Theology in the Raw - Is it Good for Christians to be Involved in Sports? Dr. Ed Uszynski

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Dr. Ed Uszynski (PhD, Bowling Green State University) has been working with collegiate and professional athletes in various roles with Athletes in Action since 1992. He’s the author of Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters (IVP) and his most recent book, Away Game: A Christian Parents Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, coauthored with Brian Smith. To listen to our "extra innings" conversation, head over to Theology in the Raw's Patreon page to become a member of the Theology in the Raw community.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of theology. My guest today is my good friend, Dr. Ed Yuzinski, who has a PhD from Bowling Green State University and has been working with collegiate and professional athletes in various roles with athletes in action since 1992. He's also the author of Untangling Critical Race Theory, What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters. We've talked about that book a couple of times, I believe on this podcast. And his most recent book is A Way Game, A Christian Parents Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, co-authored with Brian Smith.

And this becomes the topic of our conversation. How should Christians think about sports in general and how to parent their kids who are involved in sports in particular. So please welcome back to the show for the, I don't know, maybe like eighth or ninth time, the one and only Dr. Ed Yuzinski. Dr. Ed Yuzinski. How are you this morning? Wonderful. Preston. Good to be back in spaces with you, man.

Well, we really haven't connected since exiles, which was just another great experience. It seems like that was five years ago now, but it was just a few months ago. Yeah. We said audio is after, no, we went to the baseball game and then the next day we hung out and then, no, no, the baseball game was last. Yeah. No, that's where we departed. That's right. Game was that Sunday, which was very fun going to the box seats or whatever those things were. Those a good way to decompress at the end of a conference and several month process for you. Oh my word. Yeah. I was sick as a dog. I don't even remember that. I preached that. I did

the whole XLS conference and I preached at the church the next, I woke up, I mean, I could hardly breathe or speak on Sunday morning and that's due to preaching that morning at the church that hosted it. And I did it. It got, I got through it, but man, I was trashed. I thought that was a mistake. I thought that was a boundary air on your part. If I w if I wasn't sick, I would have been fine. And it's still, it's still well, I, no regrets. I'll probably do it again. But yeah. Oh man. Great to see you, man. You know, what's weird is you've probably thought more about a theology of sport than anyone I know. Maybe our mutual friend, John white, who I haven't talked to in 10 years, you know, might be up there, whatever. But it's funny because

I've had you on the podcast several times. We never talked about this topic. I don't think so. I don't think we have either. No, we always, uh, we've spent a lot of time talking about race. Um, and we've talked about a handful of other things, but never the most obvious one for me since I've been doing this for the entirety of my vocational life, almost 35 years. So it's a good time to do it. I keep encouraging you to stop talking about controversial topics so you can just have some normalcy, some life normalcy.

And then I write a book on race and critical race theory. And then follow it up by writing a book on youth sports, which is not as, that doesn't quite cause the same kind of hysteria that sexuality and race do, but it's similar. Is it? Yes. I actually, I've kind of been laughing to myself that I expect actually to get more

pushback and more blowback on this book than I did the race book actually, which was very minimal just because people have very, very strong opinions about their kids and youth sports. What can you sum up those opinions? Like what are the kind of, I mean, I could probably assume what they are, but I'd love to hear from you. What are the different like really strong opinions that are disagreeing with each other? What are those? Well, this is probably more of what I say, that I think people don't realize, when I say people, us as parents, don't realize how much our involvement with our kids' youth sports journey has more to do with us and our own insecurities, our own resentments or regrets or fears that we have about the future, this imagined future that we have for our kids

and how much that impacts the way we interact with our children, our own security. I always come back to that word security that I feel embarrassed when my kids perform poorly. I feel better about myself when they perform well. And again, I don't think there's anything unnatural about that. That's very, very natural for all of us. But it ends up messing with the way we interact with our kids. And especially now, and really, this is what's prompted us even

to have this conversation that what's developed in the last, really over the last 50 years, that what's developed in the last, really over the last 50 years, but it's only intensified in the last two decades, the last 10 years. And that is what me and my co-author, Brian Smith, have been calling the Youth Sport Industrial Complex. It's a machine. It's a billion-dollar industry that views kids as commodities, that brings its own value system along with it, that we as parents just get swept up in usually without giving much thought to it. I say this as Christian parents, just get carried along by it without giving much thought

to what's happening with our kids, or maybe even more fundamentally, what's happening to us, what the system is doing to us. So yeah, that would be kind of an umbrella under which I've spent a lot of time in conversations with people and doing my own research about just what that means. And of course, I don't know if people know this, but I've spent 35 years working And of course, I don't know if people know this, but I've spent 35 years working in a sport ministry where I'm working with college and professional athletes and helping them to grow in their faith, come to faith and grow in their faith, and listening to their own stories. And so, in doing so, I've been able to listen to kind of what their journey is with their

own parents and with their coaches in their background. Literally across decades, I've been listening to that. And then I've got four of my own kids, three of whom are in college now. So I've spent the last 15 years in the youth sports world as a parent and as a coach, which has just given me a whole different perspective

than what I've been gaining as a minister to athletes. I mean, it sounds like by calling it the sports industrial complex, I mean, uh, in the shadow of Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex, that's not, that's not a positive description. And even when he said that it's like, yeah, you know, sports does seem to be the liturgical wing of civic religion in the empire. I mean, you know, I just had a guy on the podcast, it'll probably be released by the time this one is. And he, you know, we're talking about something completely off the topic, right? But he said, we're talking about archaeology and how you kind of understand the past based

on archaeology. Because sometimes archaeology doesn't lie. It tells you how people were actually behaving and acting in ways that sometimes ancient literature can be so biased. And he said, he's the example, he's like, what if in like 500 years, like they dug up like an old football stadium and really dissected kind of what went on here. They would say this was a religious altar almost,

like this seemed to be a place where massive people gathered. They could probably discover that tons of money went into this. And gosh, this must have been a religious center of the society. And I know you've talked about this as well. Well, you probably don't even know this. That's what I did my dissertation work. I know you did. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, yes, it is a center of power and finance and idolatry, really. I don't think those are... It's not hyperbole to put language like that on what the sport industry is, at least in our lifetime. I mean, it wasn't that 100 years ago, but it's turned into that.

And even the study of the history of how that's all come about, I think, is somewhat fascinating. It reminds me of, I was thinking about this Thomas Kuhn's, what was that book that he wrote? My goodness, I just lost it, on scientific revolutions, a theory of scientific revolutions. Back in the 60s where he said that you actually, science is not as objective as we like to think it is, you actually need certain cultural realities to be in place

for certain, for discoveries to be made. You never heard of that book before? No, I barely heard of that book. No. Yeah. So it was super controversial, actually, in the scientific community, but it also just sort of makes sense as you even look at history. And so you need certain trends to be in place. You need a certain ethos to be in the air for things to happen. And we live at a time now where sport has been allowed to become a godlike figure in our lives as adults. And we live at a time now where sport has been allowed to become a godlike figure in our lives as adults, and we've allowed that to trickle down to our kids in ways that aren't

healthy. But let me just say this, even in saying that, the book that we wrote is not to attack sport culture, it's not to condemn parents for being a part of it. It's really just the opposite. I mean, it's just another aspect of culture and it's pagan culture. It doesn't exist to draw people to Christ and lift him up. That's not the point of youth sport culture. And so, just like any other aspect of society, we need to ask, what does it mean to move Christianly or in a Christian way through it? And more importantly, as parents, how do we help our kids to find and pursue Jesus in the midst of it? For those of us whose kids really love sports, and that's

a huge part of their world, you know, which isn't true for everybody's kids, but for those who it is, how do we help them to do it in a Christian way, or at least be planting Christian seeds? So given everything you said so far, like should people, parents and you know, their kids, like, should we actually be encouraging kids, our kids to be involved in sports? Or is it one of those situations where if they happen to want to play a sport, okay, now let's help them navigate it, so is it like a neutral endeavor with a lot of

potential negative repercussions? Or is it actually like more of a positive, at least a possibly positive situation that we should actually encourage our kids to be involved in? Does that make sense? That distinction? Yeah, I think it's probably,

I don't know whether we should encourage our kids one way or the other. If they wanna play sports, then we have to deal with what it means, what is that gonna look like in their lives? I don't think it's something that we should encourage or go out of our way to say, you should spend more time in this environment. This will be good for you. I don't think that's the point. They either like playing sports or they don't. I think sometimes we as parents,

it's funny, I literally was just having a conversation with a guy that sometimes kids wind up playing sports more for the parents than they do for themselves. Let me just say that. Especially after a while, like maybe a kid tries a sport and doesn't actually really like it or he's not, or she's not having a good time with it, but they feel pressure from their parents to continue on in it because the parents want them to continue. Because it was a sport they loved growing up, or they just want their kids to be a part

of this particular team or whatever. And obviously, I don't think that that is good. I don't think sports need to be avoided though, if that's really what you're asking at the core. I don't think they need to be avoided just because it's raised to a certain level of toxicity. I just think it means we need to be more intentional as parents to recognize what the culture's doing to us before we even think about what it's doing with our kids

and then be purposeful about how to take advantage of opportunities that are there to disciple them, to teach them, which is really hard to do if all I'm really concerned about is playing time and performance statistics. Yeah. Do you think it's really hard? Do you think it depends? I mean, right now we're using the term sports.

I mean, it's a very broad term. I mean, every individual sport is going to be different. Right. I mean, especially when you go from like more individual sports, I dunno, like tennis, maybe, I mean, everything has a team element, but I mean, track and field cross country or something where it's like, it's kind of like you and your legs, right. Or your pole or whatever, you know, and you're part of a team, but then there's other more profoundly team oriented sports. And that just is a different dynamic. And then you have sports that are, you know, way more deep into the heart of the sports industrial complex. You know, I'm thinking like football, maybe basketball at a high school or college, especially

my word. Why are, I mean, how did, how did sports become so integral to our educational system? I mean, how much money goes in and comes out of that? And why are people getting scholarships to elite schools because of their athletic abilities when their educational abilities may not be on par while other people who have educational abilities maybe are not getting the same scholarship. The whole system just feels kind of weird. Anyway, I'm getting off track.

Point is, should we distinguish between different kinds of sports and some maybe have a much higher level of toxicity that we need to be aware of, whereas others, it's not as much. My other question, and I'll keep it short, is does it depend on the kid too? And I've got some examples along those lines, but for one kid, we may need to be really concerned about their involvement in sports, where another kid, it may be the opposite. We're actually being involved, might actually help shape them as a person in a positive way. Yeah. All right. So let's back up for a second and just clarify what we, or at least I mean,

by the complex itself, the youth sports complex, okay? Because I do think each sport is different. Each sport has different cultures to it. A volleyball culture is different from a football culture. What happens in an individual sport is definitely different than what happens in a team sport on the ground. But when we're talking about the complex what do we mean i mean this this ever increasing need to start organized sport younger and younger.

Okay earlier and earlier so you've got four year old kids that are on organized structured sport teams it's the need to pay more and more money to be a part of the teams. So, you know, it's harder now to play rec sports or YMCA sports where the fee is very low and everybody can play. You're almost forced to be part of these travel teams and elite teams and clubs. Again, that's the language that's around them, where you have to pay significant amounts of money. There is more pressure to specialize

earlier, where instead of being in high school and being able to play three or four sports, the way we did when we were growing up if we wanted to, you're encouraged and almost forced or feared into having to specialize at 10 years old to play year round just this one sport. So you're not just gonna play summer baseball for two months in the summer, but you're gonna play in a fall league. You're gonna start winter training for this team.

You're gonna play 70, you know, 708090 games between the spring and the summer, and then you're going to have a tryout for next year's team. Now, the increased pressure that even goes along with that of what it means to be able to make a team and to feel like you have to keep going up in the hierarchy. What else can I what else can I put on there? That's what the youth sports industrial complex is. The emphasis on winning over development, which I have no problem at all with winning,

not a participation trophy guy, at least in the negative way that that term has been used, I'm all for earning and merits, whatnot, in the context of sports. But these days, winning seems to be the primary, if not sole value that's championed on a team, even for these little kids who don't even know what they're doing yet. It's just become this kind of grotesque need to have more points at the end. And for me to feel good about what's happening on the team versus am I actually teaching kids how to play? Are they having fun? Are they learning anything else about life and how to interact socially through me? Or are we just, we win. You know, that's it. That's all that matters. That's what makes Ted lasso so unique, right? You're watching. Yes. Well, that was this

whole thing, right? I mean, it was, it was, I'm not here to win. I'm here to develop people. Yeah. It's interesting. The role that ESPN has played in this whole thing. And again, Preston, we could pick this apart in so many different ways. But ESPN has played a huge role in the value system that's trickled down to youth sports. And the reason why I even just thought of them is I really would credit or blame them for this whole winning is all that matters. Ethic that hangs over the whole culture now, where the only way we're gonna value you at all is if you win a championship at the end of a six month baseball season

or an 18 game or 19 game football season at the end of the playoffs. The only way that you're gonna be validated is with the championship. And the second you win, we're going to immediately start asking whether you can do it again next year. So that's all it's just, it's just that constant pressure to alt to win at the end is all that matters.

Wait, real quick. So I've watched ESPN in 20, 30 years. I don't think so. I don't even know what you're talking about. Unless they're the ones playing the Dodger game. Sometimes the ESPN, you know, it's, it's like Sunday night baseball, whatever. But what specifically is ESPN doing to foster that? Cause I mean, winning is always, I mean, that's, that just seems kind of intrinsic to the sport. Are there, are they specifically pushing this narrative more than other? Yes. Well, how do you do that? Well, most of what ESPN is is talk shows. It's not filled mostly with actual games.

It's talk shows. And so the way that you make winning the ultimate value is that that's the topic on the talk show is you compare who the goat is in any particular sport. And the cheap way of measuring whether or not they're the greatest of all time always comes back to how many championships they won. For example, which teams that we talk about or don't talk about. But isn't that like my major league baseball app? I mean, I think just as you're talking

kind of does something similar. They're always going to talk about who's the best hitter in baseball. Is it judge or Shohei or you's the best pitcher? Who's going to win it? Who's going to win? I don't know. It seems like that's just intrinsic to anyone discussing a sport. Isn't it? Or is ESPN just simply doing it more pervasively and aggressively? I would say that they do it pervasively and aggressively. And I would say that, again, pervasively and aggressively and I would say that again I'm not saying there's anything even wrong with talking about who the best is. I'm saying that we're holding up the only value that matters is whether you've won the championship at the end of the year. There's no other values to talk about. There's no journeying value that gets

There's no journeying value that gets endorsed. There's no even, okay, you were a great, you know, they laugh about this all the time with Charles Barkley, for example, just to give you an example, NBA, former NBA superstar, Charles Barkley, who never won a championship. And so they will always mock him as compared to Shaquille O'Neal, who won several championships and what happened to be on teams that were able to pull off championships and Barclay never was. And they make fun of him for it. And it's a joke, but everybody knows that the measuring stick is whether or not you

won chips or not, as they say. And this is what I think is crazy about it, is that we act as though, well, I'll just make the statement. There's a million things that have to go right to win a championship in any sport. There's a million things that have to go right. You have to have the right combination of players. You have to peak at the right time. Things have to go a certain way when it comes to injuries with

referees in any particular game with the way the schedule falls out and who you play when in the season and on and on and on there's there's there's so many chaos theory type and money is a big part too. Right? I mean, some teams, at least in baseball, I know like some teams have a lot more money and other teams have hardly any money. Yeah. So yeah, I'm from Cleveland. You like the Dodgers. So how is, how can we even reasonably compare guys that are on the Indians or guardians teams, Indians of the past with Dodgers teams or Yankees teams? It's just, it's unfair to do that again. And I don't even want to, I don't want to give off the impression that it doesn't matter

whether you win or not. I've already said that at the beginning. Of course, winning is a pursuit that is why you play the game. As Herman Edwards, old football coach famously said, that is why you play the game. You're trying to win. But to hold that up as the only value worth pursuing, we're the only thing that's going to measure our ability to be successful. And to do that, look, it's also different to do that with a 25-year-old on the LA Dodgers versus

a six-year-old who's playing at the Xenia YMCA. And all you need to do is go to any sideline at any youth sport event and watch coaches. And if you can pull yourself away from being a parent and just watch and listen to parents, you'll see that they've gotten that ethic from somewhere. And I'm saying I would blame quite a bit of it on the power and the reach of ESPN and the ethics that ESPN brought to the table. One other part of the complex that I didn't mention

is the need to travel everywhere now. So not only is it year round, but we have to travel across state lines to be involved in the best tournaments, at the best complexes, as though the kids that are, you know, 20 minutes around the corner here are not as competitive or not as good of a group to be able to play it with. And it's all part of just this huge marketing machine. I never thought about that.

Like I, you know, I grew up playing baseball and I don't, I don't think I ever got on an airplane. I mean, even like maybe a bus across town and high school. When I got to college, we traveled, you know, two, three hours sometimes. There was one time we actually in LA traveled to Idaho for a tournament, but that was really rare. Fast forward to my son playing soccer in a, in a, in a club team, our only game in the entire year, our first game, at least we had to go to Phoenix. We had to go. We have fly to Phoenix for my 15 year old son's soccer tournament. I'm

like, are there no games at Boise or Idaho? And then finally, like later on in the season where we had a few games, whatever. And then there was another, there was two other trips that were at least a seven hour drive. You know, if not, I think we went back to feed actually we are with the Phoenix twice. It's like, dude, who could afford this? Yeah. So, well, it is interesting then the whole socioeconomic study of who gets included and who gets excluded in youth sports these days, which again, those are lanes you and I like to run around in, but not everybody can access being able to go to Phoenix to play. So it becomes, like you can do a real Marxian analysis of the haves and the have nots

of the youth sports experience. This is interesting, Preston, you maybe have never heard this either. And again, this will have something to do with ESPN. But a lot of people credit this as being sort of the beginning of the whole needing to travel experience. So one of the first major sports complexes in the country that went in was at Disney, and it was created by ESPN,

the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, I think that it's still called today. It was in the early 2000s, late 1990s. And what happened was when 9-11 hit and everything shut down for quite a while, Disney was losing money at all of its parks except one. And it was the sports complex. People were still willing to travel and to pay money and to show up for their tournaments when they were being scheduled or whenever they started scheduling things again after 9-11 shut everything down. What Disney realized was that this whole sport, this sport complex was terrorist-proof.

Not even the threat of terrorism would stop people from coming and paying huge amounts of money to be part of these tournaments that happen. And so again, I'm not saying that it all started there, but once those numbers started showing themselves to entrepreneurs across the country for the last 20 years, you can go anywhere and find huge sport complexes all over the place. I was just speaking at something in Branson, Missouri, and we had to fly into the Springfield Airport, and the way to get on the highway, you drove by this huge complex that was just built a couple years ago, and it's got a ton of fields

and an indoor facility, and they're everywhere now. And so, is that bad? Again, I'm just even thinking about what people might be thinking as they're listening to this. In and of itself, it's as neutral as anything else that you have an opportunity to buy. But when you start or when we start to feel pressure that we have to be part of teams that are traveling

to Phoenix to play their games or traveling overseas to play their doggone games. That's when I think we need to check ourselves just like anything else in a capitalist society. Let's just even keep using that language where we're being encouraged to have to buy something or we're going to miss out. Youth sports is playing the same game with us and it cuts at something more central to who we are as people, because as parents, we love our kids and we want to give them the best opportunities and we don't

want them to miss out. And so there's just sort of this unthinking. Usually it's unthinking because we don't really have many people that are challenging us to think different about it or helping us to think different about it within the to us or our kids, or even if it's what's best for our kids, which it usually isn't again, if we can just cut to the chase, it usually isn't what's best for them. I mean, you're saying that as an athlete who's worked in the, who still works in the industry, who has four kids, all of whom are in the industry, but they're not doing what they need to do. it usually isn't what's best for them. I mean, you're saying that as an athlete who's worked

in the, who still works in the industry who has four kids, all of whom played sports, I mean, I think at different levels. Yeah. So, so help me make sense of this. So why looking back, would you have discouraged your kids from playing sports or, or, or what are some positive things that can come with, with playing a sport? No, or, or what are some positive things that can come with, with playing a sport? No, again, it doesn't have anything to do with whether I would have encouraged or discouraged. And what I would have stopped doing was pressuring my first born because I was afraid that if he didn't do X, Y, and Z, he was going to limit his possibility of playing in college.

I would not have felt nearly as much pressure to be involved in teams that played around the year because then they're going to miss out. Because again, there's so many factors that go into what happens when they get to high school that when they're 11 years old, you have no idea what's going to happen when they get to high school, whether they're even still going to want to play, who the coach is going to be, what kids are going to move in and move out of the community to play on a certain team, whether they get injured or not, and just on and on and on. And I would have tried to have been much more present, certainly with my firstborn.

I feel like I was being confronted with some of these truths just through his own journey, and it's helped me with the other kids. It's not that it's bad, Preston, it's that if I just get swept up in it and let sport culture hold the reins on our experience and our journey, without ever stepping away and saying, yeah, we're not gonna be a part of that team,

we're gonna be okay to just stay here and play with friends, even though it's in a lesser, it's with a lesser club or it's with kids that maybe aren't as good. We're not gonna be on the team that's playing 70 games or, you know, is playing 12 basketball tournaments. We're gonna play with the club that's playing five tournaments. That's gonna be enough.

We're not gonna feel like we have to play year round or we're missing out. Well, then you can't be on this team. Okay, then we're not gonna be on this team. There's other teams to play on. My post-game interactions with kids, and we talk about this a ton too, what I talk about with my kids after the game

has changed significantly. Whereas in the past, it's very, very driven by performance. It's increasingly been about connection. And Brian Smith, who's the co-writer of this away game, booked with me a few years ago. He said that he started getting in the car with his kids after the game and would ask them, is there anything you want to talk about about the game? That's a great question to ask your kids. Do they want to talk about the game? And almost always, and everybody already knows what the answer is, almost always the answer is no. There's not, they don't usually want to talk about performance aspects of the game. Maybe something funny happened or something like that that they would want to talk about.

But you're asking, do you want to talk about performance? Can I fix you? Can I correct you? Can I tell you everything I've been thinking that somebody needs to tell you as a coach? And their answer to that most of the time is no, I really don't want to talk about that. I want to go get ice cream. I wanna go on a date. And why is that? They don't wanna talk about it because they know

that it's gonna be a conversation about performance and they just don't wanna go there? Good. I think, again, everybody's different and everybody's got different kids. But again, from research, from just listening and talking with people and listening to their stories, I think most of the time kids don't want to talk about it because they're not

as interested in improving their performance as we are in helping them improve their performance. Most kids, and again, it depends on what we're talking about. A six-year-old may be different from a 16-year-old. They just want to play. They just want to play the game. They're not there to try to get better or to maximize their potential or all the stuff that's going in the brochures. They just want to play and have fun. And if they can get better or they can win games along the way, that's fine. But it's not like their chief aim the way it is for many of us as parents.

So that's one reason. And two, let me just finish this and then push back on it. Two is yes, exactly what you just said, because most of us, and again, I realize that's a huge generalization, that's not everybody that's listening, but most of us wanna get in the car and correct and fix and coach after the game.

And it's why John O'Sullivan, who runs this organization called Changing the Game Project, I bumped into him, it was probably 10 years ago, and just loved the stuff that he was doing on his website and the people that he had working with him because he was really trying to reform youth sports even a decade ago. And he did a study that basically showed that kids, the worst experience they had when it came to their sports journey was the car ride home. That has been shown over and over again as the academic sports nerds type people like me that have done studies and

dig into actually asking kids about their experience, the part they dread the most is going home with mom and dad. Or going home with whoever the caregiver is because instead of that being a safe place where they can just be themselves and they can kind of move on into other aspects of life, they're going to run into a struggle session. That's interesting. Do you not think that's too surprising? I'm wondering, my question is, is it a generational thing?

Because what you're describing, I would say is pretty true of my son. And he's only, you know, I've, you know, four kids, my third daughter, she played some volleyball, but it was very much just for fun. Like she just, she had, she just, it was kind of fun. She wanted to do it for a little bit. It wasn't even like a really competitive thing. It was just kind of like, and she's out there just like messing around with people laughing and, you know, not your typical, like she has no interest in like making it or.

And you let that be the case. You and Chris let that be the case for her. Oh, we, cause yeah. You didn't pressure her. Yeah. And Chris, my wife was not a, well, she was a gymnast. No, she was. Yeah. She did gym and in high school, but not. Yeah. The whole like competitive sports vision, like that was more me, but I saw so many parents when I was an athlete, so many parents, just, Oh, I, I, I despise them. How much pressure they put on their kids and how they would pressure coaches and the putting their kid into play and how money and power is involved. And I just, I just remember looking at it as an athlete saying, I never want to be that kind of father, you know? So I, so when my

son, my son was the one he, he, he got into sports, he didn't play baseball, then a little bit of basketball and then soccer is, is where he's at now. But even that he's probably, you know, he's going to college next year. So he's, he's not going to play soccer. So, but he would be one that would take, he, he was similar to me and, and being, he was very competitive, wanted to be good. But so here's my question. So all that to say what, what, what you're describing about not wanting to talk, not wanting to like be the best, just wanting to play and have fun. I think that that applies to my son to some extent, but, but it definitely doesn't, I don't resonate with that at all.

When I was in baseball, I absolutely wanted to be the best. I didn't want to talk about the game after with, with anybody. But I would immediately go and try to figure out, okay, what went wrong? I'm going to spend three hours in the cage tonight to fix what, you know, so I had, I had that and that would, that didn't come from anybody else. I didn't have any, my parents are divorced. My dad had show up at games, put zero pressure on me. You know, my mom was working three jobs. So there was, it was nothing externally. There was just something inside of me that absolutely lived and died on wanting to be the best of the best, you know? And if I wasn't

the best of the best, I was like really upset at myself and it was not mentally good for my high school years. So hit pause. That's, that's, that is great. I was the same way. Okay. You played college baseball. I had a, I had a kind of a bizarre sports journey post high school, but I did end up, I played in the overseas. I went to Kent state to play basketball ended up not playing there. I played with the athletes in action exhibition team back when that was still a thing back in the 90s where we were playing division one programs all over the country and I'm 57 and I still have that kind of drive inside of me. Okay, but Preston this is the point. I love what you just said. So that makes up less than half a percent

of all athletes. What your experience of being able to play in college or beyond and the mentality that you described that put you there was something that was just in you. It wasn't extrinsic. It wasn't because you were being put in the best clubs or your parents were pressuring you or getting you up at 4 a.m. to work out or getting you this training.

It's because there was something God put in you that wired you that way, and it expressed itself through sports. It's also expressed itself through writing books and running about the project. You know what I mean? Like it shows up in other ways of life because it's who He's made you to be.

But listen, most kids, 99 and a half plus percent kids, they don't have that in them and there's nothing wrong with them. They just don't have that in them. They were created in a different way to put focus on other aspects of life and to be good at other things. And that's okay. But we treat, and again, I say we, kind of this general we, parents in this time wanna treat all their kids like they're part of that half percent. From the time they're six years old on,

we wanna kind of act like they have a college scholarship in their future. Or we're at least gonna push them to get the most out of who they were created to be as an athlete. And most kids don't want that. They just wanna play. They just wanna play the game. They just wanna play the sport.

And if they do want it, then they'll share that with you. And again, you'll just see it. You'll see it as a parent, that they're just wired with you. And again, you'll just see it, you'll you'll see it as apparent that they're just wired differently. They want this in a different way. They never stop playing, they push themselves to work on the hard thing in the game. Like that's not a normal thing at all. Like they, they want to fix the part that's broke on their own. They're out in the driveway, they're out in the

yard, they're okay. And driveway, they're out in the yard, they're, okay. And that's where things have gone haywire is that the sport complex wants us to treat all the kids like they've got a chance of making it. And that already taps into something inside of us as parents that wants to believe that our kid, if he's gonna play sports, they're gonna make it. And that's where things go really wrong.

And you're saying that desire on, on us as parents, as a generation, that, that, that stems from our own upbringing, like our, we wanted to make it and we failed. So now we're going to like put that on our kids or where, where, where does that, why is that so pervasive among parents these days? Well, don't you think, don't, don't you think that that's just a natural thing for any of us as parents to feel as an extension of our generation? so pervasive among parents these days. Well, don't you think that that's just a natural thing for any of us as parents to feel as an extension of ourselves that whatever it is that they put their hands to,

we want them to be the best at? Again, I'm saying this can be corrupted. This is a distortion inside of us if we start living too much through our kids or we get too embarrassed when they mess up at a game or in a play or in music or wherever. We get too embarrassed by that because there's so much of an extension of us or we feel too good or too proud of them when they succeed because there's an extension of

us. That we I think we all kind of have to go through a process of detaching ourselves a bit from them, realize that they're making their own choices, they're making their own moral choices, and yes, they're living in our home, and we have a responsibility to try to grow them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but ultimately they're making their own choices

and they're their own person. And we have to go through a process where they, they, they separate from us. I think a lot of parents have a hard time doing that quite honestly, and don't, and some parents never, never do it. And it's why their kids don't want to come home for Thanksgiving when they're 30. I experienced those emotions. Like I, I'm trying to think like when my son was doing what he had a good game, especially when he was playing baseball early on, you know, and he started really late, but he, he was good for how little experience he had. I mean, the first, his first, you know, he battled like 700 or something his like first year in

Little League, you know, he'd only played for like two years. And I was like, yeah, I was like so excited for him. But I don't know, I don't think the line between am I excited because of me, or because I'm seeing him really energized and man, he went three for four, hit a double, whatever. And like, man, I could see how happy he is and like, oh, that makes me happy. Or is it, or was it like, that's my son, you know? And like afterwards they can see like, oh, I'm his dad. You know, like I don't, I don't think it was that.

I don't, I don't know if I can completely separate that, but that's, I just all have to say like the range of emotions that the parent experiences when their son or daughter succeeds or fails, that's, I never really dissected that. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah. It's worth, it's worth dissecting. It's murky and it's not, again, I'm not saying that's bad that I feel that way for my kid. Here's where I know it's becoming, that it is becoming bad. Do I feel like I need to make excuses for him with the other parents when he makes mistakes?

Do I feel like I'm constantly needing to show him or her off and I'm constantly posting on Facebook their highlights? Do I post their mistakes on Facebook or just their highlights? What you know, what is happening? I mean, again, this is always hard work to do to ask what, ask what is actually happening. It's just, we could be having this conversation about marriage. You know, I just, I just, I just picture the, I just imagine a scenario or a parent is just posting all these bloopers of their kids. Like kids struck out for time. That's your day. They're very posted on Facebook. That would be like, we're going to bear it

on you. I'd be like, what? It would be, we wouldn't do that. My son missed the loop, the winning shot. And he told me he missed it. Nobody like boot up. He posted on Instagram. There's the free throw. Here's the game winner brick. This is the air ball that created the misery for everyone yesterday. Thank you. Well, no, we don't do that.

So it's unthinking of what we do do, which is we get so vested in the highs that come out of the game. We don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do that. We don't do that. We don't know why it's so funny. Well, no, we don't do that. So it's unthinking of what we do do, which is we get so vested in the highs that come from that and it can become a bad thing without us even realizing it. And we start to put more pressure on them.

We start to have an expectation. Again, I like to think about this fear of an imagined future that drives us in the present. So we've got an eight-year-old and we are imagining them being in some successful sports environment. They're getting a college scholarship or they're a star in their high school team. And so how do we get there? Well, the industry is set up to say, we exist to help your kid get to the top of the ladder We're gonna get them there. All it's gonna take is a down payment which will rival what you pay for college It's gonna take some money and you got to get this gear and we need a commitment out of you pretty much year-round

And you got to play with these kids and you got to travel to these places and we're going to expose you. Can't tell you how many exposure tournaments that I went to that never it was like the Jurassic Park tour where there was this promise of seeing all the dinosaurs in Jurassic, the first Jurassic Park and they get in the car and there's no dinosaurs. That's how I felt a lot of time going through these basketball tournaments where Eric was going to get exposure to college coaches and none of them show up or there's like two guys there and there's, you know, 20 games going on. And so the chance of him or her actually watching your game, it's a racket. It's just a, it really is a racket. So does that mean we shouldn't play? No.

It means we should be very mindful of what we're signing up for and ask are we actually taking advantage of opportunities to move into our kids' lives to help them grow as a follower of Jesus in the midst of that? Or are we primarily and only concerned about their performance and statistics and playing time and how they measure up against the other kids and what I look like as a parent.

So we spent almost an hour unpacking a lot of the negative aspects of sports. Can you, can you steel man a pot, not, not just a, a, this is a neutral thing. Let's navigate it well, or even a negative thing and let's protect them from going down the rabbit hole further than they should. But is there a positive case of the, a positive contribution to one's discipleship journey that sports and only sports, well, let's just say that sports can and does play. Yeah. Well, this is what, again, my co-author, Brian Smith, he's been talking about this for a decade, that sports is like buying a ticket to an opportunity. It's giving you an

opportunity to see your kid experience almost every imaginable emotion. They come home from school, let's say, and you ask them how their day went, and they say, fine. And they never give you, they don't give you really paragraphs. You're lucky to get a sentence. And the reality is you have no idea what happened with them in their school day or what it looked like in the classroom. Unless you're a teacher who's there with them, you have no idea. But when it comes to sports, you actually get to watch them at practice, at games, interacting with other people, experiencing highs and lows and how they're navigating

it. So it's buying you a ticket to an opportunity to see those moments, to enter into them with them. I want to say intervene, but that sounds too dramatic, but it's to enter into them with them. I wanna say intervene, but that sounds too dramatic. But it's to enter into those moments with your kids, to be able to talk to them, to, again, to connect versus just criticize, to go after goals that go beyond just performance. And again, I'm not at all opposed to having performance goals or process goals of, and things

like that. But to talk to them about how they see other people, I mean, that's something that we talk about all the time. The idea of agape-ing other people, where agape means I'm going to do what's best for you in spite of what it costs me. Are you starting to acquire eyes that see other people on your team? That see your coaches as human beings and referees as human beings and the people that are working there as human beings and that you can serve in these spaces.

Again, this sounds crazy to talk about with a six-year-old, but see what I want is for them to be living differently as a 16 year old and differently as a 26 year old and a 36 year old, right? So it's taken this long view and realizing that if I'm planting seeds about how to view people and how to view themselves in this world, in the context of sports, hopefully the Holy Spirit will grow those seeds in them

and they will be operating in the world in a different way after sports are done. But again, I won't take advantage of those opportunities. I won't even be looking for them if my primary concern has to do with sport performance and I'm not paying attention to things like how they walk through the handshake line after the game as when they lose. I've been talking about that a lot lately. Just watch that. If you get to go to games, just watch what happens in what is now still a perfunctory and expected part of most games is that you're going to smack hands with the other team after the game. When your kids win, they're laughing and shaking hands and looking people in the face and when they lose

More often than not what I see is kids. They won't look the other person in the face They give this limp hand, you know that they kind of stick out there. I feel like they're disrespectful to adults at the end of the line They don't look the refs in the face as they go by to touch them. And so there's a moment where we need to have a conversation about what it means to lose well and what it means to have character and class and how to go through that line like a secure Christ follower after a game. Oh, you can feel sad. And there may be a time for pouting about something that happened,

or you didn't get to play, or whatever. You lost on the last second, or got beat by 40, and it was embarrassing. Those are all real emotions that we can talk about. But for that 10 seconds, you need to look people in the face like they're human beings, and say good game to them, and shake their hand. And it's such a simple, small thing.

And sports is providing tons of opportunities like that to have those kinds of conversations with our kids. Yeah, yeah, I know totally. I mean, our kids are being raised in such a nerfy padded world that is shielding them from experiences that produce resilience. I don't know if you ever read Nassim Taleb's book, Anti-Fragile. Brilliant groundbreaking book.

It's not the easiest read, but his whole concept of that humans, and especially kids growing up, are anti-fragile. Meaning we get strong, like muscles or immune system. When it's exposed to adversity, it gets stronger. Now too much, or the classic example of the trees in the indoor dome or whatever, because there was no wind, these trees grew, and then they ended up falling over,

because when trees face wind resistance, their roots grow deeper and stronger. And people are the same way, immune systems, muscles, even our psychology, when we face resistance, not too much. Too much wind will knock over a tree, but no wind, they'll just fall over because it hasn't gotten stronger. So I do think sports can provide unique opportunities when managed well,

but it doesn't become an idol when we don't let our kid just respond. However, he or she wants to, when they lose or win or, you know, talking smack like if there's some kind of coaching like actual or discipleship going on, it does provide opportunity for them to experience a coach who yells at them, you know, or how do they respond when another kid who's worst in you is playing instead of you? He's starting because his dad is best friends of the coats or maybe he has given more money to the team or whatever. How do you respond when you go over five

and is it the end of the world for you or do you kind of build some kind of resilience to come back and play again the next day? You know, I do think there's, there can be a lot of those, I would say even unique opportunities or just teamwork, you know, working with the team, how to get along with other players that are nicer, not treating you well and stuff. You know, these are, these are, it's like a microcosm of, of real life experiences. And I would say in this younger generation, they were being shielded probably more than ever from those kinds of opportunities, which I think is contributing to the mental health crisis among teens, quite

honestly, but that's another. So do I know that's a whole nother episode, isn't it? So again, let me just resay this. We say this in the book. Sports don't build character. People do. Yeah. Again, research and just common sense life. Using the handshake line again, if nobody intervenes with our kids in the handshake line, because guess what?

There's also a way to go through there as a winner that often needs to be conformed. confronted. Talking smack and yeah. Yeah, talking trash and making fun and laughing and stuff like that. So is somebody intervening on either side of that with the kids to help them know how to do that in a way that has class at the very least and models Christ if you're coming from a Christian perspective. Well, like what would it mean to walk through that line as a Christ follower? Okay? Sports provides tons of opportunities. That's kind of our whole point. Will you be equipped to intervene and help your kids,

or are you primarily only intervening to try to help them with their sport performance? Yeah, that's good. That's a question that we need to ask as parents, because again, I think the right answer should be, let's spend less time on sport performance. There's a place for that, but less inner time thinking about

how to get them in a better place to play their sports and more time on how do we have enough relational capital that we can have conversations about how to live differently in the midst of it. And you talk about this persistence thing, we wrote a bonus chapter that's actually on Brian's site, the christ Christianathlete.com, which is worth going to, the Christianathlete.com. And it's a chapter on persistence. And look, most of the time, again, general statement, but as soon as things get a little bit tough on any of these teams, parents let their kids leave. Let them quit in the middle of the season. They're not playing as much as they thought they should. But let's just go to another team.

No. I don't like that you gave great examples. I don't like this coach or I don't like this aspect of what this coach did or he raised or she raised her voice at me. And we immediately relieved them of that stress of having to work through it, of maybe them even having to use social skills to go and articulate a concern or frustration to the coach. We just put them on a different team. And the youth sport industrial complex encourages that. Like if you don't like it, we're here to serve you. Here's another team for you to go to. Here's another group of kids. Here's another coach and this one will be better than

that last one and it's only gonna cost you X. And I've watched parents have their kids just chase that throughout their whole youth experience. Again, I'm old enough now to be on this other side where I can say, I watched this unfold for a lot of kids as their parents just had them jump from team to team to team, looking for whatever it is that's

missing on this one. And it didn't benefit the kids in the long run. Their sport life ended, they didn't end up going to college, but even if they did, they went to college and then it was over. Okay, so what? What did we use sports to teach them? Did we help them develop in following Jesus in the midst of this? Were we only and primarily concerned with the stat line or playing time or how I felt about myself as a parent in the stands? Good stuff, dude. Yeah. So just, again, we've been talking about your book. I forgot to hold it up right here. A Way Game. Nice. A Christian Parents Guide to Navigating to E-Sports by Brian Smith and Ed Yuzinski. I

don't know of any other book out there that does, I mean, I've never heard of a book that does what you guys are doing here. Is there other others out there that- There are some. David Prince is a guy who wrote a book specific about this. Sabrina Little. They're starting to, but this is actually a little backstory. So Brian and I first started talking about this eight years ago. Oh, really? And yeah, because we were feeling it as parents and we realized there really isn't anything that's been written. We've got all this experience. Let's at least take what we've learned from interacting with college athletes mostly, but also now as parents and coaches and former players ourselves. We've got this intersection

of all these different lived realities that maybe could be helpful to people. Well, I ended up going off in a different direction for a while. He went in a different direction and we didn't do anything. Well, he came to me last year and he said, dude, there still isn't hardly anything. We need to write this now. He came to me before Untangling Critical Race Theory, like a couple months before it was coming out. And I'm like, Brian, I got a whole nother book. I'm like in a totally different lane right now. You know, I don't want to do this. And he said, then when are we going to do it?

And it just bothered me because he's right. And I didn't want to put it off. So he came down from Grand Rapids and we spent a few days and just did a huge mind dump and got it in got it set in motion to start the conversation and hopefully to prompt other people to write and to write on their experience. It's super practical, that's the thing he would say too. It's not just a rant about what sport is and isn't.

There's a couple chapters about everything we just talked about for an hour about how we got here, but each chapter is saying, look, this is what sport culture teaches in general. It's sending your kid and you in a certain direction. Here's what it seems like the Bible teaches about this idea. And so here's some practical ways maybe to have this conversation about this particular topic, these seven virtues that we talk about in the book. Here's a way to have the conversation with your kid.

Here's stuff to look for and moments and opportunities that maybe you can step into and plant this kind of a seed with them along the way. And it's not going to be perfect and the kids aren't going to change just like that. But if you at least put yourself on this trajectory, you'll have a better experience and so will they. And maybe God will use you differently in their life. You'll get to enjoy sports for the play that they're intended to be. And you'll be able to take advantage of the many opportunities it presents to actually help them grow in being a Christ follower.

That's what it really is. That's good. Good. I'm glad you did it, dude. I'm glad you didn't put it off even longer. I know he, I didn't even know you came out all of a sudden. I look, I think your publicist reached out to me or something and said like, Hey, would you want to talk about a Jesus? He's latest book. I'm like, ed's one of my best friends. He doesn't have a book. I mentioned that you coming out with this. I didn't tell anybody. I was all about understanding the book. I was all about have a book. I didn't tell anybody. I was all about untangling in this past year and really wanted to focus on that. And it's like, I don't even, I don't even know how this away game book is all of a sudden come to be. I really, I really want to talk about still the race.

Well, now you can get back to it, dude. Thanks so much for being on the Al Jarrad. Do you have any, do you have a few minutes to do some extra innings? Absolutely. Yeah. I would love to, it is much as you're able to share, talk about your current ministry slash job situation so we can take this into, into extra innings. So thanks again for being on Theology Raw. in the raw community and get access to all the extra Indians conversations and other premium content This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.