Listen to the Coach

I married a jock, so I got to spend huge globs of time during my children’s growing up years at tennis matches, baseball games, basketball tournaments and soccer games. It never failed that those contests would get tense, and parents and other spectators would get worked up enough to yell suggestions to the players on the field/court. I could count on someone hollering “Shoot, shoot” when the kid with the ball seemed oblivious to the fact that the buzzer was about to end the half. Fans yelled “Home” when the player on third base didn’t make a move to score after an outfielder dropped the ball.

Even more distracting were the fans from the opposing team who would intentionally scream out directions to mislead our team’s players—the fake countdown to force a shot, the declaration “I got it!” to confuse our infield. All of this was annoying to my husband who coached many of these teams. He was the only one the players needed to listen to—something lots of parents refused to acknowledge. But it makes perfect sense. Garry was the one who taught and practiced the plays the kids were executing. None of the parents, and certainly no one on the opposing team knew what the original call was. All of their recommendations were at best useless.

What does this have to do with homeschooling? If you have been reading this blog lately, you saw the response to criticism discussed of homeschoolers’ socialization last week. That kind of talk can be just as distracting to us as homeschool parents as a rude fan yelling “I got it.” We have a Coach, the One who called the original play. All of these other voices weren’t there during our “practices”—those times when we wrestled in prayer over the decision to take on our children’s education.

My husband used to instruct his players to ignore all the voices in the stands, even the friendly ones, and focus on what he told them to do. I think the Lord would tell us to do the same.