Welcome to Sports Thoughts Story Time. As a species we humans are at our best when we’re connecting with each other through story-telling. Story telling allows us to share more than the facts: it’s our opportunity to share our feelings, our emotions, our wisdom and our learning with others. Stories allow us to share our successes, our failures, our joys and our fears. Stories help us to learn and grow. This space - Sports Thoughts Story Time is where I’ll share some of the stories I’ve experienced in a lifetime of sport.
This week - Tennis and Crayons.
Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher. You hand out a big box of brighly coloured crayons and some paper to every student. They pick up a crayon from the box and just as they’re about to draw something silly and funny like a horsey or a rainbow or a puppy - you stop them and say, “OK. Everyone listen to me. You need to hold your crayon exactly as I do - so that when you become a brain surgeon, you’ll know how to hold your scalpel”.
Pretty dumb huh.
So ask yourself, why - when a 7 year old kicks a football for the first time, instead of just letting them kick and have fun with a ball, that we make them do drills, patterns, structures and systems?
Why do we treat every kid who jumps into a pool as if they’re going to be the next Michael Phelps?
Just let them play. Let them discover. Let them be kids.
In this week’s Story time I tell you about an experience with Tennis - or rather with a Management Group conducting a review for Tennis Australia - and how it led to me hearing some of the most insightful thoughts I’d ever heard about sport.
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