Spending the day with my nephews snowboarding yesterday I learned yet another negative side effect of team sports on the youth of today.
Team sports seem to encourage blaming other people for things going wrong. The ref's suck, the coach made bad calls, Joey didn't call time out soon enough, Timmy should've made that easy shot and so on.
It's not about taking responsibility for themselves such as, "I guess I should have practiced more" or even teamwide, "I guess our team isn't as good and we need to try harder". It's too easy to believeably blame someone else. That believability is key I think. With individual sports you can blame the golf club or the snow conditions but really, it starts sounding pretty hollow. It's a poor man that blames his equipment and eventually it's harder to believe.
The bummer is, this whole lack of responsibility gets deadlier as you get older. If at an early age you learn to blame the ref for failure, why not your boss for not getting the raise, or a interviewer "out to get me" for not getting the job - or the hundred other ways people push off responsibility.
Not to say my nephews blamed others all day, they actually did a fine job at learning to snowboard and both did very well. It's just occasionally, I could hear that creeping in to why they fell or couldn't turn or whatever. And not just on the hill, but in their conversations about basketball and football and basketball and basketball and....
Posted by heyhansen at January 13, 2004 01:01 PM