19 May 09 Sportzstats: Ugly parenting in the palm of your hand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txWCPNuJdzs

I saw an ad for something called “Sportzstats” on TV today. Essentially, Sportzstats are handheld statistics counter that have been produced for a variety of sports so that parents can keep track of their kids’ statistics.

My immediate thought was – why?

All my memories of Tee-Ball as a child involve nothing of my tallies of home runs, batting averages and RBIs, and everything of the mildly-autistic weirdo in my team falling asleep at centre field. Surely something like this entirely misses the point of junior sports? Said sports are nowhere near important enough to record statistics for – have any of you ever seen an under-11’s hockey game? It’s like a cutlass fight between opposing forces of gibbons who’ve been heavily sedated, woken up, injected with noradrenaline, kicked in the testicles and then let loose on a local reserve. The basic tenets of underage sports have always been participation, enjoyment  and merciless taunting of the uncoordinated and socially incapable amongst us. This continual erosion of the distincition between childhood and adulthood truly sickens me.

Further to this, the Sportzstats allows parents to extend the “living vicariously through my idiot child” experience by uploading their stats onto the internet for others to see. God knows I’ve been kept in the dark long enough about what Jayden McTaggart’s contested possession count was like in the 2008 Metro-West U/9 grand final. Can you imagine the amount of deadbeat parents who will be clamouring to show everyone at the office just how dominant their lummox son was in the lineouts at the weekend? Or the scores of poor co-workers who will have to make some passable attempt at seeming impressed?

If these pathetic dullards insist on the continued (and unnecessary) exhibition of the minutiae of their childrens lives, they could at least have the sense of fairness to share some of their less desirable traits too. Perhaps a weekly report on the number of times their kid wet the bed? A bi-annual audit of every time their son has been caught applying his mum’s rouge? Repeated updates on every instance of the child screaming “she’s not my mum and I don’t want to stay here on the weekends any more!”?

I think the concept isn’t entirely without merit, however; I’ve refined it somewhat to create a device I like to call “BeatStatz.” Basically, every time the child witnesses an act of spousal abuse, it is tabulated and then forwarded to the local police via an alarm that plays an excerpt of Suzanne Vega’s “Luka.” Moronic parents can then regale their cellmates with tales of how their 8 year-old is going to be the next James Hird (once he gets over the eczema and love of theatre.)

Tags: parents, sport, sportszstats, statistics