“Away Game: Discipling Kids Through the Chaos of Youth Sports”

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm James Spencer, and I am joined by two veterans of sports ministry, Ed Juzinski, who I've had in the program a couple of other times talking about a variety of different subjects, and Brian Smith. And together they've written a book called Away Game, a Christian parent's guide to navigating youth sports. And so today we're gonna be talking all about sports, youth sports, what that looks like for parents and just excited to have you in, guys. I read the book this week and really enjoyed it. So I'm excited to have this conversation. How are you doing? Good. Good to be back with you, James. Yep, thanks for having us, James. Appreciate it. So, talked a little bit about how maybe you guys connected because even though you're in sports ministry, it's not like we should assume that everybody in sports ministry knows each other, right? So, how did you guys first connect and decide that this was the book that you needed to write? Yeah, it's a great question. 10 years ago, Brian and I started working closely together on a website where we were writing content about how the gospel intersects sports. We were taking things that were happening in regular sports culture and just bringing a gospel angle to them. And in the midst of that, we were also having kids and becoming parents of athletes and youth coaches ourselves. And we spent all of our time thinking about sports and ministry from a collegiate and professional level in our work. But now we were really starting to think pretty hard about what's actually going on with our kids at the youth level. And it's out of that that we really started to talk about needing a resource. We needed help for how to think about it. So, Brian, go ahead. What would you add to that? Yeah, and we had been talking about needing a resource like this for close to a decade, right, Ed? And so it was one of those things where just kind of worlds quieted. It came to that moment where we're having kids go through all of this and seeing the broader conversation taking place in culture of just the, there's something wrong with youth sports culture and everybody trying to put their finger on what's wrong, how can we fix it? But then us just feeling this conviction of, there's got to be a Christian response to what's going on. What would it look like for Christians to live biblically within the context of youth sports? So not to completely isolate, not to completely conform, but what would it look like for us to just be in the system of youth sports, but to do that in a way that still uphold the high value of our faith? And so Ed and I love thinking through stuff like that. And out of those texts, phone conversations, we started to put a book together. Failures, yeah, lots of failures that we were experiencing with our own kids and watching what was happening with other people's kids, you know, starting to become world-class observers of everything that was going on when we were at games and what kids were saying. So how, I mean, obviously this has changed over time because, you know, travel sports have really become something that is a little different, I think, than when I was a kid. I mean, I knew some people who did maybe travel soccer, but they were, they were rare. Now it seems like every sport has sort of clubs that you can join, travel sports, even as young as, you know, elementary school, getting your kids in there and doing some traveling and going and competing against other kids. And so I guess my question would be, how have you seen this sort of change and evolve over time or maybe devolve over time, depending on how you think about it, and create more challenges for Christian parents as they're having their kids participate in youth sports? And maybe, Brian, I'll start with you and then we can transition to Ed. Is that cool? Yeah, that's great. So, I mean, how did we get to this moment where we're traveling? The book kind of talks about a few different threads that are interwoven that influenced that. One that stands out as significant to me is in the late 90s, Disney decided to try to get some of their older kids more involved, that they would build a sports complex. And so that's how the worldwide sports complex started at Disney. It's like this 200 acre complex. They wanted to bring residual income to the property. So their thought was, man, if, if we can get kids coming to play soccer or basketball or baseball, get their entire family to come, then maybe they would stay for an extra day and show up at Epcot. And what they found was after the terrorist attack in 2011, that people just stopped traveling to these like resort parks. But their, their attendance doubled at the at the sports complex. And so in a weird way, they found like, man, terror, youth sports is really terrorism proof. And there's very few things that parents will not do when it comes to their kids' athletic experience. And so other cities and municipalities noticed that and followed suit and started building these like these palaces where people would come and travel to to play. And so that's become the normative part of youth sports culture. Now is the, it's almost like a rite of passage to be able to travel and go to these different complexes and Adam Mets in one of his books, he calls them palaces. It's just become this rite of passage to show up there. So Ed, yeah, I'll pass the baton to you. What would you say after that? So we've got over 30,000 of these in the U S now of these larger sports complexes. How does that, how does that kind of speak to this travel culture? It feeds into, I mean, that happened in 2001. So we're talking 24 years now, and it just feeds into a larger development of an industry. So youth sport culture is an industry now. It is a multi-billion dollar effort that many entrepreneurially minded people have tried to take advantage of. And so essentially what's happened again, it ends up sounding so crass and we always want to disclaim it before we say any of this, that we're still very pro-sport and we very much want to be involved, just like we want to be involved in all aspects of secular culture, but we want to do it with maybe blinders taken off, you know, like let's see what's actually really going on so we can be more intelligent about how we move into it. Because what's happened is as an industry, the kids have become commodities. And again, that sounds very crass. I don't know that that people that are running sports clubs are, they're not thinking that literally, but the kids represent dollar signs. They need kids to be part of their system in order for their clubs to survive and they need more kids and they need more money. It's just the nature of business. And so, you know, whenever money gets involved at a high level, kids' interests start moving, what's best for kids moves way further down the list where we're not thinking so much about how to holistically develop kids. We're thinking how to get their parents to pay money to come be part of our program. And that just right from the get-go, that winds up becoming a real conflict of interest for us as Christian parents who are wanting to see a different set of values built into our kids, but we're putting them, we're paying for them to be part of a system that's actually teaching them its own set of values, its own worldview. It's discipling them to think very differently about themselves and other people and their place in the world than what we want for them. So we're just trying to become more aware of that as a starting point. I would say, I mean, I've got kids who are participating in sports right now. We used to do club volleyball and I would say the difference, and now we do lacrosse. So my daughters both play lacrosse and they used to play club volleyball. I'm very happy to be away from the club volleyball culture. Lacrosse in the Midwest is still a very sort of new sport. And so it hasn't really taken hold just kind of like what you're saying, Ed. I don't think anybody's sitting at the top twisting their mustache necessarily and saying, oh good, these kids are commodities, right? They're not, they're viewing it like that. And yet when you get into some of these high-powered volleyball programs, you know, if your daughter's not, you know, six foot or above, you know, preferably like six, three, six, four, you know, they're not going to have the same opportunities that some of those other girls are. The game of volleyball has just changed. And yet it's like they need them to participate still. And so you start to get those veiled promises of, oh, this could be really good for your kid. This could be this. Let's go to nationals. Let's do all this kind of stuff and get all these accolades. And it's like, well, but there are, they're just not enjoying it. Neither are we. Whereas lacrosse, we feel like it's still sort of an up and coming sport. There's a lot more opportunity. It's fun, it's active, and there's not as much pressure on that sort of college recruitment aspect, which at least I've found going into, you know, junior high, high school with the girls. That's a bigger part of the conversation with youth sports increasingly is can you get a college scholarship doing

You can see the pieces there that would allow it to develop that direction. It's amazing that the dangling of that college scholarship is still so enticing to us as parents when the numbers haven't changed across decades, that there's less than two out of 100 kids that are going to even get to play at any level of college, and even fewer of those will actually get scholarship money for it. Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating study in and of itself. Why do we still believe that our kid is going to be one of those two? Right. And we just, so we're, we're very vulnerable to those people that are saying, we can help you get that. We'll help your eight-year-old start to turn into the, the college scholarship. It starts now. No, I think you're right. I mean, as somebody who's been involved in higher education at a number of different levels, I sort of look at it and go, yeah, but probably not. You know, most of the schools that are going to be recruiting my daughters, they're going to get stronger academic scholarships at, and all they'll do is sort of slice the pie differently. You know, so if you're getting whatever, let's say you just say $10,000 to give a round number, they'll give you $10,000 max. How they divide that out doesn't really matter. They can give you $5,000 in sports scholarship, $5,000 in academics, and they'll work that out on their backend, but the number really doesn't change that much. And so I think there's some realism that just has to happen with some of these things where, you know, parents need to be savvy and look ahead and go, what really is this? Why are we actually doing this? Because it's probably not for a college scholarship. Well, it's true. There was a study recently done by Aspen Sports Institute, and they found that one out of every 10 parents believe that their kid could either become a pro or Olympic level athlete, and one out of five believe that their kid can make it Division 1 sports on scholarship. And I had posted that online just as kind of a, hey, this is crazy, but it's true. And I had a couple people actually respond of like, yeah, I'm one of those, I'm one of those people, the one out of the five or one out of the 10. I really believe in my kid, and we need to have full confidence in our kids. And so it is, it is so interesting of just this like, yeah, we need to have confidence in our kids and build their self-esteem and believe in them. But the stats still are, they're there for a reason. Only 2% make it. And that's not to pro or Olympic level. That's just to college. So what is, yeah, what is the, what is that line where we want to believe in our kids, but not trust that they're all going to be a part of that exception to the norm? The norm is that we, as a collective, are believing that all of our kids are the exception. Brian, what have we been saying to each other? This is what I was going to throw back to you because we hang out with college athletes all the time. And what is it that we've been saying to ourselves and to other parents for years now about what's true about those athletes? Yeah, those athletes have, I mean, people call it the, the it factor. They just have something genetically that God has gifted them with internally. They have a drive and parents need to understand you can't buy that. A club team is not going to develop it. Kids either have it or they don't, which sounds like, yeah, for me, it takes the pressure off of it as, as somebody who's ran track and cross country at the division one level, like, and now I'm, I'm hoping my kid will have a similar work ethic. I can see him right now. He just became a freshman. I think he's got the skill level to like, I'm, I'm, I'm that one out of five, right? I think he's got the skill level, but he's just got a girlfriend and he's, he's spending most of his time with her. And so, but I'm not going to like force that on him. If he's going to make it, he has to want it. It's got to come from him, not, not from his dad saying, hey, you can make it if you just do X, Y, and Z. He's got to want it to get there. Yeah. It's really interesting. I think, you know, to you guys' point, you're pro sports, but I think being pro sports is then ultimately going to require some of what you do in the book, this sort of spiritual formation versus sport formation, right? And because if you start chipping away and you say, okay, you're not going to get a college scholarship. You're not going to get this. You're not going to get that. Then the next logical question for at least some parents is then why bother? Why even bother playing? What, what's the point, right? If you're not going to get this, if you're not going to be a high level athlete, why are we spending so much time on this? Why are we spending so much money on this? And I mean, I've watched parents make that, ask that question and, and sort of move in that direction. So I'm interested to hear, you know, from that, again, from that pro sports sort of perspective, not a pro sports, but a in favor of sports perspective. How do you guys want to, how do you guys deal with that? How do you think through it? Yeah. How did we answer that question 50 years ago? We play because it was fun because our, because kids want to play the game. They, they want to play a game, preferably with their friends and have fun, not just with the sport itself, but everything that goes along with it. The hangout, the snack after the game, the, you know, messing with each other during warmups and, you know, the experience of being on a journey. What do you, when pros retire, what do they say they miss the most? They miss that aspect of what it means to get to play a sport. They really, they could've left the business side aside and we've allowed it for our kids to turn into a business. So how do we separate that out and just let our kids have fun again is a great question actually, I think for us to ask as parents. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty. More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. 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Like, I don't need to justify why they're playing is good. The fact that they're outside moving their bodies and doing something, whether it's playing sport or tag, whatever it is, there's just this intrinsic goodness about that worth celebrating that you don't need to stick a, well, they're, they're working on their quads by running so fast. You know, I don't need to do that. I can just look at it and say, there's goodness in that. Yeah. Yeah. It's been interesting to watch my, one of my daughters is in gymnastics and you know, she, there's a whole system of gymnastics. She got into it a little late. She's not going to hit a level where she can even be recruited for college. And so we've known that for a very long time, like five years, long time, but she's still in gymnastics and she still loves it and she still has a lot of fun doing it. And it's good for her in a lot of ways. Like you can see physically, it's good for her, obviously, but then just the, uh, the way they approach gymnastics. I think it has, you know, like a lot of people would say this about martial arts or karate. You do learn some discipline to it. You, you learn to take things seriously, but you're still having a really great time learning to do new tricks, learning to do new things. And she loves it. And so it's just sort of part of who she is now. Um, I feel the same way with weight training for me. There's no reason for me to bench press a small car anymore, but I still do it. Like I enjoy it. It's fun. It's a part of my life. I wouldn't want to give up and nobody's going to give me any money to do it. Pretty sure about that. So yeah, I think it's a great answer. Um, how do you think though about, you've, you've got a whole middle section in your book that, you know, the second section where it's talking about that sports formation versus spiritual formation. Then I'm wondering if you can cover just a little bit of some of those topics. Like

every possible emotion in sport from the ultimate highs to the lowest of lows. They're dealing with the relational issues and things with the coach, which provides you as a parent with an incredible opportunity to disciple your kids. And so that's one of the, that's a huge win of having your kid in youth sports is you get to watch all of it go down. Your kid gets home from school and you're asking them, how was your day? You're getting the one word answer, right? It was fine. It was good. But you don't know, you don't know how the day went because you weren't there. And so it's hard to, unless you're really good at pulling things out of your kid, it's hard to know how to leverage even the eight days they spend at school if your kids aren't in school as discipleship opportunities in sport. You don't have to guess. You're seeing all of it go down. And if we're watching with a, what we're arguing for in this book, this Christianly lens, you should be watching for more than just external metrics and what you see on the scoreboard. You should be watching for how your kid responds when things go well or poorly. Who are they gravitating towards on their team and who do they maybe stay away from? Like all that stuff is really good opportunity for you to kind of make your primary job as a parent. And that's to, that's to disciple your kid. So yeah, but when it comes to a topic like peace, we have seven different characteristics that we talk about in the book. Ed, what would you say about what does it look like to bring peace into that conversation with your kid? I'll just say one more thing as a setup to that, that what we're saying is that sport culture is, it is discipling us and our kids to think a certain way about all of these categories. So just again, to be aware of it, it's not, it's not to condemn sport culture. All of secular culture is, is probably teaching us most of the time anti-God values. So it's just become aware of it. It's not neutral. Let's just become aware of what's built into the system now that creates anxiety. It's beyond just the performance anxiety that comes with any, you're always going to feel some stress just because you're playing or you're competing at something. But there's this heightened anxiety because winning is the only value that matters. Or we're expecting, you know, end of the road perfection right now. Social media is playing a role. It's just becoming aware of all these different anxiety creators and then flipping it around and saying, okay, what does the Bible say about how to acquire peace in the midst of troubling circumstances? What does the Apostle Paul teach us about when he had and when he didn't have the secret to contentment was? It has something to do with leaning into Jesus. Okay. So what does it look like to lean into Jesus as a six-year-old when you're feeling anxiety? Well, first of all, what am I doing as a parent that's actually contributing to the stress that they feel? So that's step one. That's really hard to admit, like what I'm doing with my words or my behavior and where is that coming from inside of me? That's a great discussion to be having with other adults. But then once I'm aware of that, how can I incorporate principles of discipleship into my six-year-old? And he or she may not understand it right now, but I'm at least going to put them on a trajectory to say when we feel stress, our first step in your mind is to turn to God and say, I feel stressed, God. You know, it's things like that. It's equipping them that now let's even take some just ways of relieving stress physiologically. Like we can add that in there. Like let's be part of the peace creators in their life, the shalom creators. And again, we just don't usually think about that because we're too worried about their playing time and we're upset that they kept hitting the ball into the net on the way down in the volleyball tournament, or they're taking strike three and we need to fix that. That's what's most important. Yeah, and we miss this opportunity, like Brian said, to actually speak into the thing that's going to matter when they're 30. So there's spiritual things, but there's also, I mean, we talk in the book, there's very tangible things that you can do to help our kids when they're feeling anxious. We talk a lot about deep breathing and the impact that just teaching our kids how to slow down and take five deep breaths can have. I mean, it's increasing the amount of oxygen in their blood. It's lowering blood pressure and heart rate. It's reducing tension in the muscle. So there's all these studies done on the benefits of just taking a few deep breaths. And so we, yeah, we can and we should learn the spiritual aspects of what does it look like to bring peace into this conversation and to run to Jesus and not to what our coach thinks. But there's also just really tangible things that we can help our kids do in the moment when they've just screwed up or when they're going to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, take a couple of deep breaths, recenter yourself, remember that mom and dad love you, God loves you, regardless of the outcome. Just really tangible things. Yeah, celebrating risk taking failures. I just opened up the book. You know, like, so instead of putting all the emphasis on getting the hit in that moment, what if we just backed up off of that even and said, we just want you to swing. Today's just going to be a swing day. And if you strike out, you strike out. We're going to celebrate you swinging the bat and not get so worked up about the fact that it turned into a strikeout or again, they didn't come through with the bases loaded or whatever. And we're not saying that because we're participation trophy dads and we don't care at all about the outcome. We do. We're saying your kid actually will have a better chance of succeeding in the end. Whether they end up succeeding on the scoreboard or not, they'll have a better chance of succeeding if you wisely engage their sport experience again instead of just yelling at them to perform and to bring about the result we want. The goal is freedom, right? We want our kids to play with freedom, not under fear. And the way we do that, we need to continue to remind them that what they do has no bearing on our standing relationally with them or with God. Like they're, regardless of what happens, you and me, we're good. I'm just here to watch you. And yeah, like I hope you do really well today, but regardless of whether you do well or it goes horribly, I still love you. I still got you. I'm still on your team. Well, James, we would all nod to that and say that, of course, we all believe that. But we just, Brian and I were just talking about this Atlantic article that was circulating again titled, Stop Trying to Raise Successful Kids and Start Trying to Raise Kind Ones. Because they did this survey with adults and kids. All the adults said that they wanted to raise kind kids. But all of the kids, when they were asked what their parents really valued, all their responses had to do with success, performance success. So the article was arguing that although all of us would give head nods to, yeah, we want our kids to know that they're fully accepted by us no matter what they do. The kids know that what we're actually saying to them all the time is perform, perform, perform. And when they don't, they feel the weight of that from us. And they hear it too. Like you can hear in youth sports when somebody, when a kid drops a pass or let's in a goal, you can hear the audible sigh from the sidelines. And so we can talk till we're blue in the face about like, hey, I love you regardless of your performance. But when they fall short of expectations and they hear from the sidelines, ugh. At best, that's all they hear. At best. You're right. Right. They understand the disconnect there. So the book is a lot, too, about our response. So it really does start with us. We can believe and say all the right things, but it really does start with us and how we're interacting with our kids. Well, I think to you guys' point, I mean, there's been a couple of things that I've been really pleased with as we've entered into this sort of space where there's recruitment happening for my girls. One of them is they've had, we kind of had to push them to go and get a number of different experiences. So we're doing a lot of different college visits and just saying, let's go to ones that aren't offering you sports scholarships. Let's go to ones that are. Let's go to ones that have club. Let's go to ones that, you know, all these different ones because you don't know what you want. So let's not get caught in that bubble of you can only go where they're recruiting you. That's a bad bubble to be caught in. They've been really receptive to that. I think the second thing is they've decided that there are some coaches they wouldn't play for. And they're just like, no, we don't, you know, they don't articulate it like, oh, we hate this person or something like that. They're just like, no, they don't really seem like somebody we'd enjoy playing for. And I'm like, that's a really great feeling to watch my kids go, yeah, that school can be out just because we really don't feel like this person is someone we'd thrive under. We don't, we don't like the way they do things. We don't feel like we'd fit here. And I love watching them go through that process. I think that's really been a good moments for me. Right. But I do think after reading the book, I had been thinking through, you know, how we handle some of these conversations with the girls because

And you can't control any of the rest of this stuff. Whatever happens is going to happen. We don't want to be nihilistic about it, but we also want to give them that sense of, hey, just be happy you can be out there playing and enjoying yourself. Don't turn this into a job because it's not a job. It's a lot of fun, and you enjoy it. What do you feel like you and your wife have done? I'll put you on the spot a little bit, but what have you done that's created that kind of security in your daughters that they would be able to recognize that they wouldn't fit for this kind of coach? Do you feel like there's conversations you've had or principles that you've implemented along the way that's helped them get to that point? So I think one of the early experiences we had with the girls was with gymnastics. So both of them were doing gymnastics when they were much younger. And one of my daughters just really loved gymnastics. I think she would have put up with anything. She's the one who's still doing it. She would have put up with almost anything just to continue doing gymnastics. The other one didn't love it and was doing it more because her sister was. And we had that real early conversation where it's like, if this isn't something that you love, it's like, don't bother with it. It's a lot of hours during the week to be doing something where you feel like quasi-miserable. So just stop. There's no commitment in gymnastics, so it could be like, at the end of the month, just quit. It's fine. Give her permission to have that attitude. Right. And we had that same conversation with my other daughter. So I have twin daughters, so it's kind of hard to distinguish sometimes. But I had the other conversation with my other daughter. She was playing volleyball. Didn't love it. Now we had to have the different conversation of, look, you committed for the season. You stay for the season, right? So you're going to gut this out. But there's no reason to think that you have to go back the next season. It's fine. Don't worry about it. And so they've both been able to try different things. They tried track. They tried volleyball. They tried all these different sports. And they know that, okay, if we commit, we're playing for the season, but it never has to go beyond that. And so if we like it, we're good. We'll keep doing it. If we don't like it, we're done. And I think that's been part of what's been so freeing for them is just to say, look, it's your choice. These things aren't requirements. They're not obligations. You're going to go to college anyway if you want to go to college. They do well in other areas. It's not something that we feel like we need to push. And as somebody who was never a sporty guy, it's definitely not something that I've said that I really push hard. I want them to be active and healthy, but I don't really need them to be pro sports stars or anything. So I think the whole vibe has been established early on where we just allowed them to decide for themselves. Like, do it or don't do it. It's fine. And when they were younger, we'd say, you got to do something. We're not just going to lump it on the couch. But then that's when we can open up the YMCA offerings and be like, oh, look, here's field hockey or soccer or lacrosse. And that's how we ended up finding lacrosse. My daughter just randomly picked it. We didn't have any idea what it was. Never really even seen it. And she fell in love with it. So yeah, it's some of those things. And interesting thing about lacrosse, there was a study done like 15 years ago when it just started to kind of become a thing. And they're trying to figure out why are kids flocking to this sport? And one of the things they found was that kids were saying, parents don't know a whole lot about it. They don't know the rules. And the researchers were putting together, like, kids are wanting to play this sport because mom and dad don't fully understand what's happening. And when you don't understand what's happening, you can't yell suggestions and you can't correct and yell at the ref. And my son played a couple of years of it. And I was in that boat like, what is going on out there? Why are guys allowed to make contact and girls can't? And I just had to shut my mouth and watch. And it was frustrating, but it was also super freeing just to be like, I guess I just have to watch because I don't want to say anything that's going to make me look like an idiot from the sidelines either. We have a running joke as parents on the sideline where our biggest suggestion to the girls on the field is anticipate. Hey, just anticipate. It's like the only advice we can possibly give them. That works in every sport too. You can transfer that to every sport. You know what you need to do? Just anticipate what's going to happen next. That's what you need to do. The best advice I can give you. That's great. It might be so easy for people who are listening or I even feel a little twitch of it inside myself to say, well, James, of course, you're not a sports person. So, of course, it's easy for you to be a little less emotionally invested and just let them do whatever they want. And I would say to myself and other people who are sports people, that's wisdom. What you did is wisdom. And I need to ask myself why, as a sports person, it's so hard for me to let go and to let them have some autonomy and let them choose what they want to do and not want to do without me putting pressure on them to do something other than what they want when it comes to a game. And as I've asked myself that, it's honestly exposed a lot of dark stuff inside myself, a lot of insecurities, a lot of regrets, a lot of wanting them to be something other than maybe what God's created them to be, which are, you know, it's hard to face that stuff inside yourself. But if we're going to maintain relationship with our kids in their 20s, we need to do that soul searching when they're 15 and when they're 5 so that we don't ruin our relationship with them. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I know, I agree. And I'm not the... So my wife is the jock of the family. She played D1 volleyball before she went to pharmacy school. And so, yeah, we've still got that impetus. But I will say, you know, my wife made a very similar choice. She was being recruited to a school here in St. Louis where her sister was also playing. And they decided not to recruit her or recruit a different setter. She was a setter at the time because they figured she'd just walk on. And my wife's like, I don't really want to play those games. And so she didn't play her first year of college. When she transferred up to UIC, that's when she started playing. And then she only had a year before she got into pharmacy school, which nobody plays during pharmacy school really or didn't back then. But, you know, I watched her make that choice, too, of like, what's really important to me? And why would I want to play for you all that are just playing games, right? You're playing games with people's lives here and you just think you're so amazing that I'm just going to fall at your feet and come out regardless. It was just interesting to watch. And that's been a long, long time ago. But I think she still takes that attitude. And even when the girls wanted to stop playing volleyball, she was like, yeah, stop playing volleyball. It's fine. It wasn't that like, oh, no, we have a legacy of volleyball in our family. You need to keep up. It was just play whatever you want to play. So it's been, yeah, it's been really interesting to watch her navigate that because I know she has stronger feelings about it than I do. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. So, bravo, James. I've heard from people in our own community, they make statements like, well, we are a lacrosse family or we are a basketball family. And just thinking, man, the pressure that puts on the kids. Like, man, that means I have to keep playing this sport. And so it's cool to hear the story of you and your family despite being essentially a volleyball type family, it sounds like your girls still have a lot of autonomy. And even when you're talking about their college journey of talking to coaches, I'm noticing you're saying like, they have decided they don't want to play for this coach instead of we have decided as parents this is not a good coach for our kids. And I think that's one of the issues right now in youth sports is parents are so often driving the bus and leading these conversations. But it's super refreshing to talk to somebody

Train, practice that in sport, but it transfers to the spiritual realm as well. That's good. You know, one question I had after reading the book, I mean, you all address it, I think, in a variety of different ways, but one of the things I talked to the girls about, they like lifting with me, so they're in the weight room with me an awful lot. And one of the things I told them when they started, I said, lifting weights is about failure. It's almost always about failure. You're trying to go to failure. You're trying to lift a weight that you couldn't lift yesterday, and you don't really know where your limits are. You're continually pushing to find that limit and fail it and then go past it. But failure is a big part of what you're doing in the weight room. And as I read through your book, and I'm thinking through, you know, what's the psyche that we're producing in young people where winning is more important than learning from failure? You know, success is more important than just sort of, I don't want to say settling for who you are, but owning who you are, right? How would you guys think about that when you're thinking about youth sports and the sort of formative effect parents can cultivate within them? How do they help them to own those failures and really learn from them, grow from them? Yeah, one of the mistakes that I have found myself falling into as well, I'll put it on myself, not just blame all of you sports culture, is living at the two ends of the extreme like you talk about. It's either win or lose. And we've been using the phrase a lot, like what you celebrate, your kids will replicate. And so, yeah, what does it look like for me then to begin to celebrate things other than what's reflected on the scoreboard or the stats for my kids? And because I am a sports parent and I'm a sports junkie, I want to talk about how the game went. I want to talk about how my kid as a wide receiver could sharpen his routes a little bit and catch with his hands and not his body. But if all I'm talking about are those things, what is he going to think dad cares about the most? It's going to be how I perform. And so, again, we get back to this conversation. What if I started, and I've been trying to do this more and more, but what if I started asking him questions like, hey, who did you have a conversation with today that nobody else on the team seemed like they wanted to talk to? Who did you move towards today when they made a mistake when coach was yelling at them? Who did you put your arm around and what did you say to them? So to even give him different categories to think through of like, man, it does seem like dad, mom and dad really value me looking out for the people on the team that other people don't seem to pay any attention to. And so for us as Christian parents especially to begin to give our kids new categories to think through, which all of that stuff that I just mentioned, that's accessible whether you win or lose or you play awesome or poorly. You can talk to them if you didn't get any playing time. That's accessible every single day at the game and during practice for our kids. And it's one, man, if anything, that's one thing that Jesus would be celebrating. So I'm constantly reminding myself of that, like just the physical stuff is important. Yeah, I want him to grow in all of this stuff. But if nothing else, I want him to come away from sports looking more and more like Jesus does. Yeah, it connects back to that article you're talking about, do you want kind children or do you want successful children? What you're really talking about there is if we really want kind children, let's reinforce some of those things. Let's reinforce them being kind on the field. I want both, yeah. Yeah, it would be great if they were both. But that means we have to celebrate both because then they'll replicate both. I like that. That's great. Or maybe even one more than the other. Like Brian said, I'll put this on myself. I've had no problem blaming ESPN for a whole bunch of ills in society and youth sports in particular. And another one to the list is this idea that winning on the scoreboard and winning the championship is literally all that matters in sports. Somebody asked me today, like, how do you know that or how do you prove that? Well, all that's what the talk shows talk about. They have to talk about something. And what they've decided to talk about is primarily the champions. So you're not even in the discussion of having been a great team if you haven't won X number of championships in any sport. And we get that, like, okay, winning. But what's happened is now there's no other categories for what constitutes a win other than the championship. A great six-month journey through a season and tons of improvements or whatever else. That means anything if you're not holding the trophy at the end. And oh, by the way, you get to hold the trophy for, like, five minutes before we start talking to you about having to do it again next year. Legacy. Exactly. Legacy. Legacy. Like, how you stack against all-time greats. Yeah. It's just because there's so many circumstances that are outside your control that go into actually getting a trophy in your hands. There's so many that are outside your control. So we've just completely punted on there being anything else to talk about along the way as being a measure of success other than the... And I just say that's silly. So as parents, like Brian's saying and you're saying, we need to come up with just our own list, maybe, of what would be some other wins. Like, let's have that conversation, mom and dad, or even amongst our friends. What are some other things that we could look for that collectively we're going to start to celebrate together? That would be transformational in a community if we started to do that together. One of the things I've found, at least, is that you almost have to track those kind of things over time. Like, again, I can sort of remember a few years ago, my daughter was doing a meet. She fell off a beam and it was like her coach had to really cajole her to get back on there. She was crying. She was really upset that she fell off. I watched the, you know, compete last year. She fell off the beam at State. Got up laughing. Like, she's just... And so you watch that over time and you're like, man, look at the resilience she's developed. Look at the change in her perspective that she's got. And highlighting that for her, that that growth was sort of really important. It's one of the all-time greatest things I've seen when she fell off that beam and got up and just was like, shrugged it off, got up, finished her routine, and moved on with life. Because I'm like, that's such... that is, we have to do that every day. That's right. As humans, we have to do that every day. And what you said, I was going to say, James, what you said is highlighting that for her. And so it sounds like you even had that conversation with her to help her connect those dots. This is what happened before and this is what I saw now. And so look at that growth. And a lot of what we do in the book is make this argument, like, that sport culture is not going to just all of a sudden grow your kid in character. If anything, it might erode it. Our kids need some sort of guide or sage. And we're arguing for parents. They need parents to connect the dots and help them see what happened before and what happened now, the growth that happened. So again, bravo. I mean, it sounds like you're the living example of what we're arguing for in this book. That is, it's huge. You're helping them connect the dots. Some people jokingly encourage my daughter to make other girls cry on the field, so I'm not the perfectly ideal. Ideal? Yeah. I'm giving the good stuff. Some people would be angry, though, that your daughter got up and laughed or smiled. They would be angry about that. They're angry if they see a kid stop to help another kid up when they fall down. They're angry. Again, because we've so absorbed this warlike quest for victory. And again, we have to trample and we have to rise to the top of the summit. And again, at six years old, we're acting that way with our kids. We're not talking about the Olympics, nation versus nation, even. We're talking about an eight-year-old soccer game. And it's like, how can she smile after falling off the beam? Of course, she's disappointed, but she can also smile because it's not the, it doesn't define the rest of the world. It's not the end of the world. But for a lot of parents, it does. And again, then we need to ask, why is that? What's happening inside of us that makes that, makes us feel that way? That's the work we want parents to start doing more of. Well, I know we're kind of getting close to time here. So I want to kind of ask one closing question, because I think this will be a good discussion. How do you see the church sort of benefiting from youth sports culture and being harmed by youth sports culture? And so, like I would tell you, like I was at a lacrosse meet or a lacrosse tournament last weekend. It went Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I was in a church, you know, I was out of town and we have those an awful lot. And so that, that relative absence, right, where to participate in these sports, you, I have found that you have to be gone on a lot of Sundays. How do you all think

to be together and we're cheering on kids and maybe not doing it in the right way, whatever, but it's still this critical mass of people oftentimes from our local communities. Again, unless we're going to Disney or traveling across state lines. But it's people that we're doing life with and that that's an incredible opportunity for the church to be the church. And again, this is kind of a separate conversation from actually showing up and attending church, which Ed and I have a high, high value on that. Yeah, totally. But this is a very cool opportunity for the church to be the church to a watching world. But to do so, we really do have to to live differently and act differently in a way that we're actually showing, hey, we we're serving a different God right now than the God of sport. I'll let you take it from there. That's great take for me, though. It's I think it's opportunity because we're gathering together and it's it's a great chance to be missional. Yeah, that's a great take. Think about it. Yeah, well done. We had a great conversation with these guys the other day who are in the youth ministry world. And it's just just a great run of ideas on how to serve and serve our people so that they're more equipped to be ministers in those spaces. So instead of always feeling like youth sports is taking people away from us, which again sort of belies this ministry philosophy that says people always have to come to us. We just flipped it around and said, no, our people are actually going out into those spaces. Like Brian just described, how do we be more intentional to put resources in their hands? So let's give them a list of five podcasts or five messages to listen to when they're on the road. Let's give them a list of churches in the community. We know they're going to these same communities all the time. Here's three churches. Some of you would want to go to visit a church early on a Sunday morning or a Saturday night when you're on the road. Here's ones we'd recommend. Like that's just such a different mindset. Yeah, it is. How to have a good conversation. How do you get beneath the surface of people's lives again, not always to necessarily share a gospel track, but just to explore their life. Let's help people become better conversationalists in an age where we don't do that very well. There's such a role we can play as equippers of the body in that space. Yeah. With that said, we also don't want it to just become another excuse for people to not gather together in local churches anymore. Like when we mentioned COVID, this just becomes one more easy way to not get back together and hear the preached word together and experience communion together and witness baptisms together and and have a few people that we feel accountable for and to. I mean, that's the church. Yeah. That doesn't always have to happen inside of a building. And again, that's a longer conversation, but that is usually where it happens for us as Americans. And so we don't want to use this as an excuse to just be like gone for nine months out of the year because that's not healthy for our kids either. It's not healthy for us or our kids. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's a sense of I like what you guys are articulating. So if I can summarize it, it's basically recognize just where we are as a culture. Allow the church to equip people who are going to be going out into these spaces and have opportunities to interact and be missional out on the sports field. But don't get so caught up in, hey, you've got to be a church every Sunday, so we shouldn't have sports on Sunday ever. Like use the spaces that you have without detaching from the local church community of which you're a part. Like, but we have to be rethinking these kind of things because it's unlikely these dynamics will actually change. And so we need to just sort of embrace where we're at and use it for the gospel as opposed to lamenting where we're at and trying to sort of peel away from it completely and isolate ourselves within a local church community on Sunday. Is that a fair summary? Very much so. And that you actually have permission. I'll say this to you, James. You can participate in sports that are playing in a tournament Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And if your conviction is that you're not going to play on Sunday mornings, you can still have that conviction and you can just tell coaches, our kids aren't going to be available for that 10 a.m. game. We'll be there the rest of the time, but not you can do that. I think we need to give ourselves permission to do that. That's a good word. And not judge the people that are saying, well, we are going to go play the 10 a.m. game. OK, like it's yeah, we can do both of those. Yeah, very cool. Well, guys, I enjoyed this book as somebody who has, like we've talked about daughters. I have daughters in sports. It was just really helpful and refreshing to read through. And so I'd encourage any parent who's got kids in sports, whatever age, really, to pick this up and get it and give it a read because I think there's a lot of helpful insights from a couple of guys who've been involved in sports ministry for a really long time. So appreciate you being on the show. Appreciate you writing the book. And yeah, just thanks for being here. Thanks, James. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Brian, good meeting you. And yeah, hopefully we can connect on the podcast again. I know I've had Ed on. This is your third time, Ed. So welcome back, I guess. But always a joy. Always good to always good to speak with you. So. All right, everybody. Well, that concludes this episode. We'll we'll call it a day with that. Thanks for sticking with us and we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting and more. Hey, I'm Dr. Sean McDowell, professor, author and host of the Sean McDowell show. I tackle the hardest questions about God, truth and culture, combining solid research with practical insight and engaging stories so you can build a confident, informed faith. Now available on the Life Audio network to reach more listeners like you. Follow the Sean McDowell show on your favorite podcast app or visit LifeAudio.com to start listening.