Champions are made — just look at Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters. So how soon do you get your toddler into the game?
It is only when you have small children that you fully realise how totally and utterly stuffed the future of this country is. And not just because today’s children are precious, soft, feckless, lazy, screen-obsessed and have the attention span of an American President.
Sure, the inability of the next generation to hold down a job for longer than a week — or to work more than three days in a row — will be economically problematic. But I’m talking about the really important stuff, what actually matters to this nation — being good at sport.
I’ve seen the evidence first hand, (my favourite being that junior levels of sport now refuse to keep score, or tell kids who won, because it’s discouraging for the ones that lose) as many dads have.
But I can sum up the attitudinal problem by quoting something called our National Junior Sport Policy, which recommends that children should not play organised competitive sport until the ages of eight to 10.
“If children are started in competitive sport before they are emotionally or physically ready they are likely to experience disappointment and stress and may give up playing altogether,” is how the thinking goes.
Apparently children under the age of eight need the freedom to explore and learn sporting skills — like throwing and catching, kicking and hitting a ball, or how to craftily apply sandpaper — in an enjoyable way.
Parents can help, according to the policy, by letting them learn these skills without pressure; “playing bat and ball games where everyone has a turn and the scores are not counted”.
Apparently children needs lots of practice at doing well before they can “learn to lose”. Oh dear.
Personally, Steve Waugh and I have always had the theory that if you don’t learn how badly losing sucks, you’ll never learn to properly hate it, and thus to savour victory, and seek it with fierce, Aussie passion.
So how young is too young for a child to start playing competitive sport (assuming you can actually find any organised sport that even seems competitive)?
Champions start straight out of the womb
At the top of the list of people who would disagree with our softly, softly, cotton-wooly policy is Tiger Woods, whose father had him playing golf as soon as he could stand.
Tiger was putting for dough on TV by the age of two and had shot a score of 48 on a nine-hole golf course by the age of three. By five he was on the cover of Golf Digest, and the rest is history.
Similarly, the Williams sisters were groomed to be tennis champions by the time they were three, and they seem to have done pretty well. David Beckham’s dad had him kicking a ball while he was still in nappies.
Now sure, these kids might have been blessed with some natural skill to go with their starting-early approach, but there is also some science behind the idea of getting as much practice as possible.
There is a well-known theory — the 10,000-Hour Rule — that suggests you can become professional-level good at any chosen skill if you just put in 10,000 hours of practice (that’s a lot of Saturday mornings).
The oft-quoted concept can be traced back to a 1993 research paper written by Anders Ericsson from the University of Colorado, catchily titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.
The professor examined the work of a group of German psychologists who had studied young kids learning the violin. All of them had begun playing around age five and generally practised for roughly the same amount of time.
Around the age of eight, however, their practice times began to diverge sharply, and by the age of 20 the truly elite violin players had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the merely average had only done 4000 hours.
Ericsson concluded that “many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years”.
Clearly, then, you can push your kids to be really good at something, if you’re driven enough — like Earl Woods, who was an army officer as well as a golf nut — and it only stands to reason that the sooner you start, the sooner they’ll be better than all those other little mongrels you want them to beat.
When it comes to how soon you should start your kids at something competitive, it’s worth considering that if you want them to be gymnasts or racing drivers — or they show a natural inclination towards those things — they’ll need to begin a lot younger than eight to be any chance of making the big time.
Kids can start their tumbling lessons from the age of two, and they need to be well into their gymnastic training by five or six to hope to be part of something like the Olympics, where your peak years tend to occur before you turn 20.
As five-time Soviet Olympic gold medalist Nellie Kim once put it, younger female gymnasts are “lighter and more fearless”. In other words, once you get old enough to realise how insane what you’re doing to your body is, you’ll want to stop.
As for car racing, Michael Schumacher won his first karting championship at age six. Start your engines, boys.
But what about your kid?
All this theory is fine, of course, until it comes to sending your own son or daughter out there.
Leaving aside the misery of cold and rainy Saturday mornings, criss-crossing your home city to stand in the opposite of awe as a bunch of tiny kids chase a ball around a field like headless chickens, the whole thing can seem a bit bonkers.
Being absurdly into sport, I was keen to sign my son up for something as soon as he could walk, and AFL seemed to be the most switched on about kids’ sport, so off to Auskick he went.
The earliest you can get them in is four (turning five that calendar year), so it’s just outside the toddler age. But I can tell you one thing, even then he clearly had little idea what was going on — the complexities of the game were completely beyond him and the actual skills seemed as foreign as algebra, or driving a tractor.
After about half a season, I realised he wasn’t enjoying the actual games that much, and the weekly training sessions even less, but he did enjoy the hot dogs after the game, immensely.
The trips there and back were fun bonding time, but as much as I wanted him to love the idea of being a part of a team, and winning, I could see it wasn’t really grabbing him.
I realised he was mostly happy about making me happy. And it quickly became clear that I was the reason we were doing this.
So we gave up on AFL, and put him straight into football (soccer, if you must), which he stuck at for two years. I even tried to coach them, a couple of times.
Looking back, I can see now that it was, again, a case of too much too soon. I should have waited for the desire to play to come from him, rather than trying to instil it in him. Or force it upon him.
He’s since found a liking for tennis, but I’m still yet to get him into a team sport the way I wanted to, and perhaps that’s just not his thing.
Is it possible that he’d have done better if I’d waited until eight? Possibly, but not for
the stupid reasons our Sport Policy sets out. It just might have suited his character better.
There are kids out there who just take to sport like a Thorpe to water, and they should, I believe, be encouraged to play, and compete, and savour winning, and suffer losing, as soon as they’re physically ready to strap on the boots.
Interestingly, though, my daughter is now six and I haven’t put her into netball or football, yet, much as I’m itching to.
This time, I’m going to wait and see what sport she likes, and hopefully comes to love, rather than choosing one for her.
Well, that’s my theory. So far, so good.
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