Some engineers are athletic, or at least can play a sport or two. But, in general, the average athletic ability of the average engineer is somewhat less than that of the average person. However, that does not mean that our involvement in sports has to be less.

I met a wife of an engineer who explained that her husband keeps very good stats of their children as they compete in sports. She may not have actually said, “very good stats”.  I put a more positive spin on that part of her story.

As an engineer, he overdoes it with the numbers. In baseball or softball, he will keep all the stats that are typically kept for a major league baseball player, even though his child is only playing T-ball. And giving his 6-year old a folder with hitting average, rbi’s, on-base percentage, fielding percentage, and around 14 other statistics all laid out in a spreadsheet with graphs showing improvement (or worsening) over the weeks of the season could be seen as overdoing it.

It may be the case that his interest in numbers and calculations could possibly cause him to go a little overboard with the statistics. To look on the positive side, the good news is that he is very involved in his child’s life.

The difficult question is: what is the engineer to do when his child starts dance lessons?