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O P I N I O N
Picking teams As a coach, your choices can impact the fate of your team members, so take pains to put the right people in the right places.
I didn’t grow up in a very sports-centric family. We never went to any kind of college or professional sporting events, my dad never had “the game” on TV, and I’ll admit I only attended one high school football game. Nevertheless, I now follow horse-sports like my own version of the NFL. If I had been born into a different family or had different early experiences, I have no doubt I could have easily ended up a sports fan.
Christina Zweig Niehues
So why was my team so bad? Did we have a bad coach? Was it just a stroke of luck that the most awkward, bumbling, un-athletic third-graders all “If I had been put on a better team, coached better, or just lucky enough to have played against even worse teams, I bet my attitude about the sport would have been different, and I would have stuck with it longer.”
So what went wrong for me? Let’s back up to the third grade when I think everything began. Because I wanted to participate in the same activities as my friends, my parents signed me up for soccer. We didn’t have any kind of try-outs at that age, they just grouped us randomly into different teams and sent us on our way. I will be the first to admit I probably wasn’t the most coordinated kid, but I could run fast and enjoyed the game. But my enthusiasm for soccer quickly waned. My team sucked; in fact, we sucked so badly we only scored one goal the whole season – and it was against ourselves. After this foray into team sports, I chose not to continue.
See CHRISTINA ZWEIG NIEHUES, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 28, 2017, ISSUE 1214
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