remember one under 12s match he was going mental on the side lines screaming at me to work harder to the point the ref stopped the match and actually told him to leave the pitch altogether. Needless to say over the season I became less and less interested in football because I was so embarrassed about it. This on top of always being told how soft I was led me to dropping out of sport altogether until I started kickboxing when I was 16. I think that even though it was only a few years I missed out on so much because I hated sport.
I think many of us have had this kind of experience. I love Gaelic football and always speak up for it in my predominantly hurling county and parish. I haven’t played since the under-9s because I was the kid whose boots would be given to whichever good player didn’t have them. I knew I wasn’t good, but I was trying to get better. Those Pumas were the only reason they had me at the club, and when my parents copped it they pulled me out straight away. I ended up getting into Tae Kwon Do, and later running, but I would’ve loved to have played GAA. Years later I was working in a pub and some guys tried to get me to come and play junior with them but my confidence was still shattered.
Not wanting to join the chorus of GAA bashers, I’d like to say that our local club is fantastically inclusive for kids. The most recent stories I’ve heard about this sort of thing were in soccer clubs: one which made a 6-year-old do a trial and another which texted half the parents of their under-12s at the end of the season to wish their sons the best of luck at whatever club they would be training with next year.
The best way to deal with these types of coaches is to take the Roy Keane approach and tell your kid the next time he says something derogatory to them their response should be ‘show us your medals, what have you ever won’. They wont be expecting that from a kid and it’ll put them back in their box poste haste. Bonus points if your kid can say this in front of the entire team, the coach will think twice before he picks on anyone else.
I see this in junior soccer a lot. Ruthless bastards some of them.
Grown adults taking a kids’ game entirelty too seriously is the story of most small village teams in Ireland.
It’s a massive problem with all sport In Ireland. There was a coach doing under 16s soccer in Connemara who shouldn’t have been let near them lads. Screaming and roaring at them. What’s the point when half them quit before senior soccer
When you’re one of the last to be picked for a team in P.E all the time, it’s a crushing feeling.
So I just stopped bringing my kit and done lines with the other unsportly students.
Had it myself at a young age but I didn’t let them win. Worked my ass off to get onto the team and got there a year or two later. Coaching hurling to kids now for the past few years and no matter what they all get to play. I’ll gladly take a loss instead of the look on a kids the face who spent an hour watching his mates playing. Kids sport is for fun. Too many clubs and coaches have completely lost sight of it.
My ol’ man was very into soccer when he was a lad so signed myself and my younger brother up to a local soccer team when we were 8-10ish can’t really remember but I do remember 2 things very clearly:
1. One week the coaches lined us up to shoot at the goal. You queued up and when you go to the front of the line you took your shot then went to the back. If you missed every single lad would taunt you as they passed you on their way to the back of the line. This was encouraged by the coaches. I know cause I was one of ones who missed. This event, the pitch, the weather, every little sarcastic jeer, everything is burned into my memory.
2. The head coach’s son played for the team and was the captain and star player of course. One match he made a mistake and it cost us the match. His dad/coach reacted by picking him up by the collar and shook him berating his playing. Not one single dad stopped him or saw anything wrong with this as they equally yelled at the kid when he messed up.
Maybe your experience was different but standing in the rain early on Sunday morning watching grown ass men traumatize and yell at little kids, encouraging a toxically competitive atmosphere, making sure that the only way to win daddy’s love and pride is to win hence bringing up a whole new generation of emotionally stunted man child “sports” men, this has killed my enjoyment of any form of football.
Played football when younger and again to get on the teams it was who you where in the town talent never came into it, used to score for fun during training, didn’t do to much running but was always in the right place and right time to get a goal, cross comes in I was able to pick out a lose ball and get a goal,
Like it still hurts me to this day that I wasn’t good enough for the team but no idea what didn’t make me good enough,
A few years later was playing in soccer bitz London of thing and was asked to come back playing as I moved back from playing up front to playing in defensive and scored quite a few free kicks from the 1/2 way line that day,
Like even just before covid I went back playing football 7 a side with work and I still had it, my team lost 1 game out of 10 and I played in 9 of the 10 matches and I might not have been able to run much but I was still able to tackle and clear a ball,
So yah not being good enough for the local team still hurts me badly and still think about it to this day Newley 20 years later
However I took up taekwondo to replace football full time when I was younger ended up with a 2nd degree black belt and endless amounts of medals so it kind of worked out in the end but I still love football and would have loved to have made the team and kept playing 11 aside when I was younger
My primary school art teacher told me I’d never be good and to just stick with maths. Got an A1 in the leaving and have sold 3 paintings.