Saturday 18 June 2011

Sport

D'Arcy decided to play rugby at his new school for the winter. It was a pretty interesting decision on his part I thought. He's not really built for rugby, being not very tall and under 30 kilos. He'd played basketball for a few years with a local club, and convinced a friend to join with him, but last season he got quite jaded with it, complaining that the other boys "never pass me the ball". So he decided to give that up, and spurred on by eagerness by his new peer group at school, and the fact that his teacher is also arugby player, he wanted to give it a go. Of course now, about half way through the season he's over it. "The other boys never pass me the ball, and some of the others have METAL STUDS". Part of me wants him to man up and deal with it, and the other part wants me to get him away from such physical danger (especially after hearing some of the stuff that's been in the media recently about football players of all codes, and long-term brain damage). I've ended up saying to him that he should stick it out for this season and then we'll reassess. He doesn't want to go back to basketball, but I think playing some kind of sport is useful, both for the physical aspect, but also the social. I'm hoping that it will help him forge bonds with his new peers, but maybe I'm wrong. The other thing, I guess, is that at his old school he was in the chess club. My dad is a keen chess player, and encouraged him to learn, and then join the club. At the end of his time at the old school, he'd had enough "I always lose" and it's true that he'd gone from being on the top of the ladder to close to the bottom. I'm not quite sure how or why that had happened, possibly not enough one-one-one tuition, but whatever the reason, he didn't want to join the chess club at the new school "because they meet at recess time, and I already do library duty that day at lunch, and I'd basically have no free time"... I don't know, am I being unreasonably pushy in wanting him to do club things?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think it's good to have them do something physical, at least. I wish my folks had pushed me into some regular sport, just so I would have developed a habit of being more physically active-it's a lot of work to try and get into the practice at 40 than it would have been earlier. On the other hand, I was completely horrible at any sport involving a ball...and would have been miserable if forced to stay with it. Mary hated soccer, but did well at swimming, so we let her switch, and pushed her to do swim team, though we haven't made her compete much. She's dropped that for Aikido with her dad, which is good for lots of the control and calmness, but is only once a week. The parents of her friends and I all decided we would tell the girls they had to pick a physical activity to do in high school, so they're all doing swim team again. I think once she does something, she needs to stick it out for the year or whatever, but I would let her switch when the season was over. Swimming is nice because the weather is much more pleasant than for soccer :)

Anonymous said...

and that was Sara, by the way. Sorry!

Mummy/Crit said...

I knew it was you, even before you mentioned Mary ;-)

I was the same with sport, but got pushed to play music, which I think was a good thing, despite how much I hated practising. But I was dreadful at sporting things - couldn't see properly I think, and never really learnt the whole spatial thing (or it was the bit of my brain missing that was to blame)...