When Sports Becomes Your Child's Identity

I had an English teacher in seventh grade who knew that I loved basketball. We had been given a writing assignment, and she suggested that I write about the history of basketball. She was a really nice lady and a good teacher, and I’m sure she thought she was helping me find something I would enjoy writing about. But I remember being bothered by it.

I was born in the Philippines and had lived in Thailand, where I learned to speak Thai. My parents had taken us all over the world. I had been to the Sistine Chapel, the Louvre and the Alps, and had seen and experienced quite a bit for a seventh grader. I remember thinking, there’s more to me than the fact that I can shoot the ball a little bit.

I have thought about that moment over the years, particularly as a parent. There was nothing wrong with what my teacher said. She saw something I loved and was encouraging it. I have probably done the same thing hundreds of times with young athletes. When a kid is good at basketball and loves basketball, we talk to him about basketball. Other people do too. He spends hours practicing, his weekends are built around games, his friends may come from his team, and before long a pretty significant portion of his life is connected to the sport.

That can be a wonderful thing. Some of my closest friendships and best memories came from basketball. The game gave me opportunities I never could have imagined when I was a kid, and I still love it. But I also know how easily something we love can become connected to how we understand our own value.

When I was 11 years old and living in Thailand, I told my brother that I wanted to play Division I basketball at an Ivy League school and then play professionally overseas. That is exactly what happened. I went to Cornell, became captain of the basketball team, and after graduating I moved to the Philippines and played professionally for ten years. When my playing career ended, I coached professionally for another twelve.

Basketball was the one constant through almost all of my life. I had been Alex the basketball player, and then Alex the professional basketball player, and then Coach Alex. For 22 years in the Philippines, basketball was also my profession.

When COVID hit, my family happened to be visiting my parents in Wisconsin. We ended up staying, and eventually I made the decision to leave coaching. I was 46 years old, living in a city where almost all of my old friends had moved away, removed from the country where I had spent my entire professional life, and no longer doing the one thing I had always been really good at.

I had a wife I loved and three kids I wanted to be with. Leaving basketball was my decision. I had also spoken publicly about athletes finding their identity outside of sports, so none of this was something I was unaware of. It was still really hard.

My friend and co-author Kevin Dalafu had a different basketball journey, but his experience when the game ended was even more difficult. Kevin played four years of college basketball and came to the Philippines hoping to continue playing professionally. He got hurt, was newly married, and eventually decided he needed to step away from basketball and provide for his family.

Years later, he described that time in a way that I have never forgotten: “I didn’t know at the time that my identity was in basketball until I didn’t know who I was.” Kevin struggled deeply for about six months. He tried different jobs and wondered what he was supposed to do with his life. For 14 years after he stopped playing, he didn’t watch a professional basketball game.

I look at our experiences now through a different lens because we are both fathers. Most of our kids are not going to have their athletic identity challenged at 46. It may happen at 13 when they don’t make a team they expected to make. It could happen when another kid becomes the starter, or when an injury takes away a season. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all. They simply reach an age when everyone else keeps getting better and they realize they aren’t quite as good as they thought they were.

There is nothing wrong with being disappointed by any of that. If my son works hard for something and comes home crushed because it didn’t happen, I don’t want to talk him out of caring. Sports matter to our kids precisely because they care about them.

What catches my attention is when the disappointment starts changing the way a child talks about himself. Kevin once gave the example of a kid struggling with his homework on a Monday night and saying, “I suck at basketball and I can’t even do my homework anymore. What kind of person am I?” That is a different conversation.

One of the things Kevin and his wife did with their oldest son has stayed with me. Kevin found out about three weeks early that his son was going to be named MVP of his league. His son had no idea. For those three weeks, Kevin and his wife had the chance to talk about the season without the award being part of the conversation. They talked about how hard he had worked, how he had persevered and the commitment they had watched from him. Then he found out he was the MVP, and of course they celebrated that too.

I love that story because I don’t want us to become afraid of achievement. Winning an MVP is exciting. Making the team matters. Scoring 30 points feels great. Our kids should be allowed to enjoy those things without us turning every accomplishment into a parenting lesson. I just want them to hear enough from us about the rest of who they are too.

That requires knowing our kids well enough to recognize when something is changing. It is one of the reasons Kevin and I chose the name Parenting Athletes for our podcast. Parenting is a verb. There is a constancy to it that requires both quality and quantity of time. Some conversations happen because we sit down intending to have them, but a lot of what we learn about our kids comes while driving somewhere, eating together or being around when they decide to tell us something.

Basketball has been one of the great gifts of my life, and I would never want my experience to make my kids love sports less. I hope they find things they care about deeply. I hope they learn to work at something, compete, deal with disappointment and experience the satisfaction that comes when the work pays off. I also hope they always know there is more to them than the fact that they can shoot the ball a little bit.