Jenyfer Matthews

I started doing yoga about 7 years ago when a friend in the United Arab Emirates volunteered to lead a class, took a couple years off, then got back into it in Cairo when a neighbor of mine adopted a studio and started a cooperative effort with some other instructors. I’ve tried going to gyms and also swimming but with the exception of water aerobics, which I also love once I get over getting into a cold pool (yikes!), yoga is one of the few exercise oriented activities that I will stick with. I despise gyms and swimming is boring.

As much as I love yoga, I rarely do it at home on my own. I need a class to keep me going. When I was in Cairo, I even had an instructor who would send me texts if I missed a class! Going to class is great because 1) there is variety and feedback in a class that you don’t get from a DVD, 2) I work out for longer and do positions that I might avoid if I were working out alone, and 3) I always push myself harder in class.

A lot of people profess they love yoga because it’s so relaxing, and it is. I’ll admit that I go to yoga class and compete with the others in class.

I know it’s not a very yogic attitude, but I want to be the best yogi in the room. I am not always the most flexible because of my lower back issues, but I want to be the strongest, hold my balance the longest, and do the most challenging of the pose options available. My approach does not exactly promote my inner peace and harmony quotient but it does usually end up giving me a heck of a workout.

Just in case you think I’m the only sick puppy comparing myself to others, a couple of times I have had people come up after class and compliment me and ask me how long I’ve been doing yoga because they’ve obviously been checking me out too. One of my proudest moments was when I inspired yoga-envy in a couple of young women in their mid-twenties by holding the plank pose for longer than they could.

I could claim that I was giving them something to aspire to, but in fact I realize that I’m slightly twisted. Slightly twisted and fairly strong.

And very, very competitive…

All week I’ve been stewing about my daughter’s soccer team. I wrote before about the children and their bad attitudes. This week it was their parents who got on my nerves.

The team has lost badly several weeks in a row, not because they cannot make goals, but because they cannot stop goals. The only thing most of them can think of is to make a goal but no one wants to put any effort into defense. I appealed to the parents to talk to their children about shifting their focus a bit, both to point out that they need to cooperate and play as a team rather than as individuals and also to realize that you can win a game with 1 or 2 goals but only if you keep the other team from scoring.

The parents are pretty much as bad as the children – they just don’t want to hear about it. One parent responded to my appeal by saying that the purpose of this league is to teach an appreciation of the game and it wasn’t about competition. I’m sorry, but why does anyone sign up for a team sport if they aren’t interested in learning to play well? If you only want to teach your child a love of the game in a non-competitive environment, watch it on TV and spare the rest of us.

It was very tempting to keep my daughter home this weekend and let them sink or swim without her to prop them up but that would be more punishment for her than for them so we went. However, we requested that they put her in a defense position this week. We played what is currently the best team in the league and due to her superb efforts in stopping goals, the team won 4-1. She was the MVP of the game – without her they would have lost by at least 15.

I myself love the beauty of the lesson we demonstrated by putting her in defense, however I doubt that anyone else will have learned a thing. We are continuing the season strictly for the love of our daughter. Only three games and the tournament to go…

Back when I was in high school, I was a champion avoider of team sports. The private Catholic school where I’d gone to middle school did not have PE class, so the two years of mandatory PE I had to endure in high school was torture. On the whole, I didn’t mind the solo-activities like aerobics so much and I enjoyed the unit on bowling we did, but I loathed the team sports because I didn’t know the rules and was not confident in my ability to perform. I’ve got a competitive streak a mile wide, but I did not want to be the weak link that would let my whole team down.

In my effort to avoid responsibility to the team, I’d usually happily volunteer to play outfield in kickball or softball games. At the time, I thought that the further back I was, the better. No pressure. Of course, what I wasn’t thinking about was that if anyone did manage to hit / kick a ball way out to the clover patch where I’d parked myself, it was my job to get that ball back into play not only as quickly as possible but also to the correct base. Let’s just say I was never carried around on the shoulders of my teammates.

At present, my whole family is the thick of soccer season. If I thought it was hard being the team mom and organizing the snack list / coach presents, that was nothing compared to the frustration of being a back-up coach. Nothing makes you appreciate your own children like working with other people’s children.

For the most part, the children are very enthusiastic about the game and also very confident in their own abilities (real or imaginary), however, they are not at all interested in being part of a team. They want to play what position they want to play and they if they don’t get their wish, at best they pout. At worst, they stomp their foot and just refuse to cooperate. If we let them have their way, we’d have eight strikers on the field and a goalie and no other defense at all. Since my daughter’s team lost last week 8-3, you can guess how that works out. When my husband attempted to point out to the children that in fact defense was very important and used the score as an example, many of the kids either denied that was the correct score or just argued that it was his fault (referring to the goalie) and they want to score, not block, goals.

My desire to avoid responsibility by hiding in the outfield also leads some of the kids to choose to be goalie – as if not having to run means that it’s not a vitally important position. There are very few places to hide on a soccer field.

One girl actually quit because she was bored playing defense and wanted to play striker. This is a girl who has never played soccer before, is afraid of the ball, and can’t kick. What on earth gave her the idea that she was entitled to play striker simply because she wanted to? I’d really like to be a fly on the wall in the homes of these children to hear what sort of constant loop of positive-reinforcement-crap they are being brainwashed with. On second thought, it would probably just make me sick. As much as I’d like to knock the heads of some of the children together, it’s really the parents I should go after for creating such egomaniacs in the first place.

It’s a community league and it’s supposed to be more about fun and exercise than competition, but why does anyone join a team when in fact they just want to play solo? Go play tennis or golf if you want all the glory to yourself. I’ve heard several stories recently about coaches who have been relieved of their posts due to bad behavior. I can sympathize with what frustrations they might have been suffering. I’d love to be able to kick some of these kids off the team for the same reason.

My daughter was on a team last season that was not only undefeated but also won first in their age division tournament. Her current team plays the team of her former coach this week. No doubt we will get slaughtered, but hey – it will be the goalie’s fault, right?

Just in case you thought I am only taking pictures of foxes and other wildlife, allow me a moment to brag on my daughter. She played her very first tennis tournament last week and won the girls under 12s category.

I admit that I was on pins and needles much of the time. Since it was her first tournament, I wanted so much for her to play well and have a good experience. She lost to a girl she should have defeated in her first match in the under 14s category and was very upset about it, so it was doubly thrilling to see her come back so strong in her second match in the under 12s category.

Putting it in perspective, there was only one other girl in her category she had to beat, but they were both very good players. They had to play the best 2 of 3 sets. My daughter won the first set in a tie breaker and took the second set easily.

Considering that it was her first tournament, she was playing on a hard court (rather than clay, which is her usual surface) in front of an audience, and she came back after a defeat, I was tremendously proud of her for doing so well even if she did only have to play one opponent. She won a $20 gift certificate to a local store for her achievement.

Her first prize money

I never participated in sports as a kid. First because the Catholic school I attended until eight grade didn’t even have PE class. Later, I was much too self-conscious to admit that I didn’t know how to play various games which was necessary before I could actually learn to play anything.

What it boils down to is that if I can’t be sure I’ll do something well, I just won’t do it at all. Instead of sports, I concentrated on my school work and was on the honor roll rather than a team.

Never in my wildest imagination did I ever expect to have two such sports-gifted children. They are amazing to watch. And after two years of watching them play tennis and making it look easy, I was sucked in to my own lessons at the suggestion of a friend.

I really ought to have known better.

It’s not that I’m bad at it. I’m okay for a beginner, even if it isn’t as easy as the children make it look. It’s that I let myself get intensely competitive about the whole thing. I want to be the best. Except why does it matter? It’s not as if I’m ever going to be a champion tennis player at my age. I’m an adult and supposed to be more mature than that, so why can’t I just relax and have fun with it instead of channeling my inner McEnroe?

The experience has given me new insight into my children’s mentality with their own tennis lessons, and not always in a good or comfortable way. Funny to think that I was on the right track as a young person by just avoiding the whole thing…

My daughter’s tennis coach (my tennis coach!) recently announced that he’d signed my daughter up to participate in a local tournament at a nearby neighborhood club. My daughter is a cautious creature by nature – she likes to take her time to warm up to a new situation and scope things out before she jumps in – and she absolutely refused to do it.

I was disappointed by her reaction and told my mother about it. My mother in turn cautioned me not to push her too hard. She’d apparently seen some talk show (Dr. Phil?) about pushy sports parents, including the children who were complaining about how much they were pushed. One girl was an Olympic medal winning gymnast.

I know that pushy, super-competitive sports parents exist, and I have no doubt that some children suffer for it. I also know that there are children out there who participate in activities their parents choose for them, only to please their parents. I’ve seen them for myself. I do, however, have a hard time believing that many parents have succeeded in pushing a child so hard that the child won an Olympic medal against their will. If there are parents out there who can achieve that, then clearly I’m doing something wrong because I can’t even get my own children to pick up their socks or make their beds.

I talked to my daughter and encouraged her to give the tournament a try just for fun and experience, and in the end when she still refused, I let it go. If she’s going to be a successful athlete of any sort, clearly it’s going to be on her own terms.

But you can’t take competition out of the children.

I subbed last week for a librarian at the local American school and instead of working in the library that day, I did what she was scheduled to do that day and worked at their annual sports day. Only they don’t call it “sports day”, they call it “kids day” – and rightfully so because there was nothing sports-like about it.

When I was a child we called it “field day” and there were actual competitive sporting events. We had things like sprints, long jump, relays. There were also slightly borderline events like three-legged race and wheelbarrow race, but all the events had one thing in common: they were all competitive and they all had a declared winner. Someone kept a tally, and at the end of the day the person who won the most events was declared the overall winner and on the next regular school day the first, second, third and fourth winners were recognized with ribbons. It was meant to be a mini-Olympic type day and anyone who cared competed fiercely for those ribbons. I can still remember that I won first place for the girls when I was in sixth grade.

Back to the present and last week’s kids day. It was a day of fun, a day of games, but not a day of competition. At least not officially. Some of the games had ways to measure wins and losses, but they were all team events and so far as I could tell, no one was keeping track of it in any official way. As the officials running the various game stations, we assigned points for how well the children listened to the instructions, how much positive team spirit they displayed, and how many children were wearing hats. If there were a way to swab for sunscreen and what SPF they were wearing, I’m sure that would have been on the sheet as well. But nowhere was there a spot for recording winners and all the activities were team activities. No individual events. It was all for fun.

In spite of all this carefully orchestrated non-competitive fun, I still heard kids cheering for their teammates to hurry up, accusing others of cheating, and declaring themselves the winners of an event. They were clearly enjoying themselves, but they were also very intent on winning and were disappointed when they didn’t do as well as they would have liked.

So why is it that we can still celebrate the victory of our Olympic athletes, but we want to erase any sign of competition when it comes to our children? Where do people think that Olympians come from anyway? Or any successful people in any field for that matter? Different people are good at different things. No one will excel at everything, and yes, when you are young and still figuring all that out, it’s not always a happy or comfortable process. But parents and teachers aren’t doing anyone any favors by trying to shield children from that knowledge. And from what I’ve seen over the years on soccer fields, tennis courts, and schools, parents and teachers would be much better off accepting that competition is a part of human nature and instead of trying to expunge it from the curriculum, teaching children sportsmanship – how to be good winners and good losers.