I’m a poster boy ‘non-example’ of why you should put kids into sports early. I grew up on a tropical island with no organized sports. When I moved to Toronto my parents didn’t know that kids were put into things like soccer, baseball, and hockey. The extent of my learning sports came from playing kid-organized baseball and street hockey with friends that lived on my street. No coaches, no lessons, just stick a glove on my (wrong) hand (having only played cricket before moving to Canada) or lend me a hockey stick and I’ll do my best.

I didn’t do any organized sports beyond physical education classes until I joined the school water polo team in Grade 11. And then I was deservedly last off the bench for the whole first year because I sucked. The worst part of it was that I had a crappy swim stroke, so not only was I uncoordinated with the ball, I was the slowest person on the team.

But I loved the sport, I trained really hard, and I got to play at a fairly high level, but always as defensive player who learned to watch the play and anticipate what was happening to compensate for my slowness and lack of talent. A few quotes from different coaches:

“If air were denser than water, you would swim backwards.”

“If the pool was on a 45° angle, you’d be the fastest to the top.”

And my personal favourite:

“Dave, there are two kinds of people in this world, the talented and the hard workers… You are a hard worker!”

Yes, I was the slowest person on the team, but I trained with faster people and was forced to do swim sets where I had half or a third of the rest that everybody else would get. That just made me have incredible cardio, and allowed me to push myself and keep going when others couldn’t.

No, I didn’t have a lot of talent, but I compensated by really understanding the game. And while some hotheads would try to do more than they were capable of, I understood I had a role to play and coaches learned that they could count on me to play that role.

But it’s only the last few years that I realized that my limits and talent didn’t come from being talentless, but rather from not really having a good mind-body connection. What it comes down to is: I know what my body is supposed to do, I just don’t communicate it well to my body. A great example of this is that when I weight train, rather than really focussing on the muscle that I’m working on, I tend to compensate with my whole body. For example, if I’m trying to do a bicep curl, and I’m struggling on the final set, rather than making a good connection with my bicep what I do is I start to use my body position and shoulder muscles. I compensate with other muscles rather than connect with the muscle I’m supposed to use.

Essentially, when other kids were getting coaching and learning drills that helped them connect their body to their actions, I was at home watching tv, or playing sports without any drills or coaching to help me make that connection. Even living in Barbados, where I swam all the time, I never once had a swim lesson, never got coached, and learned to swim to survive, not to move efficiently or effectively.

I don’t regret any of my childhood, I think I had it pretty good when I compare what I had to some of the stories of my friends, but if there is one lesson I can take from this it’s to help kids find a physical activity they love and foster their physical growth through that sport or physical activity. It doesn’t matter if it’s a team sport, dance, gymnastics, martial arts, or swimming. What matters is that at a young age they have an opportunity to be coached about how to make a good connection between their minds and their physical bodies. This simple opportunity, early in life, will pay dividends for a lifetime.