The key to answering your question is your comment that “he wants to be good”. If he wasn’t interested in sports, I would answer you differently.
The first question that you need to answer is whether he wants to be good because he wants to FIT IN, or because he wants to participate but just lacks the skills. If his goal is fitting in, the approach may be about helping him see that you don’t have to play sports to fit in. He can BE ACTIVE (play lasertag, swim, climb trees, etc) and not be good at sports, but pursue other things such as music or whatever interests him. On the other hand, if he really wants to play sports but lacks ability, the key is twofold:
a) Help him find a sport which he likes and has some ability at. This may be less traditional sports, but every child can find a sport that they aren’t horrible at.
b) Help him find success at it. Teach him, find someone else who can teach him, get him in a program for that sport, whatever it takes, help him get success. BUT, you must monitor what is going on. Go to everything, be present, meet the teacher/coach, hover for a while to make sure that it is progressing and positive. If you are not there and he is failing constantly, you will do more harm than good. Eventually, when you are comfortable that he is enjoying it and FEELS like he is progressing, you can fade into the background a bit. Keep checking though both with him and the teacher/coach to see if things seem to be going well. It does NOT matter how good your son becomes. It only matters that he feels good about the experience and is having fun with it. If things don’t go well, speak to the teacher/coach and ask them if they think this is the right sport for your son. Be prepared to move to another try if this one fails.
Good luck and keep us posted!
