In general, I do not love watching sports. I’m not someone who follows professional or collegiate sports, or ever attends a sporting event that my kids aren’t playing in.

What I do enjoy is watching my kids play, whether it’s at a swim or track meet, or a wrestling match, or a soccer game. Over time, my kids’ teammates also become “my” kids, and watching them grow and develop together is part of the fun.

As G pointed out, missing it a little himself, this is the first fall in 15 years that he hasn’t been playing soccer.

Sure, I could go watch the boys team play any time I want to, but it’s just not the same. It wasn’t as noticeable when A left, because G still played all the same sports. It won’t be as bad come wintertime, as E is still swimming, but fall without soccer is hitting me hard.

On the plus side, though, I am able to attend E’s matches and meets without worrying about missing one of the boy’s activities.

I was also worried about them going off to school and no longer being involved in athletics. Playing a different sport every season not only kept them in peak physical shape, it balanced out the mental challenges they placed on themselves.

Practices and games kept them on a tight schedule, with little room for slacking. I was particularly worried about G, who had played multiple sports per season in high school. I wasn’t sure he’d know what to do with so much time on his hands.

For A, I was most concerned that he’d lose the physical stamina he’d built up, despite his heart condition.

During A’s freshman year, I was glad that he tried a few different intramural and club sports, including continuing to swim, but I knew he hadn’t found something that he was motivated enough to make a commitment to doing daily. During his sophomore year, he was able to make the boxing club work with his schedule, and he has discovered a new passion.

It’s not surprising that he ended up here: Steve boxed in college and taught the kids the basics and would hold sparring matches in our living room. A’s role model, Theodore Roosevelt, also boxed in college, and A was motivated to follow in his footsteps.

Obviously, no mom wants her kid participating in a sport where he routinely gets punched in the head, but A assures me that that’s not what they do at practice, and that he’s never had such an intense cardio workout as he does when he’s sparring or doing the other drills.

I don’t love it, but I can see that he has found something that he enjoys, and something that motivates him to regularly hit the gym and attend practices.

G had kicked around playing a few different club sports, or joining an intramural team for fun, but was reluctant to commit to one thing, and seemed to be rather nonchalant about joining anything at all. I knew the worst thing I could do was pressure him and decided that he’d know when he was ready to find something to do.

I just didn’t expect that to be at 5:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, when I got a Life360 alert that he was “speeding” about 20 miles outside of State College.

What the heck was going on? I immediately assumed the worst, maybe he’d been kidnapped. Then I thought about how ridiculous it would be to kidnap a 6-foot-5-inch, 250-pound college kid on a Monday morning, and assumed the second worst, maybe that his phone had been stolen.

I was not expecting, “I joined the crew team,” to be the answer. I really didn’t expect that same alert to keep going off every morning for the next two weeks, either.

In retrospect, it seems like almost the perfect sport for him: Early mornings rowing on the lake at a state park and a small, close-knit team that requires each member to have their own skills and come together to work like a well-oiled machine. I think he also enjoys the fact that I now have to learn an entirely new sport and language.

I attended my first “chase” a few weeks ago. I have absolutely no idea what I watched, but I did see G have the biggest grin on his face as he helped prep his boat (are they even called boats?) to head out on the lake. I could see that he’d found his place when I introduced myself as his mom and his teammates all immediately knew “Big G.”

Neither of the boys has followed a traditional path with their sports.

The years and years of practices and training for all the other things they’ve done have been abandoned, but somehow, they’ve both managed to find an outlet in a sport that they are loving and it’s helping them thrive in all the other ways they’re supposed to be thriving at school.

Now I just have to learn how to be a long-distance supporter.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News