When you’re chatting to other parents at school pickup, or on the sidelines at Saturday morning sport, have you ever noticed how often (and quickly) parents love to say that their kids play rep sport?
We get it, making a rep squad is an achievement, and it’s natural for parents to be proud. However, many of us place tremendous weight on the success of our kids in the sporting realm.
None of us set out to have a negative impact on our kids when we start enrolling them in
junior sport but along the journey something changes. SALT’s Positive Parenting course re-sets the dial. Through
smart, positive sports parenting, we can help prepare our kids for life and one day they will
thank you for what you did.
At SALT we often receive letters of thanks. Rarely are they as well written or as moving as this one:
“A few of us at Birregurra FNC had been talking for a while about bringing someone in to do a mental health and wellbeing session with our footballers and netballers, knowing that for many of us – young and old – maintaining good mental health can be an ongoing struggle.
As coach of the reserves footy team, I’m used to receiving Thursday night messages from blokes saying they won’t be able to play the coming weekend, because they’re going to a festival, going fishing, going camping, can’t be bothered, whatever. Midway through the 2022 season I received a Thursday night text from one of our twos players that absolutely floored me.
“I’m really sorry Pete, I won’t be able to play this weekend. This morning I tried to take my own life.”
Sport and Life Training (SALT) gets a lot of calls from local sporting clubs when things have gone wrong.
‘We need a course on respect and equality’ explained the President of this typical suburban footy club. He went on to explain why.
‘Our women’s teams do the warm-ups with our men’s teams at training. One of our young blokes said quite loudly, ‘Why do we have to train with these ****s?’ The Pres explained that they had dealt with it strongly. ‘We suspended him for 4 weeks and during those weeks he had to run the water out to the women’s teams. We need to follow up with some in-club education,’ he explained.
Over the past few months Scott and Dave have been on the road, around the State facilitating to many clubs and impacting even more communities. Dave and Scott the absent fathers and husbands as they hit the road over the past two months visiting townships such as Tytynder, Jerilderie, Yackandandah and everywhere in between.
We think that it is important that we are clear on why we exist and why we think our work is so important. There is so much that needs to be done to impact positively on the lives of people, many of which have experienced complex and difficult times over the last few years.
It’s been a very insecure and rocky road since the beginning of 2020 and mental health issues have been a very natural fallout of the times we’ve been through.
But there are large number of Australians who believe they are coping. They are working productively (whether at home or at the workplace), looking after their families and loved ones, doing what activities are allowed dependent on the times and generally feeling like they are in control. They have energy and they aren’t depressed but they may not anticipate anything in the future like they used to do. Describe “languishing” to them and see the understanding dawn in their eyes.
The social isolation experienced by so many club members during the COVID-19 lockdowns, has bought into sharp focus the need for sporting clubs to modify how they operate and to make nurturing the mental wellbeing of their members a centrepiece of their operation
Values, standards, ethics, principles – whatever you call them – are central to building a club that is successful not just on the field, but as community centric organisation that is also trusted with helping young people grow and develop.
It’s important that we all work to empower girls to use their strengths, their skills, their talents to reach their full potential. To encourage them to pursue their goals, follow their dreams and live happy, fulfilled lives. It’s also important that we prepare them for the challenges, and train them to look for alternative routes to success if one pathway gets blocked.
