Play Ball! 5 Tips for Navigating the Spring Sports Season with your Co-Parent

The onset of the spring sports season can be quite a transition for any family, let alone a two-home family, and the Co-Parent Collective is here to help you get through it! Whether it’s signing up for a sport or activity that occurs across both parents’ time, deciding who gets to attend practices and games, or navigating post-game snacks and celebrations, we’ve got you covered with some helpful tips so you can get back to focusing on what matters most: your kids!

Communicate early and clearly
As soon as your child gets their schedule, upload it to your shared family calendar (and if you don’t have one of those, now is a good time to start!). It’s important for co-parents to recognize how practices, games, and tournaments will cross parenting time and impact everyone’s schedules. Urgency creates conflict, so the sooner you and your co-parent can get on the same page about carpools, snacks, practices, and all the other logistics, the smoother things will go for the entire family.

Evaluate the schedule
Do you need to ask your co-parent to switch any games or practices? Is there a carpool system that can be arranged? Remember, your child is the top priority—not making sure that you and your co-parent are doing exactly the same amount of work.

Keep your child’s comfort top of mind
Even though every practice and game can feel important and exciting for you and your child, it might not be in their (or your) best interest for their divorced parents to attend every single team event.

Think about how your child might feel about both of you being present for these occasions, both big and small. A weekly soccer game is clearly different from the state tournament. As challenging as it might be to miss some games, you need to consider whether potential conflict between you and your co-parent will overshadow your child’s event.

Sometimes it can be helpful to envision how your child might remember these events in 5, 10, or 20 years. Are they going to remember how both their parents came to support them? Or will their happy memory of scoring the winning goal be overshadowed by their parents’ shouting match in the parking lot after the game? Keep bringing your focus back to your child’s overall best interest and well-being before you feel tempted to unleash your feelings about your co-parent on the sidelines.

Set up a protocol
If you and your co-parent aren’t at a place yet where you can comfortably be together on the sidelines, it’s a good idea to create a protocol so everyone knows what to expect on game days.

A protocol can be as simple as determining when the off-duty parent will arrive and depart, how the on-duty parent will facilitate the child saying hello to the off-duty parent, and when the off-duty parent will leave. At really big events (e.g., state tournaments, championship matches, belt advancement ceremonies, end-of-year recitals, and graduations), both parents could take a picture together with the child so they will always have that memory—and evidence that both their parents love them and are willing to put them first time and time again.

Find ways to regulate yourself
These situations can be really difficult. Seeing your co-parent bring their new partner to your child’s game for the first time, missing your child scoring their first goal, or not getting to be the first one to give your kid a big hug after their grand slam can all be challenging and disappointing. Make sure you have ways to regulate your emotions before, during, and after the event. Some suggestions include: coming up with a mantra to help you get through the moment, finding a friend from the team to attend with, listening to music before or after the event, practicing deep breathing, or breaking the game into smaller parts so the entire match feels like more manageable sections rather than one long event.