🎽 Watching your kid play their first proper school sports day

Attended my daughter's first proper school sports day last week, and genuinely was not prepared for just how emotional the whole entire experience would actually turn out to be, watching her line up nervously for a simple race alongside her classmates, clearly anxious but also visibly excited in a way that honestly caught me completely off guard myself watching from the sidelines. She did not actually win her specific race, finished somewhere comfortably in the middle of the pack overall, but the genuine pure joy on her face crossing that finish line regardless of her actual specific placement reminded me forcefully of how differently kids experience competitive sports at that age compared to how adults tend to overthink and analyze absolutely everything about competition generally. Talked to a few other parents there watching alongside me, and several mentioned feeling that exact same specific surge of unexpected emotion themselves, something about watching your own kid attempt something genuinely new and slightly scary in front of other people apparently taps into feelings most of us honestly do not fully anticipate ahead of actually experiencing it live ourselves. My own parents attended too, and my mother mentioned it reminded her forcefully of watching me at that exact same young age decades ago, which genuinely added another layer of emotion to the whole entire day, realizing this specific cycle of watching a child attempt something new nervously continues on quietly across generations this exact same way. Sports day itself is obviously a fairly small, low stakes event in the grand scheme of things overall, but watching my daughter actually try, fail to win, and still genuinely feel proud of herself regardless taught me something quietly valuable about competition that I honestly had not properly considered or thought about carefully myself in quite this specific way before. Did other parents here have a similarly emotional reaction watching their own kid's first proper sports day, and did it genuinely change how you personally think about competition and winning for your own kids specifically going forward?

Watched my own daughter run her relay leg last month at her school sports day and somehow got far more nervous just standing there on the sidelines than I ever remember feeling during my own school sports events decades ago, which absolutely nobody had warned me about beforehand going into that particular Saturday morning at all this year, oddly enough.