When Every Afternoon Is a Different Practice: Protecting Connection During Fall Sports Season

By the time fall sports season is in full swing, a lot of families hit the same wall. School all day, straight to practice, straight to homework, and then bed. Repeat, five days a week, sometimes with a game or a meet thrown in on the weekend. It's incredibly easy to go a full week and barely actually see your kid, even though you're technically in the same house every night.

If that's where your family is right now, the instinct is usually to try to squeeze in more connection wherever you can find a gap. But I want to offer a different approach, because in a season this packed, it's not really about finding more time. It's about making the small pockets of time you do have actually count, in a way that fits who your kid is.

Why Generic "Family Time" Often Falls Flat Right Now

Here's the thing about the little windows you do get during a packed season, dinner, the car ride home from practice, twenty minutes before bed. If you try to fill that time with traditional forms of connection (deep conversation or a big shared activity) it's going to land well for some kids and completely fall flat for others. Not because they don't want connection with you. Because what actually recharges them and makes them feel connected looks different depending on how they're wired.

This is exactly where the Enneagram comes in, and it's a core piece of both my Understand Your Teen work and my Safe Place Parent Coaching. Knowing your teen's Enneagram number tells you what they actually need to feel connected to you, instead of what you'd assume they need, or what worked for a sibling, or what worked for you as a teen.

Two Kids, Two Completely Different Needs

Let me show you what I mean with two real examples.

If your teen is an Enneagram Five, they've likely spent all day surrounded by people, classmates, teachers, teammates, and by the time they get home, their social battery is genuinely drained. For a Five, connection in that moment doesn't look like a big conversation or an energetic activity. It looks like low-key, side-by-side presence, something like reading in the same room together, or just being nearby without demanding much interaction. That quiet closeness is the connection, even if it looks like almost nothing is happening.

Now take an Enneagram Seven. Sevens tend to run on a real fear of missing out, and they want to do it all. You might notice this teen has a hard time settling down to do homework after practice, not because they're avoiding the work exactly, but because their brain is already three steps ahead, their friends are getting together, something's happening on their phone, there's always something more exciting pulling at their attention. For a Seven, connection usually needs to come through a higher-energy shared activity, something active or engaging you actually do together, not a quiet moment on the couch.

Same packed schedule, same limited window of time, completely different approach needed to actually land as connection.

This Is Notice, Regulate, Connect in Action

This is really the Safe Place Parenting Model playing out in real time. Notice what your particular kid actually needs in that small window you have, not what you assume they need or what worked last year. Regulate your own expectations and energy to match it, because if you're depleted and they need high energy, or you're wound up and they need quiet, the mismatch itself becomes a barrier. Connect in the form that actually fits them, not the form that's easiest for you or looks the most like quality time from the outside.

That Regulate step matters more than people expect here, by the way. If your Seven needs high-energy connection and you're running on empty after your own long day, that's worth noticing too. You may need to save a little of your own energy specifically for that window, the same way you'd plan around any other part of a packed schedule.

You Don't Need to Be an Expert in the Enneagram to Start

You don't have to become an expert overnight. Start by just paying attention to what your teen actually does to recharge when they get a rare quiet moment, and what tends to light them up versus shut them down. That alone will tell you a lot about what kind of connection is actually going to land during a season with this little spare time.

And once you've got a read on what kind of connection works, the next piece is having something real to actually talk about in that window, especially since a lot of teens go quiet the second you ask how their day was. I put together a free guide called "10 Questions to Restore Connection with Your Teen," real conversation starters that work whether you've got twenty quiet minutes with a Five or a high-energy ten minutes in the car with a Seven.

Grab the free guide here!

And if you want more of this kind of thing all season, come find me on Instagram @beckyfunkcoaching. I talk through real examples like these two a lot more casually over there.