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Sportskind, USA Today
It’s a drive most of us sports parents have made. Not just the loss, but the plays that contributed to it, are getting scrutinized. There is regret, and some despair. The quiet of the ride is amplified by the depth the defeat has rendered.
“I’m kind of in shock,” one passenger says to another.
“Yeah, me too,” the other replies.
Some time passes.
“It’s tough to host a playoff game and not win.”
“So close.”
There is comfort in those last words, almost as if they are coming from a parent. They are, but these aren’t sports parents in the traditional sense. They are parents, yes, but one of them is an NFL quarterback, Kirk Cousins; the other is his wife, Julie.
They are driving home through the dark Minnesota January night. Cousins’ Vikings have just lost in a playoff upset to the New York Giants in the NFC wild card round. It’s Cousins’ third playoff loss as an NFL starter in four tries. The QB points out how the team’s 13 wins during the regular season now seem insignificant.
“You’re back to nothing,” he says to his wife, who has been listening intently as he verbally decompresses.
Their SUV moves from the highway to a snow-covered neighborhood. Cooper, their young son who has gone with them to the game, is most likely asleep in the car. As they pull up to their home, which is adorned with Christmas lights, Kirk is still processing the game out loud. His wife softly interrupts him.
“Oh, I forgot it’s trash night.”
We get a window – in fact, a quite expansive picture – into the Cousins’ home life in Episode 7 of the Netflix docuseries, “Quarterback.” Through this window, we can gain much insight about parenting.
Though the Cousins are relatively new parents – Cooper is only 5 and his brother, Turner, whom we soon meet, is 4 – Kirk and Julie can also instruct us as sports parents. Here are three lessons I took from Episode 7 of “Quarterback”:
1. Keep perspective on every game and event, no matter how important it seems
The interactions between the Cousins and their children are so real, we almost forget cameras are rolling on them as we watch. Kirk seems to forget, too, until, for a brief moment, he composes himself when he gets out of his car in the garage.
“Alrighty,” he says, as he lets out a sigh.
He walks past his dog, who has come to greet him, and into the house. He wipes his feet on a mat and walks through an open baby gate and up the stairs. We see happy pictures of the family – and the dog – on the wall.
We find Cousins in a bathroom with Julie as Cooper takes a bath. Turner, who watched the game at home with a caregiver, sits beside them in his pajamas.
“Turner that was awesome,” Cousins says, “The fact that you let Cooper go to the game in your place … ”
Cousins rubs his son’s shoulder.
“Tomorrow, I’ll let him go again,” Turner says in a high-pitched voice.
“Do you know if we won or lost?” Julie asks him.
“We won,” he says, looking up at parents for approval.
“No, we lost,” Kirk says, his face a little downcast.
From the bathtub, we hear Cooper: “Yeah, we lost 24-31 … we got 24 and the other team got 31. That’s why we lost.”
These are moments you treasure with your children and the Cousins realize that, even in the aftermath of a painful loss.
They are moments that give you a keen awareness of what you have and what is truly important, even when you’re a world class athlete.
“Do you wanna go read with Dad?” Julie asks Turner.
2. Don’t be that mom or dad
There are times we should cherish as parents when it comes to our kids’ sports, too. Cousins, who will be 35 when this coming NFL season starts, is on the back end of his career. But he has practically his whole life as a father – and a sports dad – ahead of him.
It’s a sensation Tom Dolan, a former gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer and now a sports dad of four kids, has realized. During a recent podcast with ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, Dolan related a story of how a parent can feel pure exhilaration through watching his or her kid compete in sports.
His then-8-year-old daughter was learning the breast stroke and hadn’t won one race all summer under the burden of who her dad was. But she steadily improved every week and then broke through at her championships. Her win came right before the Washington, D.C.-area country club hosting the event named the championship trophy after her father.
Dolan was horrified of the pressure he thought she would feel to watch this presentation before she swam.
“You have to have fun,” he said to her as he walked past her following his presentation. “That’s why we’re here.”
“OK, Dad,” she said.
She won the race, dropping a second and a half off her time.
“This beats the freaking Olympics,” Dolan said to his father, who was next to him.
“It’s not because she won,” he said. “It’s because she tackled it. … and whether she had gotten eighth or first, to see that effort and the look on her face, man, that beats anything I’ve ever done.”
There are kid sports episodes, of course, that are much less enjoyable. Dolan has also has found himself standing on a fence line watching a travel soccer tryout for his daughter. There were eight fields and a number of tryouts going on at once.
Dolan noticed a nearby dad “screaming like his son is kicking to win the freaking World Cup.”
“I can’t say I’ve never seen it before because I have,” he told Van Pelt. “But I’ve never seen it for 8U girls travel soccer. How are we even doing this other than, just, it’s a money grab?”
Dolan didn’t say anything then, but he couldn’t contain himself when a head coach during his daughter’s 9U basketball team was getting similarly worked up. Girls were crying as they came out of the game. Dolan, who stands over 6-foot-5, walked over and put his arm around the smaller man.
“No one had fun today,” Dolan told him. “I don’t know your background, I don’t know who you are. I’m just telling you nobody had fun. And I’m just gonna share with you that I was fortunate enough to compete in athletics at a high level and this ain’t it right here, my man. This isn’t how you get there.”
A trip back to the Cousins home provides another path.
COACH STEVE: How to balance winning and having fun at an away travel sports tournament
3. Don’t look too far ahead
After bath time, Cousins and Turner are sitting in a chair with a book.
“Why does the NFL have so many rules against hitting quarterbacks?” Cousins reads from Sports Illustrated For Kids’ “Big Book of Why.”
“In the NFL, the quarterback is by far the most important player. An injury to the quarterback can sink a team’s entire season.”
Turner works on a pacifier as his father reads.
“Did you know the season-ending knee injury that Tom Brady suffered in the first game of the 2008 season led to a ban on hitting quarterbacks below the knee?”
Cousins puts on his own finishing touch:
“And Dad is forever grateful.”
The screen soon goes dark. They are now in the bedroom.
You hear Cousins singing (in a friendly voice) and the praying.
“Alright, Buddy, you good?” he says after they are finished. “Sleep well. Love you.”
(Warning: If you are a parent who is feeling nostalgic about these innocent early days of parenthood, the whole Cousins home sequence is likely to melt you.)
Cousins is a four-time Pro Bowl starting quarterback in the NFL and, yet, hours after probably the most bitter loss of his career, he has shown signs of moving on. There is another powerful lessons at play that Dolan understands, too.
“What’s so hard for parents who don’t have that advantage or perspective is understanding how freaking big the world is when it comes to athletes,” Dolan says. “Man, you’ve got summer leagues; then you’ve got other summer leagues. Then you’ve got other summer leagues on that. And guess what? That’s like, where the grass grows. That’s how low that is. Then you’ve got regionals above that, then you’ve got year-round teams.
“You’ve gotta go for another hour of laying that out until you get to the national view. And you’ve got every country that runs it that way. And so, my point is that, boy, it’s easy to say, ‘Hey that kid looks like they’ve got something,’ right? Man, you have no idea where that’s gonna go. And so I think the challenge there is to say, ‘All it needs to do is go for today’ and have that view of like, ‘Hey, just get better today,’ right?”
As Dolan says, you can’t work off the dream. You have to work off the day-to-day.
Each new day, and each new game and practice, is a one-off and an opportunity to learn. We can all take lessons from letting go and focusing on the next one.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now loving life as sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a future column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com
