The Concordian

My little brother had playoffs for basketball this past week. Why is that significant in any way?

I know that there are probably about a total of ten people who actually read my thoughts every week, so I’m not worried about hurting feelings when I say this. So here it is: parents are raising their kids to be a bunch of pansies. Now let me explain.

My brother’s team was absolutely horrible. They were last place in their division and had about as much athletic talent as participants in a chess match.

The leagues had a trophy ceremony and at the end, guess what team got a trophy…my brother’s. I don’t want to come off as totally insensitive, but come on. The team was horrible: They didn’t deserve to wash the uniforms of the better teams in the league.

Parents want to tell their kids they are proud of them and that they are always winners in their book and blah blah blah. No, they’re not. If your kid sucks, he or she just sucks.

Don’t encourage your kids to be terrible. The only thing that does is cause your kid to be cocky and a guy that thinks he knows it all. This is my attempt at a fair warning: Don’t pacify your kids (and that goes beyond sports). Kids or not, the worst teams and players shouldn’t get trophies.

This is why kids today want everything handed to them and don’t want to work for anything. My baseball team my senior year of high school didn’t win the championship, and we didn’t get trophies. 

After all of my hard work and sweat, in the end, all I got was a baseball that all of the players on my team signed for me. That was it.

And it’s sitting on my dresser back home because even though we didn’t accomplish what we set out to, I still gave it my all and gained 20 other guys’ respect. To me that was more important.

The best lesson you can teach your kids is that nothing in this world comes free and you will almost certainly have to work for everything you have.

Once you get that point across do what I’m doing with my brother and pay for some basketball lessons.

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