Chill and Be Mindful

Chill and be mindful. These were the main messages at yesterday’s forum for parents in sports entitled “Parents in Sports: One Big Fight (Chill lang diha).” This was held at the Sacred Heart School-Ateneo de Cebu campus in Mandaue for parents of student-athletes of the sports program of the school. A first of its kind in Cebu and organized by the school’s Parents-Teachers Association, the forum was held with the goal of taking a second look at the role of parents in sports.

Guest speakers from Ateneo de Davao (ADDU) were invited. Joy “Tita Joy” Diamante, a mother of three boys and one girl who all play or played for football for ADDU, were part of the national youth football teams of their age groups, and who were honor students, spoke about her experience as a sports parent to all four. The other guest speaker was Coach Noli Ayo, the Athletic Director of ADDU whose self-confessed proudest achievement was setting up and nurturing the culture of basketball program at Ateneo de Naga University.

Tita Joy revealed that there is no secret in bringing up her football playing kids who turned out to be role models as student-athletes. The two older boys Gio and Gelo played for De La Salle University in the UAAP and were team captains of the Archers. The youngest boy Jed, the class valedictorian of his ADDU batch, is still with the team as its team captain on his last season this schoolyear. The only daughter Jeli is still a Grade 10 student at ADDU and is the President of the school’s student council. When asked what she fed her kids to turn out the way they did, she said she breastfed all of them, cheering up the crowd. Turning seriously, she said that her children’s being the way they are was not a result of a program to make them excellent football players, but a planned and intentional attempt to raise them to become responsible individuals. “As parents, it is our responsibility to raise good people who will build a better society, a better world,” Tita Joy said.

She added that preparation was the key, starting with teaching them how to pray. She even narrated her way of praying, treating the consecration at a holy mass as a perfect venue to throw all her pleas to God. She cited how detailed she was in asking God for specific things about her kids. Values Formation was also key since she said that “values will shape their decisions,” she added. She also said that it was important to teach the kids obedience, respect, sense of purpose, discipline (setting of priorities and time management), sense of gratitude, and to reflect and to process. Parents also need to give them quality time, appreciation, direction and guidance, freedom to set their own goals and room to grow. Personally, I found it interesting that she wasn’t even talking about sports development per se. All these were guides to bringing up kids, and not just football players.

For his part, Coach Noli talked about the importance about being mindful of how we as parents or coaches manage our student-athletes. Looking back to his coaching experience at Ateneo de Naga and getting the chance to talk with his former players, he asks himself today, “Did I teach them well?” And since there is no formal school or education degree on coaching, he now realizes that being mindful is crucial in the sense that coaches and parents have roles to develop responsible citizens and it’s not about the winning of games and championships. In a documentary that was shown to all, he emphasized among the players he was facing on the need to always seek excellence in everything that they did. And this didn’t necessarily mean winning. For coaches, he had three simple words to treat as a mission of coaching: information, formation and transformation.

“You need to be careful and prudent,” he said when dealing with student-athletes. He then cited a quote he read in one of the articles he read on parenting, “There is power in the words we speak. Our words carry great weight for those to whom we say them. However, the words alone are not what makes them powerful. It is our intention, our tone, our inflection and our desired outcome of speaking those words that give words their greatest power.”

The forum was a huge success, drawing applause from the parents who were present, some of who shed a tear during the talk of Tita Joy. It also opened up eyes that sports parenting wasn’t about sports per se and that there was more to life than just sports. This only illustrated how sports can truly become a means to build persons with character. It wasn’t a lesson on sports but a lesson on life.

Chill and be mindful. Game?