Chief among the burdens weighing upon the weary sports parent'worse than the endless commutes, the exorbitant fees, the obnoxious parents on the other team'is the sense that your every decision has the power to make or break your child's future. Should your 11-year-old show up to her elementary-school holiday concert, even if it means missing a practice with the elite soccer team to which you've pledged 100 percent attendance' What if this turns out to be the fork in the road that consigns her to the athletic scrap heap' These are heavy decisions'at least they are for me, a soccer dad who happens to have spent years writing about the science of athletic success. Making it to the pros, the conventional wisdom says, is a consequence of talent and hard work. Best-selling books have bickered over the precise ratio'whether, say, 10,000 hours of practice trumps having the so-called sports gene. But the bottom line is that you need a sufficient combination of both. If you're talented...
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