When youth sports gets hard, it’s no surprise that kids are tempted to quit. Nobody likes facing difficulty and through 22 years of being a sports mom, there were numerous occasions when our kids were discouraged and even if they didn’t say it, we knew they were toying with the idea of quitting mid-season.

There was one particular day when my high school daughter came home from varsity volleyball practice, obviously distraught. As a libero who’d fought for the starting spot on varsity in her junior year, she was excited to finally have achieved her goal in the early weeks of her senior season. Or so she thought.