Family Reading

Every month, when the Sports Illustrated for Kids arrives in the mail, I spend 30 minutes or so looking through it. No, it isn't my magazine; it belongs to my son. But I like reading it to keep up-to-date with the way the media's version of kids and sports. Besides, I enjoy some of their features on athletes. (My son likes the trading cards in the front the best.)

Every week, my son picks up my copy of Sports Illustrated (except the swimsuit issue, which I promptly dump in the trash) and reads the shorter articles.

Sports magazines (and the daily newspaper's sport section and sports web sites) are, in my opinion, a must for every young athlete. Sports are more than the time spent practicing and playing a game. Each sport has a history and heroes and bad guys and statistics. Of course, the world won't come to an end if an athlete doesn't know histories and statistics, but it makes games so much more interesting.

Just like professionals will subscribe to periodicals pertinent to their career, athletes should also take note of magazines focused on their sport. These magazines keep you current on trends, equipment, teams, individuals, rule changes, and general news. Too often, kids don't know the lingo in their chosen sport, and worse yet, have only a very basic understanding of the rules. Once, someone told me that you don't need to know the infield fly rule to play baseball. No, you don't, not if you are playing a pick-up game in the backyard. But if you plan to play organized ball, yeah, you better know the infield fly rule, or the reaching first base on a strikeout rule, or any number of baseball's rules of the game. I learned them in Baseball Digest as a kid. Sure, I could have asked my dad, but it was more fun to learn them myself then use my newfound knowledge while we were watching a game together.

General magazines are good, too, because they are, well, general. It's a good start for kids who have lots of sports interests (and parents too!) and want to learn the gist of a sport. My son, for example, developed an interest in volleyball because of an article he read. He began to pick up more articles, brought home a volleyball book from the library, watched some matches, and now we have a volleyball net in our backyard, where he has been practicing so he can play on his school team this year. What caught his attention was the fluid description of a spike that won a match.

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