Years ago, as a youth athlete I went to soccer practice and that was it. I looked with envy as the other players engaged in pick-up games on the weekend and off days. I had always heard that was the best way to improve my skill level, but I never joined in. It was just too intimidating. I didn’t know how to break in and play with the boys and sometimes grown men. What if I made a mistake? What if they all got mad at me? Or worse, what if they laughed me off the field? I let my fears of what other people would think keep me from playing and I held myself back from my true potential as an athlete.
What I felt then ties into this idea of surveillance. This is the notion that other people are looking at me, and more often than not is associated with the fear of their judgement. The fear of surveillance doesn’t end with your awkward teenage years. For me these days, play has shifted in to general physical activity and exercise. Instead of the eyes of other players, at this point in my life that surveillance fear shows up as gym anxiety. But in this era, there is the added fear of “What if there is someone filming my mistakes to criticize me on the internet?” And I am certainly not alone. A lot of adults feel this way. After all, many gyms have as part of their marketing push that they are a judgement free zone.
Thinking about these experiences can us understand and start unravel what we can do to fix youth sports and bring more kids into the game. Here is what you can do to help address the surveillance fear when you work with young people and when you try to get more involved in physical activity yourself.
Too many of us, kids included, are sitting on the sideline because we are afraid of what people will think. To combat that, we need to build cultures of support where we are free to make mistakes and show up as we are. That is so much easier to write than do. But the first step is recognizing that the problem exists. And then we can move toward trying to fix it.
If you have been able to overcome this fear yourself, feel free to leave advice for how you were able to do so.
The Sideline Fix 
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