Those brawling moms and dads may think their rabidly competitive behavior will help turn out future Olympians. But the parents who raised soccer stars Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy say nothing could be further from the truth. These athletes, along with many other top players, found their own way into their sport and played because they wanted to, often without so much as a soccer mom in sight.
“Mia was raised with benign neglect,” explains her mother, Stephanie Hamm. She means this warmly, in the way mothers who are close to their children talk about them. As a mother of six and a professional dancer, Stephanie Hamm tried to give each of her children equal opportunities. When Mia turned three, Stephanie took her to a modern dance class, hoping she would love it. “After the first class, Mia emerged in tears, and I asked, ‘What happened?’ " Stephanie recalls how her daughter told her the teacher made them all trail each other around the room in an idiotic “choo-choo” dance. Humiliated, Mia never wanted to return, but her mother insisted she give it one more try. After the second class and the second round of tears, they gave up.
Mia soon began tagging along to her older siblings’ soccer games, says her mom. Although she wasn’t allowed to suit up until age six, she amused herself by playing with a ball on the sidelines. At that point Mia’s father was coaching and taking the kids to their games. Stephanie pursued her own dance career and went to as many matches as she could.
Mia’s earliest hint that she would become America’s best-known female athlete came when Mia was about two, playing in a park after church. Bill Hamm’s Airforce career had taken the family overseas, to Italy. Mia at that age had to wear clunky orthopedic shoes to correct a club foot. Stephanie remembers looking up and seeing Mia darting across the playground toward an unknown target. It turned out to be a soccer ball, bandied about between a man and his son. The force with which she kicked the ball was astonishing, the elder Hamm recalls. “The little boy gave up. He couldn’t compete.” The other dad kept kicking it with Mia as his son sat and watched.
Brandi Chastain’s mother, Lark, agrees that you can’t choose what your child will love. The Chastains are a football and basketball family: Brandi’s great uncle played pro football for the Packers, the Stealers and the Rams, and her grandfather was a former NBA basketball player. When Brandi was young, Lark tried to interest her in tap and ballet. But her daughter had different plans. “She was always in the street playing with the guys, stick ball and baseball, and she was too young for little league,” Lark remembers. So when another mother told her they took kids as young as six for soccer, Lark signed her daughter up. A quick study; Brandi was soon scoring up to 11 goals a game. “People used to say, What do you feed her for breakfast?” says Lark. “She took to it and loved it. It was her passion.”
Most of today’s players can pinpoint when they discovered the sport they wanted to pursue above all others. Yet the parents of elite athletes nearly all say they tried to expose their children to other sports as well: baseball, basketball track, swimming, in some cases even cheerleading (former Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders admits to being a cheerleader before her performance in the pool made it clear others should be cheering for her.) Often parents didn’t go to games, except under extraordinary circumstances. U.S. women’s soccer team member Julie Foudy has played most of her games without a parent in the stands. (She, like Jenny Thompson, thought medicine was her true career, and sports was just a temporary pastime.)
Olympic gold medal tennis star Lindsay Davenport has said she was proud of the fact that both her parents had their own careers, and unlike many other tennis parents, did not travel with her to tournaments or make a living off her earnings. When she reached the quarter-or semi-finals she’d call them and if they could get on a plane they’d come to watch. Otherwise, it was her career, and they supported it from afar.
These days, it’s not unusual for parents to spend thousands of dollars a year to send children to tournaments and training camps where they may be recruited or discovered by a scout or influential coach. If Mia were coming up in sports today, her mother is not sure the family would have been able to afford it. “You want to be equitable with all your children, and if Mia had been playing in this day and age, I don’t know how we would have done it,” says Hamm. “Mia was mentored in so many ways, and we know that we benefited from that in a big way.”
Hamm often talks to groups of parents about a sane approach to dealing with the pressure of youth sports. “One mother asked me, ‘How can we make sure there are always leagues for children who just want to play for the fun of it?’ I heartily endorse that.”
Playing for the fun of it? It sounds like a nostalgic notion. So many parents are so concerned with getting their child to the next level that they forget to make it fun. And they’re disappointed and betrayed when their children quit. How many of the young soccer players watching their parents punch and shove one another on that sunny New Jersey field will stick with the sport? In five or six years a good number of them may have given up organized athletics for skateboarding or some other sport. (“Heckle this, Dad!”)
If the Olympic women’s soccer team is any indication, the best way to raise a champion–or, for that matter, an active, healthy, sports-loving child–is to be as nonchalant as possible. Feign boredom. Yawn and talk to friends over the cheers of other parents. Be happy for them, but find your own happiness elsewhere. You can be assured that if you want them to play tennis, the closest they’ll come will be to take up kayaking.
Lucy S. Danziger is the former-editor-in-chief of Women’s Sports & Fitness magazine and is a commentator on sports.
