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'Why I'm raising my son to be a nerd'

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Jun 28, 2011.

  1. JonnyD

    JonnyD Member

    You know what's bad about how kids are raised these days?

    Everything that's different from the way I was raised.
     
  2. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    It's crazy. And the parents fall right into it worried Little Johnny would be left behind.

    I was an assistant coach for an 11-12 year old baseball team and we had a kid who was playing on three teams at the same time -- two different leagues and one AAU.

    We tried to do a variety of sports instead of going year-round on one. Still my high-schooler is mad at us that we didn't sign him up for youth football (we tried to take a break between baseball and basketball).
     
  3. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I know it's a different world today, but I was a pretty good high school football player. I started playing tackle football just before I turned 10 and didn't go to a single "camp" until I was in high school.

    My 5-year-old has already been to a "camp" and is playing flag football. He enjoys it and I'm certainly not going to take it away from him, but it kind of pisses me off that these things are even an option at this age.

    His coach was great. But some of the coaches in the league are teaching 5 and 6-year-olds to straight-arm other kids and stuff like that, which just seems wrong at this level and age. One kid broke his collarbone as an indirect result of a straight-arm. The coach said, "He broke it when he fell, not when the kids gave him the straight-arm."

    They're 5. They'll probably be doing Oklahoma drills next year.
     
  4. Dyno

    Dyno Well-Known Member

    My 7.5 year old cousin is on a competitive swim team (has been for 2 years) that has practice 3 times a week during the school year. This summer, she meets with a coach 4 days a week for 90 minutes a day. She also takes tennis lessons and piano lessons. Her father was recently kicked out of observing her piano lessons for being disruptive. He says that none of the coaches or the piano teacher are hard enough on his daughter. I'm waiting for her to explode.
     
  5. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    Yeah. That's going to end well.
     
  6. Bamadog

    Bamadog Well-Known Member

    I'm glad my parents insisted on balance. Academic and athletic achievements were lauded equally. I played baseball, but I also took piano lessons and did recitals. Sports taught me my limitations and helped me work in a team concept. It's something, even if you're a benchwarmer, that you can only learn in sports.
     
  7. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Heck, when I was 7, all I wanted to do was cannonballs. How the heck does a coach motivate a kid to swim laps for 90 minutes?
     
  8. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    When I was in high school, Stanford was the school where most of the people wanted to go. During my junior year an admissions person spoke at my school and told us that "Stanford is more interested in the people with high grades who have done sports and are well-balanced than those with the highest grades who had done nothing else.

    Of the nine people from my graduating class who got into Stanford, only one had done more than one season (out of 12) doing sports and all of those came during our freshman years when every single student had to play at least one sport. In fact, most of our freshman badminton team (I'm not joking.) went on to go to Stanford, MIT or one of the Ivys.
     
  9. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    I get that.

    When you are talking about kids with 34 or better ACTs and 3.9 and above GPAs applying to top schools they all tend to look the same with extra-curriculars such as president of the Spanish Club or Chess Club or whatever.

    But I don't really understand why someone who might come to school and play intramural basketball would gain an edge over someone who might come and spend an extra five hours a week studying.
     
  10. Dyno

    Dyno Well-Known Member

    Of the 5 people who went to Ivy League schools from my high school, only 1 played a sport. That was back in 1986.
     
  11. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    I got into a couple Ivy League schools that I never would have gotten into without football.

    A buddy of mine (who later went on to graduate from Cal and Wharton) interviewed with one Ivy League school the day before I interviewed with the same person. He called me when he got back that night and said, "Holy shit, he grilled me, asked me all these questions about this and that. I felt exhausted by the time I left.

    I studied for several hours that night so I would be prepared. I spent my interview there debating with the guy over whether I was better suited to play center or tackle.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Malcolm Gladwell has some interesting stuff on college admissions in "Outliers." Basically about how absurd it is when Harvard starts trying to differentiate between people with 1500-plus SAT scores and 4.0 GPAs (which everyone has nowadays).

    Sonner made a good point earlier that kind of got lost. We all think an academic scholarship is so easy to get and more obtainable than an athletic one. But for undergrads, are there a ton of merit-based full academic rides out there? I don't know the answer. I'm asking. I know there are to graduate programs, especially law schools, because they want to game the U.S. News rankings, and one way to attract better students is to throw money at them. I don't know that SAT scores and h.s. GPAs matter as much in the undergraduate rankings. Hence, maybe the schools aren't as incentivized to distribute scholarship money for academics.

    Regardless, I want to encourage my children to excel in school academically first and foremost not for scholarship purposes. That's incidental. I want them to be able to attend the best school they can get into to best position themselves for career success and fulfillment. We'll figure out how to finance it from there.
     
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