ROSS WERLAND CHICAGO TRIBUNE

When soccer threatened to steal their last chunk of family time, Dennis and Patti Lisauskas decided their 11-year-old son had to make a career change.

That was a tough call, because Danny Lisauskas had spent about half his life with his high-achieving soccer team, religiously making his twice-a-week practices as prescribed by his sports-conscious father.

Dennis Lisauskas had made it a point to follow his son's out-of-town exploits, even at the cost of weekends with wife Patti and daughter Lauren, 8.

``It was eating up more and more time, every Memorial Day, every three-day weekend,'' Patti Lisauskas said. ``When they started taking them out of state, it just got to be too much.''

The family switched Danny to a less-pressurized team rather than have to spend a week's vacation at a tournament.

The competition between family time and sports is heating up everywhere. At the foreground of the battle is William J. Doherty, director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. He has declared that if parents see any value in family over sports and numerous other outside endeavors for children, adults must fight to reclaim their authority.

The social science professor, also a marriage and family therapist, has written ``Take Back Your Kids'' (Sorin Books, $12.95), due out this month, as something of a manifesto accompanying a budding parents' movement in the Minneapolis area.

``We are turning family activities -- mealtimes, visits with relatives, vacations and the like -- into a consumer option for our children, not an expectation that comes with being part of a family,'' he writes. ``The family becomes the launching pad on the carrier ship, with the real action occurring in the skies around the ship. The kids fly home to sleep and eat before taking off again. Parents become brokers of community services for their children, and they downplay the importance of face-to-face family time and family rituals.''

Doherty explained: ``Many families are not as conscious about family time and family activities as they are about providing opportunities for individual children. So what happens is you give away two dinner times for child No. 1 to practice and two more for child No. 2, and you've just kissed away your weekday meals as a family, but you never made the decision. Now families are increasingly giving up their Sunday mornings to sports activities.

``It's not that there are any villains out there,'' he said, ``it's just a sort of bracket creep in sports,'' with parents pushing coaches for greater competitive success and the coaches responding with more practice time.

Amid the hockey mania of Minnesota, he added, many coaches now are compelling players to surrender the family Thanksgiving for practice.

``That's scary,'' said Glen Kozlowski, a former Chicago Bears wide receiver and special-teams standout who now coaches boys football, baseball and basketball in the Chicago area. ``That doesn't happen in the leagues I'm in.''

At the advanced age of 37, Kozlowski the coach and Kozlowski the father of four boys said he promotes balance between sports and family and even sports and schoolwork.

``The rules I have are very simple. If a child can't make practice because of schoolwork or whatever, all the parents have to do is call me. Then it's excused. But I've gotten to this point over the course of time. When I was younger, I was probably a lunatic about all this, but as an adult, you go home and you say, `I'm doing this for the kids.' When the game is over, all they want to do is go have a cheeseburger and socialize anyway. Winning and losing is not that important to them.''

Parents can spoil the experience for children in two ways, he explained, one by being too intense, the other by not participating at all and using the coach as a baby sitter.

``Sports are a great way to teach kids to be successful, to teach them life lessons, and they can apply that to every level of their life,'' he added. ``Sports are the greatest thing in the world, but it's the parents who ruin it. I'll be the first one to say I've embarrassed myself, too, but the key is to recognize it.''

Kozlowski said parents, in general, must make more effort to investigate the kinds of demands sports and coaches will make on their family time, such as on holidays.

``I firmly believe that people put too much emphasis on their kids doing well in sports, thinking they're going to be pro athletes. I disagree with that totally,'' said Ellen Zmolek of Rochester, Minn. That's not to say children shouldn't be given the opportunity, she added, but that opportunity might be in theater or in dance, anything where the child has a chance to be good at something.

Her son, Doug, dances opponents into the boards at the United Center, where he plays as a defenseman with the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team.

And though Doug's career took up a great deal of family time, she said, she and husband Eugene made a point of maintaining family vacations and never had to give up a Thanksgiving.

``Unfortunately, I probably would have done it if it had come to that,'' she acknowledged. ``Now I look back and say, `No way.' But we're older now and look at it differently than young parents who still have these aspirations. But I wish people wouldn't expect so much. Family is far more important.''

Though sports and family have become intertwined for many families, with parents showing their support of their children by supporting their sports activities, Doherty pointed out that unless a person is a ``super-involved parent, sports practices are not a family ritual. Seventy-five percent of your involvement is as a chauffeur. And even at the games, you're not interacting with your child. What are you giving up when this becomes the heart and soul of your family? For me, the family conversation rituals get lost. The games are spectator situations. The times to talk -- dinner time, Sunday outings -- if you have a couple kids in sports, those are gone.''

Though some might be inclined to blame coaches for this trend, Doherty suggests the pressure comes instead from other parents.

``Parents whose egos are wrapped up in their children's individual exploits and who do not protect their family time make it more difficult for other parents to create a balanced life,'' he writes.

The Blackhawks' Zmolek agrees wholeheartedly.

For him, family is comfort. He points to his time away from the game, home with wife Jenny and sons Riese, 2, and Will, 9 months, as being the payoff for him.

And for this boy, now 29, whose parents followed him through all this youthful glory years in hockey, what was one of his fondest memories?

Thanksgiving.

``Those are some of the best memories, when you were together not only with your brother and sister and parents but all your cousins and grandparents,'' he said.

Certainly, he added, parents need to stay grounded in their expectations for children's sports.

``But family,'' he said, ``if you take that away, you don't have very much.''

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