Sports are for Entertainment?

Author's note: I write about my experience growing up in childhood athletics and finding ways to bring that lifestyle back into my adult life. I also write about the difficulties of finding adult athletic communities and dying sports.

What do you first think of when you hear "sports"?

I think of childhood, when I went to swim practice 6 times a week. Monday through Fridays after school and Saturday mornings. I think of swim meets on the weekends. I was a competitive swimmer up through 8th grade with the year-round swim team NCAC. I was never the fastest swimmer, but it was what I arguably spent most of my childhood around outside of school.

I also think of figure skating – taking skating lessons once a week from Basic 1 through Basic 8, driving to the ice rink that had USA Figure Skating-affiliated classes. I remember hearing that passing Basic 4 was when some students could choose to switch to ice hockey. I never fell when I was taking classes back then, but I also didn't spend any extra time practicing – I wasn't that obsessed, but I did like going fast around the rink.

Then, I think about the sports I learned about through PE classes and sometimes the TV: basketball, soccer, football, volleyball, baseball. In middle school, some of my friends would play more competitive school sports: field hockey, lacrosse were among them. There were seasons for different sports. This also continued in high school. When I heard about high school competitive swimming, I was always curious about how those swimmers who were also on my year-round swim team would balance the practices. Those who did swim team year-round were definitely more competitive from what I could tell.

I remember one of my swim coaches telling us that when we grew up, we might not stay as swimmers. It was a period of life to cherish and spend as much time with as possible. Some of my favorite moments were from swim practice even though I absolutely disliked dry-land workouts (this basically just means exercises done on land). I remember one swim practice where the coach drew an intersection and 4 cars on each side and asked us to say which way the cars should turn or move to not crash into each other – the answer which I gave was to turn right. To this day, I still don't know why my coach was quizzing us about traffic logic.

From Childhood Sports to "Staying Fit" as an Adult

It would be about 9 years, combining both high school and university, before I went back into sports – recreationally. During those 9 years, I spent my time doing marching band (arguably also a competitive sport, when applicable). I did do one semester of Taekwondo (relevant later) but wasn't able to commit.

Despite my time away from swimming and ice skating, I still looked back fondly on the memories and knew all of the lingo that the swimmers and skaters would use. Any time I heard someone mention "JOs" or "time standards", I knew they were a swimmer. I would bring up "3-turns" and "crossovers" while at public skate sessions when the pep band would have the opportunity to skate with the hockey team, and it felt like I was an outsider speaking about a past I used to have, being unable to fully demonstrate what I was talking about.

In 2022, I learned about rock climbing which was also a competitive sport. I met friends who would play badminton together, which also happened to have a competitive scene. There were no badminton courts where I grew up in NC, but the Bay Area seemed to have more than enough. I explored ways to "stay fit". At first, I did get a YMCA membership to swim, but I'd get annoyed at the pool policies because no diving was allowed because the pool was too shallow. I really wanted to feel the sensation of diving off the block again.

I even tried Irish Dance, a cousin to tap dancing, which tested my endurance, stamina, foot agility, and leg power. The only way I was able to consistently workout I realized was to aim for mastery. On Instagram, I came across MovementByDavid and HybridCalisthenics. I ended up following their flexibility/mobility stretches to do elephant walks, as well as, both active and passive hamstring stretches to finally be able to touch my toes. I don't think I was that flexible as a kid either, so it was a milestone for me to train that flexibility.

In addition to mobility exercises, I also bought the workout book and the gymnastics rings + bars that HybridCalisthenics was selling in order to do calisthenics. He had a really good progression for absolute beginners to advanced exercises for both squats, leg raises, push ups, pull ups, and mobility exercises like backbends and twists. Doing these, I was able to make a lot of progress towards a pistol squat as well as finally being able to do a proper push up. I enjoyed how flexible it was to anyone's skill level.

Something was missing though.

It wasn't that I was missing accountability, I was missing structure. When work became engaging, I started slacking in my workout schedule. This went on for a few months until now. As I've written in my Q3 blog, I recently decided to commit to training Taekwondo (TKD) again. Finding this dojang was really hard. Many of the recommended spots near me weren't for adults or had closed/became inactive. I really wanted to find a reputable opportunity to train with people who knew their stuff and weren't going to hand out belts easily.

After showing up to my first real class at Pure Taekwondo with Grandmaster Carlo, I was instantly brought back to my life as a swimmer growing up. I felt an odd sense of nostalgia towards that time of my life, and I missed being tired from physical activity while being guided by a coach. I had almost forgotten what that felt like. Initially, I was trying TKD as a way to relieve my frustrations from work while getting an incentive to improve my flexibility. However, I didn't expect to feel a rush of emotions from the intensity of the class.

Adult Athletic Environments are Rare

When I told friends that I was starting TKD, they would ask, "What's the commitment like?" For non-athletes, it might seem a bit unusual to intentionally dedicate a majority of your week to an activity that most adults would engage in "whenever they were free". I chose to invest 3x/week in TKD to get back to baseline athleticism without deprioritizing some of my other outside-of-work projects.

Even when I was doing Irish Dance, it was also a competitive studio. I would attend classes with some of the older high schoolers as well as adults. I'd overhear conversations the instructors would have about how to delegate classes and find new instructors. It seemed like it was a lot of effort to scale at quality.

Most sports are seen as a way for children to gain motor skills and do an extracurricular for a well-rounded youth. Only a few would continue into university or even go pro. The financial incentives aren't there for athletes. Not every competition has prize money. A lot of these events require sponsorships from businesses or some other type of funding. Athletes in the more popular sports become celebrities who are sponsored by brands and end up as part-time entertainers doing interviews, variety shows, and other content. Athletes in the less popular sports, often end up needing to do other jobs on the side to be able to pay for competition and training even though they may compete on the world's stage.

For someone who craves mastery and enjoys the process, I feel sad when watching less popular sports die out as the locations where people would gather to practice and learn go out of business. I recently came across an artistic roller skater, Natalie Chen, post about her sadness about the dying sport. Because professional sports – where one's mastery has its chance to shine– needs watch time and an audience to be monetized, it's essentially a form of entertainment. And because sports are a form of entertainment, not only is it competing against all the other sports, but it's also competing against all the other forms of entertainment which include the performing arts (music, theatre, film, etc.).

I've seen some coaches start to post content on Instagram and YouTube to expand their reach and share their teaching to a broader audience, so maybe the way to keep a sport alive is to create entertaining content around it. To share it with the internet audience so that someone may be curious or inspired to spend some time to learn it and carry it forward in their own communities.