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Same, but I was pretty bad at the sports part. Still spent a lot of time playing for the lower teams though. I enjoyed both in the end.

The point is I could’ve been a normal person

Sports parents can be pretty abusive in how they make young children devote hours of their life to a sport that their parent has decided they should do.

Yea, but introducing kids to sports ata young age also get them good at it. Wish my parents actually encouraged and forced me to do it, because I actually loved sports.

I would think OP is talking more about playing in people's backyards for fun, not the proto fascist hellscape of school sports

hell i was decent at it and it didn't stop the bullying and attempted murder

I was forced to play sports and got some injuries that did lasting damage, all to placate a chud family.

Would not recommend forcing kids to play sports, particularly ones with expected contact injuries.

The arts should be a fine alternative.

Yep, same here. If anything it made me less likely to pursue physically active hobbies as an adult.

Was also forced into it (baseball, such a boring sport only topped by golf) and didn't like it, however I got into playing ice hockey as an adult and I wished so much that I had started playing as a kid cause it's so fucking fun.

E: not trying to advocate for forcing kids into a sport here, more what I was going for was that getting into a sport of your own volition as an adult is way better for being engaged (fuck I would have loved to compete in hockey though)

Dad would often wake me and my little brother up at 5:15 am, still drunk from the night before, to go to posting practice. I was 7 years old and shivering because we lived in North Dakota and my dad hated keeping the heat on at night. My routine was to stand on top of the central air vents, after he would mercifully turn the heat back on, in my long johns while eating a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes.

At 5:40 am he would direct me to the basement where our computers were located. I say computers but it was more like a server farm. We were posters. My dad had dreams of us going pro so he made sure we had the best equipment and he bribed the local Poster Association to get us in to Triple A Posting League. After a short warm up we would begin our serious posting at 6 am. Obviously we would check Something Awful for the latest news from the posting trenches but my favorite place to go ham was the news message boards. I'd be posting about how good Dick Cheney's shot is one second and quickly pivot to how lame Al Gore was for believing in things.

But this was my downfall. This is why I was never destined for the pros. My beliefs weren't sincere. I was nothing more than a troll. I was never able to capture the sickness of the world in a pithy and cynical yet humorous quip. That's what separates the pros from the amateurs in Posting.

Nah those teams are like extreme bullying pens. The wholesome chungus 100 disney-netflix-pixar representation of kids coming together to support each other is a total fucking fantasy. Kids especially teens are very mean.

I don’t know. The problem now is that I despise sports, both watching and playing, and feel out of place around everyone else involved in it

War sure, religion maybe, but sports? The mega team franchise stuff that taps into tribalistic tendencies is weird but I would say thats not intrinsic to sport, it's a capitalist development. I think at basically any level below that theres a lot of value to be had from sports. Also I think that's not all that present in sports that feature individual competition e.g. tennis, fencing...

One might make a similar argument for religion actually. There's stuff that's been really useful to humans in religion even today, it's primarily bad at higher level of organization.

As someone who isn't much into sports, you absolutely cannot write it off as a waste of time money and human life, any more than anything else.

As well as being a pursuit many people love and have a good time with, most local sports are about building a local community, so you socialise and make friends, which is one of the healthiest and funnest things you can do in this world.

And if nothing else at all, sports are typically a moderate-intensive exercise, meaning for someone otherwise sedentary, spending an hour playing football might give a return on lifetime by 2-4 hours, as well as improving mood, function, health, etc etc benefits of exercise.

Does this website seriously believe that jock culture is any less toxically masculine than gamer culture or? Have we gone so far the other direction where we started realizing that nerd culture is actually just as toxicly masculine as sports bro culture, which was a good thing, but now we actually think that its only the nerds that are?

Like if this thread was about encouraging kids to disengage from screens to read or do artistic things or even do physical things on their own or with accepting friends I'd be down but team sports are fucking toxic as hell man. Unless your kid is like, actually jock-coded and can fit in they're probably going to have a bad time. And even then like, do you really want to socialize them into that culture? I question that.

ETA: I'm also put off by the art elitism in this but thats another subject.

ETA2: Actually no ok I do want to talk about that a bit. Can we like, talk about how a good parent could engage with their kid about the games they play as like... an artform? (And lso steer them away from the sloppy stuff to stuff thats actually like... good. Which like, I realize is hard for a parent to do especially if they dont know about games in their own right, like whats going on with my sister and my nephew, but its not impossible. And I dont think like, banning a form of art is really the way to solve the issue lmao.

But i absolutely of course in favor of screen time limitations. I see an increasing amount of child liberation discourse that seems to genuinly believe that you can just let 5 year olds do whatever they fuck they want and they'll end up fine, up to and including things like not enforcing a bed time, and that shit is dumb like. I do think child liberation is good in some amounts but theres obviously like... parents do need to enforce certain rules and standards on kids especially with so much brain poison out there.

But I think there's a midpoint here between "let the kids entire freetime be Fornite and Minecraft" and "just dont let the kid play games literally at all".