Looking Back

With the stress and busyness of the holidays, I actually came up with a great idea for an article, but didn't have the time to do any research. I'll save that idea for another week. This column, I'd like to reflect a little bit about my own moments as a sports mom.

There have been many wonderful times over the past year, especially. For example, just the other night, a wrestling coach friend, who relunctantly went to watch my daughter's Nutcracker performance, became a champion of dancer-athletes. He never realized the stamina and athleticism a ballerina must have. I've always enforced the idea of dancer as an athlete without a sport. It was nice to hear a male coach agree with me.

It was a year when my son saw that women in sports could be -- and are -- just as good and exciting as male athletes. And no, it wasn't thanks to the U.S. women's soccer team. Instead, it was closer to home, at Penn State and the athletes were women's volleyball players. He went to a number of matches over the year, and nearly every day, he and a number of his friends would sit around at lunch and discuss the play of Lauren and Bonnie and Carrie and the rest of the team. He celebrated their national championship with his friends.

Perhaps the most poignant moment came during a Penn State football game. Penn State's undefeated season ended with a last second field goal by Minnesota. The crowd fell silent in disbelief and heart break. My son, who had never seen the team lose while he was in the stands, fell into my arms, sobbing. He had experienced loss before, many times. But this game was intense and the loss was excrutiating. Holding him, watching him experience this emotion, was very difficult. He cried that he never wanted to go to another game and that he hated football. It's not a moment when you say, "we'll get them next time." What I learned is that you let them mourn the loss for a while, and the next day, you start again. I insisted he go to the next game with me. He feared a loss so bad that his stomach hurt for a good deal of the game. We did lose, but this time, he took it better. It's hard, teaching our kids how to lose, but I remember my dad saying after he had coached a number of consecutive undefeated football teams that he wished they would have lost a few. It bothered him, that those boys would go into the harder times in life and sports not knowing how to handle a loss.

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