As fall sports season begins, don’t miss this interview about healthy sports parenting

Photo above by Nathan Anderson via Unsplash.

Last spring, Kidsburgh kicked off our podcast series with six powerful interviews, each one designed to showcase ideas and inspiration from a person who has some personal connection to the Pittsburgh area.

The first of these was a conversation with former Pittsburgh Pirate Travis Snider, now retired from baseball, whose career is now focused on helping kids and parents create a healthier culture around youth sports in America.

Recently, Snider cofounded a company called 3A Athletics, which offers guidebooks and resources to help parents and kids manage the pressures that can arise in youth sports. The goal? To make the sports experience a positive thing in kids’ lives, helping them to reach their potential while building strong mental health.

When Snider spoke with Kidsburgh, we discussed his baseball career — the dream-come-true of getting drafted out of high school to play baseball professionally and the fun of playing for Pittsburgh’s dedicated fans. It was, he said, an incredible experience to play in the city of Pittsburgh on a team that broke the Pirates’ long streak of not making the playoffs. He still gets chills thinking about the 2013 Wild Card game.

For kids listening to the podcast who might dream of that kind of career success, he shared these thoughts: If you love a particular sport or another pursuit, make time to work on your skills. Each of us have our natural talents, but success comes from repeated effort: “If you want to be great at something,” he said, “it takes a lot of practice.”

This applies to school, sports or any other goal: “A regular conversation we have in our household with my children is understanding that if you’re not good at something, the first question I’m going to ask you is, how much have you practiced?”

For parents, one key to supporting these efforts is praising effort rather than just celebrating successes.

Even if a child loves a particular sport, it’s also important for kids and parents to realize that the child’s identity as an athlete is only one aspect of who they are. This is something that struck Snider as he was ending his baseball career, while also parenting his three young children.

“In our society and our culture, we heavily tie our identity on our accomplishments, or what we do for a living, or what we want to be when we grow up,” Snider said, “and that’s a lot of pressure.

“I was lucky enough to play professional baseball for 16 years. But at the end of that, I wasn’t going to continue to play baseball into my 40s and in my 50s,” he said. “At that point, I had to go through a process of unpacking my identity and how closely tied that was to baseball, being a baseball player, and what I had accomplished in baseball. Those are all things that I’m very proud of, but I also had to learn and understand how that identity can make things very confusing and very difficult at times, to believe that you are anything other than what you do.”

From having difficult conversations with kids to making space for their voices, Kidsburgh’s conversation with Travis touched on so many valuable ideas for parents.

Listen to the whole Kidsburgh podcast interview with Snider right here or find this and more Kidsburgh podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Pandora and Spotify.