Hint: It is about becoming remarkable sports-parents, first.
Over the Diwali weekend, I watched a fun Bollywood movie, “Chhallang”. The Hindi title translates to “Leap”, in English. A classic underdog tale, it showed an ordinary sports teacher in a small town in India, who finds himself in a situation where to win the love-of-his-life back, he has challenged a far superior coach. Trapped in his impulsive action, he must now buck up, take his team of unathletic players and put up the best fight he can. Eventually, through a series of creative coaching tactics, he leads them to victory against the stellar coach’s formidable team. Touched upon briefly in his victory speech and portrayed beautifully throughout the film is the struggle that talented sportspersons face in persuading their parents.
Every parent wants their children to become the next Sachin Tendulkar, the next Roger Federer, the next Zinedine Zidane, the next Mary Kom, the next “insert the name of your favourite sports star”. But nobody wants to be their parents!
In the middle-income households of many countries (not just in India), sports are not a viable career option, even when the child shows talent. The main reason is the social conditioning of parents around academic versus unacademic pursuits. As a parent, your need for stability, security, and certainty may be getting in the way of your children’s pursuit of alternative paths. To create a successful sportsperson, their parents and their coaches must unlearn their social conditioning first. You must steer away from your emphasis on shepherding your children into stable jobs and linear career paths. Instead, your role is that of a stewards of your child’s innate talents, and the wider society must acknowledge this role.
Living in Canada, where winning Olympic medals is one of the most respectable things you could do, I see families making it a priority to learn sports, to play — recreationally and competitively, to watch sports and to pursue them as a career, too. In my town, the person behind me in the grocery queue is likely to be an Olympic skier or a star snowboarder or an awesome mountain-biker.
However, it takes an overarching belief in the importance of play and sports, at the societal level, at the household level and at the individual level to build up an active culture and a supportive ecosystem for sports. In a nutshell, it all begins with a shift in the mindset of parents whose kids show an interest in and a talent for sports.
