About Us

This is a blog mostly about coaching or guiding my child's journey though youth sports. She says now, at 9, that she wants to be a professional basketball player in the NBA. Yes, that is the NBA and NOT the WNBA.

I coached kids from about 4 years old up in basketball, karate, baseball and boxing for more than 25 years. I've watched kids of all ages play a wide variety of sports both organized and free play - my own kids and others. I've seen kids as young as 5 or 6 who where internally driven, but they were admittedly rare.

Kids and athletics I know. Will she still be playing basketball at 12? Maybe. At 15? If she is being pushed, I'd guess not. That is about the age that children burn out and disappear if a sport is not longer fun for them.

This little who lives in my house is an athlete. At nine, she has much more coordination, concentration and spacial awareness than most 12-year-olds. From a very young age, I've introduce her to everything that I could afford - all sports, textured books, musical instruments, hands on science kits, math cubes and puzzles, a wide variety of building blocks, legos, finger paints etc while providing a physically rich environment for her. I have not limited her options to organized sports. I make sure that she is always involved in things physical. I have also taught her to play chess, to train dogs, to appreciate good writing and to knit.

Nine years old is too young to specialize in any one thing. I advocate strongly that a child play a different sport every season until about high school and rarely be coached by their own parent. It helps to limit the burn out. The new norm, however, is to push a child to a pick a year-round sport by about age 8.

The Kidlet pitches for a fast pitch softball team, enjoys soccer and futsal, wants to be a sprinter on a track team, loves karate and excels playing the cello. She also enjoys solving math problems, writing books, playing chess and designing and running sciences experiments and making sculptures out of junk from the recycle bin.

She is a very cool kid.