Colbert: Mother’s Day and sports

As I type this, it is Mother’s Day and my thoughts are more on family than sports. However, there is an intersection between the two.

For example, I am in Utah this weekend to watch my granddaughter in a hockey tournament.

I was invested in a particular activity back home that I look forward to every year, but the chance to enter into family time took precedence over that. Perhaps, I have been influenced by the commitment shown by so many of you toward your kids and grandkids at sporting events and the priority set on being supportive.

It can be behind-the-scenes support. There are all kinds of mothers that have put together scrapbooks from newspaper clippings of their children.

I often see them at graduation parties and am proud to have a byline on some of the articles. However, with newspapers shrinking, scrapbooks are harder to put together.

Even as I trundle off to cover a sport, my mother still has my best interest at heart. An example is last week before the Ogle County track meet. It was a chilly Tuesday afternoon and just as she did 60 years earlier to me, she wanted to make sure I was properly bundled up for the elements.

We have to love our moms.

It was Senior Night at that meet and like most Senior Nights, I’ve always enjoyed seeing the parents of the athletes. By the time a kid is in their senior year, dad and mom have invested a ton of resources into helping them get that far.

Do parents occasionally become overzealous in their pursuit of sports for their kids? Yes and some would say I fit that category for traveling 1,300 miles for a youth hockey game.

So, family involvement can be seen in many ways. One school of thought is to let kids organize their own games and adults stay out of it, such as when neighborhood Wiffle Ball games were the norm and parents didn’t have as much free time nor the inclination to run interference.

I don’t know where the happy medium is. Whether a game is won or lost, there is plenty of joy to be found in the whole family being together in sports. That’s not the case with so many other things in life that can tear a family apart.

Here’s a great example of the impact of family upon high school sports.

A long-time friend of mine from Rochelle, Joe Lodico, finally retired from coaching at Rockford Lutheran. The reason he got started there in 1998 was because his son was coaching and asked Joe if he would help out.

When a son or daughter asks a parent for help, it’s a badge of honor. Of course, Joe jumped right into action, as he had plenty of practice at Rochelle as a youth coach and everything in between.

His background was in football, as he played for Western Illinois University. By the time he left Lutheran as a well-maintained 87-year old, he coached soccer, bowling, wrestling, track and field, basketball, softball, football and golf.

It was bizarre how often I would run into him at BNC events. About the only thing he didn’t coach was competitive cheerleading.

Private schools are different than public schools in attracting qualified coaches. Places like Lutheran tend to have more turnover and when shortfalls in the coaching ranks arose, the administration knew they had a bonafide fill-in with Joe.

If he didn’t know a sport, he would learn it.

He’d do it with poise, excitement and dignity. He was no slouch either, as evidenced in leading the school to state trophies in golf.

As I watched an interview with him and Scott Leber, Joe talked of the kids at Lutheran being his family.

So, with him coming to Lutheran because of a family member, Lutheran became like one big family to him.

If we could channel the relationship Joe developed through coaching sports at Lutheran into the rest of the world, we might all be one big happy family.