There are three cups arranged on the kitchen counter this morning. One of them has a little plastic dog on it. Now, I don't think Logan is cup stacking, but seeing the cups made me think of it.
What's up with cup stacking? You guys know what I'm talking about, right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNG3sgk02Lc
There's some sort of company that sells "stacking cups". (No, I'm not making that up) and some sort of timer. Voila, a sport is born.
I just don't get it. I mean, in the most absolutely fundamental sense, I don't get it.
It's not like special olympics. The kids I see stacking cups all seem to have reasonably good dexterity. They don't seem like they're wearing hockey helmets to school riding the short bus. These all seem to be relatively healthy, normal kids.
But stacking cups? I could see doing it as a bar bet. Maybe as a little competition during a birthday party or something. But actually practicing it? I have to imagine these kids practice it.
It teaches virtually nothing that you would want your kid to learn from sports. It isn't teaching social skills. It's not teaching how to work with others. It isn't emphasizing physical fitness, flexibility, strength...
Even as far as "games" go, this one isn't so hot. I hate to give a shout-out to video gamers, but at least most modern video games require a little bit of thought. Most good games involve some degree of strategy.
Now, yeah, it's true that something YOU do is fascinating and interesting, but things other people do make no sense whatsoever. I used to look at the guys who lived in the gym and think, "Is that how they want to spend the rest of their lives?"... then immediately go sit in a room by myself and practice guitar for 3 or 4 hours at a pop.
Nowadays, I question whether my time was well spent. Honestly, for me right now, it boils down to something approaching a parlour trick. If a guitar just HAPPENS to be handy, and folks just HAPPEN to be standing around and I just HAPPEN to stroll over and start playing, the usual result is that people are impressed.
For my son, if he continues to play travel baseball, it'll probably be the same thing. Someday, he'll say to himself, "I wonder if I should have spent so much time playing ball." Then, once every 3 years, there'll be a softball game at the company picnic or something and he'll go 3 for 3 with 3 HR and gun down everybody while playing shortstop.
As a side note: I'm starting to think the gym rats were right. They look good 24 x 7. I only look good when I'm playing a guitar, and even that's debatable.
So, to a degree, almost anything you devote your younger years, unless you find a way to make a living at it, is going to prove to have been a waste of time in your older years.
If you're lucky, you'll get a chance every year or two to display a flash of brilliance that makes people think about you in a different light.
But what are the cup stackers going to do? They're sitting at a bar and say, "hey everybody give me 18 cups, I want to show you something"?
Or, they're at the neighborhood barbecue, and wander over to a table of unused cups and start stacking and unstacking them?
What is the reaction going to be? "Oh wow, I didn't know Drew played the piano so beautifully!" Or, "whoa, who knew that Madelaine in accounting was a wizard with a basketball?"
I think the reaction is likely to be something like, "Oh my... Joe must have OCD. Look at him over there, stacking and unstacking those cups."
Or, if they know about stacking cups as a sport, I think the reaction will be even less favorable. "Ummm... no... Joe doesn't have OCD. He's spent a considerable portion of his life doing that by choice. He thinks its a sport."
Joe finishes his dazzling display, wanders over to the group of onlookers with a self-satisfied smile. The reaction?
At best: "Ummm... that was nice, Joe."
More likely something like, "Joe... don't ever do that in front of other people again. You just embarassed me."
Or, "Joe... those were the last cups we had. Will you run to Wal-Mart and get some more. Silly me, but I didn't account for some guy having an uncontrollable urge to touch all the unused cups at the table..."
Now, I am positive that somewhere I'm going to offend the parent of a cup stacker. Yes, I realize that it takes a lot of practice. Yes, I realize that it's a wholesome activity and that at least the kids aren't doing drugs.
Honestly, though, was there NOTHING else for your kid to do? Gardening? Knitting?
These kids are actually travelling to competitions. So, seriously, you could have afforded a real hobby. Buy a snare drum. Go get them some LaCrosse equipment. Heck, buy them a dart board. They may never have to pay for a drink the rest of their lives.
Sports are supposed to build self-esteem, but I'm not so sure this one is succeeding on that dimension. It really smacks of trying to find a sport that is so incredibly obscure and wierd that your kid can be a champion simply by showing up.
(Not that I'm making a value judgement on that. I was once my church's ping pong champion because the only two people who showed up were me and my cousin, Charlie. He took second place. I still have the ribbon. He probably does, too.)
I know where you're coming from. You saw that girl in school who is the state champion at dressage and yeah, you thought that was a bunch of BS because the girl's primary accomplishment was having parents who could afford to own, train and stable a dressage horse.
You got to thinking, "Well... sheesh... I can't afford a horse, but my kid should be a state champion, too."
Thing is, riding a horse actually does involve some rather obvious skill. It's actually a sport. In fact, it's one of the world's oldest sports. Like all the truly great sports, its origin was in perfecting a skill necessary in trying to kill things.
Yes, it's BS that one 12 year old in middle school, primarily by virtue of being filthy rich, gets to be the "state champion". Because, you know, filthy rich people need a few more advantages in life.
The cup stacking thing? Honestly, it's got the sport and competition value of taking a phillip screwdriver, and screwing and unscrewing 2 drywall screws into and out of a block of 2 x 4.
Actually, it's not quite as good, if you ask me, since being able to drive drywall screws is actually a skill with some professional application later in life.
The dressage champ is going to have all these childhood photos of when she was skinny and looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor in Jodhpurs and Wellies.
Your kid is, at best, going to have a youtube video where they're hunched over a table stacking cups.
This is not the stuff, "Whoa, look what I found from when grandpa was a kid!" is made of.
Post Scriptum:
The criticisms of this blog post are already coming in.
My sister in law, Laura, says that she used to have to square dance in gym class, so cup stacking is at least not as bad as that.
My response is:
From a middle school boy's perspective, at least in square dancing, you got to touch a girl. I'm thinking cup stacking has the opposite effect.
Okay, maybe we could compromise. I think it should have an aspect where it teaches something they can show off later in life. So, include a ping pong ball and teach the kids beer pong.
Call it "milk-pong" or something. But send them to college with a skill that pays the bills.
My cousin's husband, Clay, who is one of the blessed few people I know who were so proficient at a childhood waste-of-time that he has earned a living at it for over a decade, now, said that if I am going to gripe about wastes of time, that my I won't ever have time to write about anything else.
To which I had to point out that my blog is almost always about wastes of time and that I really don't ever write about anything else. I mean, not to kick myself too hard here, but I'm the guy who writes about zero-turn lawn mowers and analyzes youth baseball bats, right?
Okay, I just looked up the sport of "speed stacking" on Wikipedia and the first two paragraphs had me laughing so hard I cried. Literally.
However, there are apparently, benefits to participation in this sport:
[A third group (Gibbons, E., Hendrick, J. L., & Bauer, J. State University of New York, Cortland) studied the effects on the reaction time and confirmed Udermann rather than Hart, stating "that the results agreed with the claims made by Speed Stacks, in which practicing cup stacking can improve reaction time." [16] They also state "Even 60 minutes of cup stacking practice can improve reaction time in young adults."]
60 minutes? What? Are they kidding? That's like saying that eating 72 tons of brussel sprouts will reduce your risk of cancer. I mean, at a certain point, the benefits become irrelevant if what you have to do to get them is insufferable.
And what do they mean by "reaction time"? Like the kids who are sport stacking are now invincible in dodgeball? Color me skeptical.
[The Department of Kinesiology of the Towson University, Towson, MD studied the influence of participation in a 6-week bimanual coordination program on Grade 5 students' reading achievement with Sport Stacking being the bimanual activity. A significant increase was found for the experimental group on Comprehension skills, proving that Sport Stacking may improve students' reading comprehension skills, regardless of sex.]
I would think that any benefits of sport stacking would necessarily have to be "regardless of sex" because if you had any regard for sex at all, this is the last thing on earth you'd ever do.
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