Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Shorter

Shorter is puncturing a sentimental myth that modern sports culture still sells hard: that the best athletes are manufactured by parental presence, sacrifice, and sheer hours logged on the sideline. As an Olympian who came up before youth sports became a year-round industry, he’s pushing back on the idea that proximity equals development. The intent is corrective, almost preventative: stop confusing “being there” with building the conditions for a kid to thrive.

The subtext is sharper than it looks. “Supporting the child in an organized activity” isn’t code for paying travel-team fees and hovering with a stopwatch. It’s about creating access and structure without commandeering the experience. Shorter is arguing for a kind of disciplined humility: the adult’s job is to widen the runway, not steer the plane. When he says “so the child can find what they truly like to do,” he’s centering intrinsic motivation as the real performance enhancer. Elite outcomes, in his telling, are downstream of curiosity and ownership, not parental intensity.

That last phrase, “let them go,” carries the cultural critique. It calls out the anxious parenting model where every practice is an audition and every sport is a résumé line. Shorter implies that the highest-level athlete is more likely to emerge from freedom and fit than from pressure and projection. Coming from someone whose era prized self-driven grit, it lands as both advice and rebuke: organize, encourage, then get out of the way.