Confessions of A Newtown Sports Parent

Newtown Youth football practices start this coming Monday.

And with that we begin three-plus months of the most intense sports activity seen on this planet since the Lions swept the Christians in four straight, back in Rome, circa 404 AD.

Back in 2003, I had no idea what to expect from what was then known as “Newtown Pop Warner Football.” My daughter was knee-deep in the warm and fuzzy waters of youth cheerleading, but the football part was pretty much foreign to me. I had seen all those kids and all those parents spending all that time at Hawley, but it was always peeking through the fence, so to speak, with only mild interest and considerable trepidation.

My father, a high school football player himself and the son of a college All-American who actually played for Pop Warner at Cornell in 1906 (WOW, I am old), refused to let any of his three boys play football.

The reasons why were never fully explained to me, but I think it had something to do with either a concerned response to a cautionary orthopedic, or my Dad’s lifelong dream that the men in our family would dedicate themselves to becoming chiropodists.

But then my son announced he wanted to play football. So now you understand that this football thing was not his parent’s idea.

At the time, there was much happiness for us on the soccer field, and although fraternal DNA had conspired to rob my son of the fast-twitch muscles required for consideration as a member of the 5th grade Newtown travel soccer team, the in-house program is an absolutely great place for a 10-year-old athlete, even if he himself knows that he won’t be invited to the Olympic training program any time soon.

Everything was going along quite smoothly from a fall sports standpoint.

But hey – this is AMERICA.  At some point every American boy wants to be a football hero, right?

So our initial exposure to youth football came via that first hot practice at Hawley on an early August evening prior to our son starting fifth grade. We had no idea what to expect.

And it was more than any of us could have ever imagined.

After a few weeks of pathetically weak pre-practice meltdowns and subsequent reiterative lectures on WHY we don’t quit those things we begin of our own volition, things settled down and the kid actually had fun playing a game he was completely ill-suited to play.

And the next four years of Augusts-through-Autumn held some of the most friend-filled, emotional, curious, anxious, glorious, frustrating and ultimately defining moments of our son’s early and middle adolescence.

And come to think of it, if you take out the adolescence part, my wife and I experienced all of those things, too.

It sounds like a cliché, but youth football teaches kids about commitment, about the importance of playing a defined role, following a plan as opposed to operating as an individual. Football doesn’t completely eliminate individuality (although some coaches try their best), but it does ask players in specific positions to understand that the whole is truly the sum of its parts, and that’s always a good thing for kids to understand.

Oh, sure, there were lots of warts, but who’s kidding who, warts are everywhere.  There were over-zealous coaches, over-eager parents, over-hyped players and most egregious of all, a system of regulating playing time that has to be figured out and changed. It’s literally possible for a kid to come to football practice every single day and play a total of 16 seconds in a single game.

And that’s something that always got me hacked off, whether it was my kid or not. I spent considerable time that first year being red-faced about that, and probably didn’t endear myself to a few people in the football hierarchy.

But then one night, on a cold and dusky evening with the light fading down to nothing just before Halloween, my son’s team was practicing at Hawley for its first playoff game. I sat there watching them practice on an empty field that had been filled to the gills with players and parents just three short months before, all of them with the glow of anticipation for their first season, or yet another season or even their last season of football.

And that’s when I truly realized how cool this youth football thing was.

My kid barely had played that year. He didn’t care. He was on that team, and the guys let him know it. He had friends, he had bruises, he had helmet stickers, he had run through goalposts as cheering girls his own age waved blue and gold pom-poms and a guy read his name dramatically over the loudspeaker.

He was a football player.

What happened between the lines was immaterial. He was living the football dream, if only for a brief few moments of his life.

My son was a football player, and he was really happy about it.

And I never did become a chiropodist.

Thanks, Dad. Thanks a lot.