1. "There Is No Mercy Rule."
If anything crystallizes the state of "elite" youth sports today, it is the ominous instructions posted on flyers throughout a cavernous warehouse hosting a 75-team regional tournament:
"THERE IS NO MERCY RULE."
It is in all-caps. It is in bold-face type. It is underlined. It is posted prominently and inescapably next to each of the half-dozen courts. The message could not be more clear -- or foreboding.
Welcome to the Flames Holiday Tournament, a youth-basketball event held last weekend in District Heights, Maryland, a mid-range jumper from Kevin Durant's childhood home -- and my first experience with a travel-team showcase as a parent/fan/spectator of my son Gabe's 4th-grade squad.
2. "That'll be $7."
The first thing a parent would notice when entering the building is the admittance fee. I get it: This event is a money-maker for the organizers. Each team has to pony up $325 to enter, but charging the parents to watch appears to be the real business model. As I hand over a $20 bill and take back my change, I make sure to set aside $7 for the following day's entrance fee -- yes, parents pay separately for each day.
The next thing that hits you is the sensory overload: The cacophony of sneaker squeaks. A barrage of referee whistles, which most kids can't tell are coming from their game or three courts over. The kaleidoscope of high-end jerseys promoting teams whose names range from the aspirational ("New World") to the intimidating ("LBA Attack").
Gabe and his teammates got their new uniforms shortly before their first game, and they were pretty sharp: green and white, Michigan State-ish. The shorts have five basketballs printed down the side. Instead of individual player names on the back (which some elementary-school squads I notice are showcasing), every jersey says "Team First," an admirable sentiment that also feels out of place here. My favorite detail is a small sponsorship on the shoulder for a local car dealer.
The top end of the spectrum is "Team Durant," the tournament's marquee team and eponymously backed by the local legend himself. They have special Nike sweatsuits and awe-inspiring uniforms, cool backpacks and, of course, incredible shoes. If they sold team T-shirts to the public, I'd probably buy one. Not unexpectedly, they play as sharp as they look. I'm initially torn between wishing we played them and so very, very glad we didn't.
Because, as soon as you get past the initial optics and turn even a little attention to the court, the other thing you notice is how awesome the other teams are -- how aggressive, how disciplined, how strategically savvy, how skilled, how full-court-press-ish -- and when you set aside the squeaks and off-court sights and gear, it is clear this is going to be a rough weekend.
3. "Is that the real score?"
That was a curious (if snide) 6th-grader from another team sometime in the middle of the second half of our team's first game. The score was something large to ... 1.
"Team Durant" was playing one court over, delivering a throttling of their own, but it felt like most of the tournament had wandered near our court to rubber-neck.
We have talked about the value of youth-sports obliteration, but there feels like a material difference between your 1st-grader on the soccer field getting his first sip of losing in sports and your 10-year-old facing off with opponents programmed to destroy.
Game 1 final score: 48-1.
Game 2 final score: 43-17.
There is no mercy rule.
4. "You got 46-6?"
I volunteered to be Gabe's team's parent at the scorers' table -- chronicler of points, fouls, time-outs and margin as the book-keeper. It kept me occupied, which was for the best. It gave me a front-row seat to the statistical evidence of the gap between our team and its opponents, which may or may not have been for the best.
It was an awkward conversation between me and the parent working the electronic scoreboard. (Always starting with a friendly, "Which kid is yours?") Every few minutes, he and I needed to check that the point total I had in the official scorebook matched what he had displayed to the players, coaches and crowd.
This reconciliation process is vastly more important during close games; when your team is losing by 10, then 25, then 50, the recurring query closer resembles self-flagellation. The other dad was clearly more uncomfortable with the margin than I was. In other contexts, we might both be grimly eyeing the floor as our kids battled for a tournament title; in this one, we pattered, finding ways to compliment each other's players. In youth sports, nothing brings parents together like pity.
The one caveat to the no-mercy rule was that if both coaches agreed -- or the refs simply saw what was going on -- they'd let the clock run down. The other dad was responsible for that final moment when he ceased to stop the clock on every whistle and let the game inexorably end. We both were grateful when the horn finally sounded and the kids walked away from their third and final game, 62-12.
5. "There IS a mercy rule."
The tournament organizers were wrong. There is a mercy rule, and it has nothing to do with the scoreboard.
It is the mercy of the moment that you finally accept the limits of the entirely normal parental default about your own child's exceptionalism, particularly as it relates to sports.
Every parent in youth sports should welcome that moment: When you fully understand that your kid likely won't be going pro, or playing in college, or maybe even suiting up for the local high school team.
You don't see it when you're watching Steph Curry or March Madness or the varsity. No, it comes into stark relief at a gym 40 miles from home, your team down on the second-half scoreboard by a margin of roughly infinity to one to a buzz-saw of a team of 10-year-olds straight out of a sneaker commercial.
If your kid was on "Team Durant" or "Attack" or "Elite" and winning games by 40, you might extend the fantasy that your child was destined for big-stage basketball greatness. But that is closer to what I'd qualify as an unmerciful ending than losing an inconsequential grade-school basketball game by 50.
Far from "no mercy rule," the mercy is real. The mercy, frankly, is the most important part.
The mercy rule is that you can position yourself and your kids to ease up -- to focus on the larger life lessons to be learned through sports, the relationships that can be forged, the fun that can be had.
My favorite moments from the weekend were off the court, and that would have been the case regardless of which side of the scoreboard our team was on: listening to Gabe's coach empathetically offer a pep talk; watching Gabe and his teammates take in other games together, just sitting on bleachers and bonding as part of a larger community of kids who simply love basketball; sneaking off with him to a nearby KFC during the lunch break.
And, finally, glancing back in the rear-view mirror on a chitchat-free highway ride home late Saturday, listening to Gabe guilelessly hum along to one of our favorite songs of 2015, Alessia Cara's "Here," which could double as an anthem for this journey, for kid and parent both: "I ask myself what am I doing here?"
You can accept the permission to let yourself and your kid -- your time, resources, emotional investment and opportunity cost -- off the hook for the entirely unmerciful (and entirely unrealistic) pressure to pursue some kind of mythical pro career for your kid, some kind of hypothetical college scholarship, some kind of faux AAU glory.
"There is no mercy rule?" So wrong.
If anything, all we've got is the mercy rule.
Dan Shanoff writes about parenting for espnW. Let's keep this conversation going at facebook.com/espnW.