Raising the Gifted Athlete

Quarterback Tom Brady’s Dad and a Baseball Mom Share Tips and Experiences

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady with his father, Tom Brady Sr.

By Steve Calechman

As long as T-shirts exist, kids will be playing sports. Some will struggle along, with mom and dad in the stands praying for merciful endings. But a select few will demonstrate real athletic talent – the kind that comes with traveling teams, potential scholarships and intense scrutiny. And parents will have to deal with that, as well.

Tom Brady Sr. is the father of four talented kids, including a triathlete daughter, Nancy, and a superstar – New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady Jr., who has achieved three Super Bowl rings, Most Valuable Player awards and the potential to go down in history as one of the greatest NFL players of all time.

Pam Carey, of Westport, has two sons who made it into the Boston Red Sox minor league system. Her oldest, Tim, played two seasons before retiring from Single A in 1994. The youngest, Todd, logged seven seasons before leaving Triple A in 1999.

While their careers might go unrecognized (as compared to Brady), Tim and Todd Carey reached rarefied air. Less than 0.5 percent of high school seniors playing college baseball will be drafted by a major league team, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Sports-loving kids often dream of making it to the big leagues. How do you know if your little ball players are gifted enough to reach professional athlete status? You don’t. Neither Carey nor Brady could foresee this kind of success back when their kids still needed rides to Little League practice. Back then, these parents’ hopes were simple.

“You know they’re good because they make the next level,” remembers Carey. “You just want them to have the skills to make the high school team.”

Both she and Brady insist that they weren’t raising gifted athletes – just kids who wanted to play. As parents, they cheered, coached and listened. They stressed school and responsibility. And, while difficult, they also both knew when to keep quiet and let their kids make their own way.

Supporting – Not Pushing

That commitment extended into other sports, and family time. Tim and Todd also played hockey through high school, so the family’s winter vacations were usually spent at tournaments in Michigan or Illinois. Warm-weather vacations involved finding a ball field where the boys could practice every day. But the motivation to practice came from the boys, not the parents, Carey says.

“You can’t push a child to play a sport. The child will resent the parent and burn out,” she says. “They wouldn’t have made it if they didn’t love it. In the minors, there are six other [prospects] to take your place. If you’re not loving it, it’ll reflect in your performance.”

For Brady, it was about supporting his children and giving them every opportunity to succeed. He remembers one year when his four school-age kids played in a total of 315 games. He and his wife, Galynn, made sure that at least one Brady parent was in attendance at them all.

Tom Brady Sr. and his triathlete daughter, Nancy Brady.

Tom Jr. always wanted to play football, even though baseball was his better sport – he was drafted by the Montreal Expos in his senior year of high school. He didn’t even start playing football until he was 14. It was not what would be deemed auspicious, his father says.

As the freshman backup quarterback at Junípero Serra High School in San Mateo, Calif., Tom Jr. never saw a snap for a team that never won a game and never scored a touchdown. But football was his love, so his dad hired private coaches, took him to football camps and put together a recruiting videotape that eventually led Tom to the University of Michigan.

There, as a quarterback for the Michigan Wolverines (but still not always the starter), Tom began telling his father that he wanted to be one of that select group of 32 quarterbacks who lead an NFL team – and then to be that one quarterback who ended the season by winning the Super Bowl.

His dad’s thought at the time? “You’re smoking some bad stuff,” Brady quips.

But the senior Brady kept his doubts to himself. “It’s not my place to limit my child or detract from his dreams. The rough world will do that,” he says. “You don’t limit their horizons because of your horizons. We got our chance. Now they get their chance.”

High Standards for Schoolwork

“There are priorities in life,” Carey says, “one being education.”

She made a point of getting involved in her sons’ schools, knowing their teachers and the coursework they were doing. She and Charley didn’t give out empty kudos or reward A’s. The grades were expected, and eventually that message was ingrained.

“Our expectations became their expectations and they expected certain things for themselves,” she says of her sons.

Tim ended up graduating from Dartmouth College, Todd from Brown University, and both completed grad school – Tim in Asian Studies and International Relations from the University of California in San Diego and Todd in business at Bryant University in Rhode Island.

Pam Carey with son Todd

Stepping Back

As their children grew, both Carey and Brady found their roles as involved parents shifted a bit. Brady learned after he confronted one of his kids’ high school coaches about what he saw as disrespectful treatment. The critique put his child in an awkward position and didn’t improve the situation or the relationship between student and coach.

“It goes nowhere,” Brady says of this kind of parent intervention.

So he stayed publicly silent, stressed that the coach had authority and that team rules were paramount. If outside coaching was needed, however, it was found.

Post-high school wasn’t any easier. When Tom Jr. was deciding between Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley, his father wanted him close to home, where he could play football on Saturdays and they could continue to play golf on Sundays.

“His choice crushed me,” Brady says of Tom’s decision to head east. But he knew that lobbying any further would be counterproductive. “When he went through difficult times [at school], he couldn’t blame dad. I couldn’t tell him what to decide. I gave him the tools. He had to own that decision. I wouldn’t be experiencing the classes.”

Like many parents, Carey found that she too had to learn to step back when her two sons went to college and beyond. But still, she struggled. Once, after giving Todd her opinion about his playing, he proceeded to tell her that she was ill-informed and should just watch the game. Carey realized then that her job wasn’t to be a critic.

“There were coaches to do that. Your role is always that of a supporter,” she says. “Once you leave that role, it’s tough for the child to accept.”

Protecting Your Own Life

Ultimately, what do parents of wildly successful athletes need to do?

“Get a life,” Carey says, but she admits that it’s easy to become consumed when a child grows up and enters the elite world of professional sports.

“They put in all those years. You’ve put in all those years,” she says, and then offers this reality check: “Their sports careers will end. They’re going to move on.”

It wasn’t as if she or her husband were idle. Pam ran an interior design company and Charley was a vice chairman at Fleet Financial. But she was still focused on her sons and their baseball careers.

It was particularly challenging when Todd was playing near home in Pawtucket, R.I. She’d go to games, watch his slumps, and her emotional reactions didn’t help. What did help, finally, was when she began writing journals. “I could distance myself. By writing, I could analyze what I was feeling,” Carey says. The end result was her book, Minor League Mom: A Mother’s Journey Through the Red Sox Farm Teams (Barking Cat Books, 2009; $16.95).

Even with hindsight, Carey admits that her advice to other parents of rising-star athletes is easier to give than to follow. She knows that she probably should have gone to fewer games when her sons were at the farm team level – and not taken the business side of professional baseball so personally. And yet that, she also knows, would have been impossible.

“You want to absorb every minute of it,” Carey says. “You hate what management is doing, but you can’t tear yourself away.”

Steve Calechman is a contributing editor for Men’s Health magazine and a freelance writer in Waltham.