The Year I Became a Sports Dad

This week, as we near the end of 2024, the writers and editors of KQED Arts & Culture are reflecting on One Beautiful Thing from the year.

I never expected that I would become a sports dad. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I’d long ago given up on the idea: The gods bestowed my wife and me with two smart, lovely girls of moderate hand-eye coordination, more inclined to hide away in their room for hours with a Rubik’s cube or a stack of comic books than engage me in a game of catch. My youngest, bless her heart, is about to take the beginners’ swim class for something like the 17th time. She’ll probably take it an 18th time too.

In other words, they’re very much their father’s daughters.

So I wasn’t quite prepared, earlier this fall, when the 13-year-old decided to sign up for skateboard lessons, and when the eight-year-old tried out for — and made — the youth climbing team at the local bouldering gym. Suddenly I’d joined the ranks of all the other soccer moms and gymnastics dads shuttling the kids to endless weekend and after-school practices. Buying high-protein granola bars in bulk. Filming little cellphone videos from the sidelines to share in the family group chat. Shouting inanities like, “If you aren’t falling down ALL THE TIME, you’re probably not trying hard enough!” (Hearing all this, a friend asked me, “When did you become such a tiger parent?” About three months ago, apparently.)

The thing no one ever tells you about sports dadding, though, is that sometimes you actually have to participate in said sport(s) yourself. By now I’ve given so many lectures about the importance of taking risks and trying new things that it only seemed right for me to swallow a dose of my own medicine. And so, during one of our early skatepark outings, the teen taught me how to jump onto the board with both feet. On totally flat ground, I managed to balance myself for about three seconds before the skateboard kicked out from under me and sent me tumbling to the concrete — and that was that. (I know the limits of middle age; I’m not trying to end up in the hospital with a shattered hip.)

At least at the bouldering gym, you fall on a padded mat. And now, monthly father-daughter climbing sessions have become part of our routine.

I never tried rock climbing when I was young and reasonably fit, but I’d always thought of it as a sport for thin outdoorsy types who were incredibly lithe of limb. I am…not that. These past months, I’ve often stood in front of even the simplest boulder problems (as the color-coded climbing routes are called) with a mixture of sheer hilarity and terror. What do you mean I have to contort my arms and legs into that ungodly position? Just whomst, exactly, do you think I am?

I have become intimately familiar with the way gravity hits different in your mid-40s — with all the unlikely angles at which this old and heavy, half-decrepit body of mine can come crashing down onto the mat. Or, in my prouder moments, the way I wheeze my way up to the top, forearms burning, only to spend the next two days bed-ridden with a thrown-out back.

All of this is the source of much merriment for my eight-year-old, who has taken to the sport like she was born to do it — light as air as she tip-taps her feet from boulder to boulder or, on the steepest-angled walls, hangs upside-down, like Spiderman, for longer than seems possible. On the way to practice each Monday afternoon, she is as excited as she ever gets, with her monkey-shaped chalk bag strapped over her shoulder, her pink unicorn water bottle filled to the brim. She is ready to CLIMB.

Which isn’t necessarily to say it’s come easily for her: She is by far the littlest member of the team, which means sometimes she simply can’t reach the starting handholds, not even with a running start. She’s also always been the most cautious one in our family of careful rule followers — wary of new people and new experiences, occasionally prone to worrying herself to tears over school projects a full week before they’re due.

You’ll have to forgive me, then, for the way I teared up when one of her coaches pulled me aside, a couple months in, to tell me how much he’d enjoyed having her on the team — how she was a very careful, deliberate climber, and also very, very brave. Her sweet, exuberant coaches — some of them still just college students themselves — who have her doing multiple sets of burpees and ab crunches, and who are also so incredibly gentle with her, kneeling down to face level to give her “beta” (climber-speak for strategic advice) on tough boulder problems. Who model for all the kids a kind of non-toxic masculinity that I myself am still aspiring toward.

About a month ago, we drove up to Santa Rosa for my daughter’s first formal climbing competition, and I watched as she tried to ascend a particularly tricky wall — the handholds set maybe just an inch too far apart for someone her height to reach. Still, she scrambled up and up, and I almost started to cry again when I heard the booming chorus of voices — her coach and her older teammates — ring out: “Come on, you’ve got this. YOU’VE GOT THIS! Don’t give up. You’re almost there!”

Call it the peak of sports dad–dom: All I could do, my heart in my throat, was join in.