How to Honor God in Youth Sports

Do your kids play sports? In 2023, 70 million children participated in some form of team sports.¹ I loved playing sports as a kid, and our older two boys have thoroughly enjoyed playing soccer, basketball and baseball.

Since our family enjoys sports, I would consider myself to be a sports dad. As we’ve participated in sports the last few years, I’ve come across several types of sports dads:

• Vicarious Dad: He lives out his athletic dreams through his child, which usually translates into high intensity, low patience, and over-competitiveness.
• Sideline Coach Dad: The backseat driver of youth sports, he believes he is the best coach for his child, even if he’s not the coach. Often his “coaching” intimidates his child and contradicts the actual coach’s gameplan.
• Critical Dad: Nothing makes this dad happy, so he berates referees, challenges the coaching decisions, and criticizes the players, especially his own kid. His child’s performance is never good enough.
• Golden Boy Dad: He complains about everyone and everything except his child. His child can do no wrong, and he can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t see that.

These are just a few of the stereotypes that exist in a Little League near you! But is this how a Christian sports dad ought to behave?

Absolutely not!

The root issue with all these sports dads is selfishness. They all use their child’s athletic opportunities to satisfy themselves and draw attention away from the kids to self.

God calls Christian dads to be different. Our identity is not found in our child’s sports—our identity comes through our relationship with Jesus. Christian sports dads must keep the big discipleship picture in mind and remember that kids sports fits into their overall goal of raising their children to love and follow Jesus.

Christian sports dads should view their children’s sports as another opportunity to accomplish their mission of making disciples, both within their own home and among the people around them.

That’s the perspective of a God-honoring sports dad. To help yourself honor the Lord as you cheer on your athlete, remember these three questions.

#1 Will my behavior (actions, attitude, words) help or hurt my testimony?

If glorifying God is your aim, then even the way we cheer matters. How easy it is to get caught up in the excitement and action of the sports game, only to say something that hurts your testimony!

Kids sports can be a great tool to connect with unsaved families. We should build relationships with unsaved people to befriend them and seek to share Christ with them. But we can act in such a way as spectators to turn people away from the gospel. Will the people around you be more or less likely to accept an invitation to church based on your behavior?

This principle also applies to your own family. Will your child playing be embarrassed by your behavior? Will your wife sitting next to you look for an excuse to get away from you? Your testimony is too valuable to throw away at a missed call.

#2 Will my behavior (actions, attitude, words) build or weaken my relationship with my child?

You can tell a lot about a parent’s relationship with their child by the way they cheer them on from the sideline. It is not worth weakening your relationship with your child because they didn’t play up to your standard. I’ve had to bite my tongue several times and remind myself that my relationship with my son is far more valuable than yelling some advice from the sideline!

Don’t burn bridges with your child; you shouldn’t have to apologize to them after the game because of your behavior. They don’t need to perform well for you to love them or praise them. After all, God doesn’t base His love for us on our performance!

A little perspective here might be helpful. Even if your child is the star athlete, scholarships aren’t on the line in Upwards Sports or 6–7-year-old Little League. Only about 2-3% of high school athletes receive a scholarship, and about 2% of those athletes turn pro.

That means, out of 2,500 high school athletes, only 50 will receive a Division I or II scholarship, and only one of those DI or DII athletes will go pro. Those are low odds, so accept your child for who they are. It’s good to lovingly push them to improve, but if you don’t work with them in between games, no amount of yelling at them in the game will miraculously enable them to play better. They don’t know what they don’t know.

#3 Will my behavior (actions, attitude, words) model grace or the flesh?

We model grace by actively displaying the fruit of the Spirit and treating others the way Christ treats us. Encouragement, not criticism; patience, not frustration; thankful, not complaining. You may need others to help you evaluate yourself because it can be hard to be realistic with yourself or even view yourself accurately (hint: your wife will probably tell you what you need to hear!)

We should model grace in winning and in losing, even if others around you are losing their minds!

Last baseball season, my son’s teammate hit a long ball into the outfield. He rounded third as the relay throw came toward home. It was a bang-bang play, but since I was sitting down the first baseline with some other parents, we clearly saw that he was safe. But the umpire saw it differently—he called, ‘Out!’

Needless to say, many people on our part of the field did not react well. The head coach blew up, yelled at the umpire (who couldn’t have been older than 15), stomped around, and lost his cool. Several parents screamed at the umpire and told them to make the right call. You can probably picture how all this went down.

How would you have reacted? By God’s grace I didn’t snap at the umpire (though I wanted to). But that little incident reminded me of how important it is to model grace and not allow the flesh to rule my response. A whole season’s worth of relationships could have been destroyed in just a few seconds.

As we attend our children’s sporting events, we can honor God with our words, actions and attitudes and be God-honoring sports dads.