うたぴょんスポーツThis one is hard to write, but I think it is worth writing.
Uta, who is nine, went into the Platinum Kids second selection trial — a tryout for a national youth development program — expecting to pass. I expected it too. Instead, she had trouble in every single event on the day.
How the day went
Uta has had a good year. She is ranked 10th nationally for the 2024 fiscal year in the 3rd-grade girls 1000m, so this trial was not some reach for her — it was a meet she had a real shot at. That made the result sting more than it might have otherwise.
From what she told us afterward, nothing clicked. Not one event went the way she had practiced it. There was no single disaster, no one moment you could point to and say 'that was the problem.' It was more that the nerves of a test-like environment — timed trials, officials watching, a pass/fail outcome instead of a normal race — seemed to get into her legs and her head at the same time.
She knew partway through that it was not going well. By the end, when the results were read out, she was not surprised to hear she had not made it, but she was still disappointed. A kid who is usually confident about her running had a day where none of that confidence showed up on the track.
We talked about it on the way home. She was quiet for a while, then said she wanted to make a video about it so other kids trying for Platinum Kids next year would know what to watch out for. That is very her — turn the bad day into something useful for someone else.
What a parent took away from it
The biggest thing I noticed is that a selection trial is a different animal from a normal race. In an ekiden or a local meet, one bad leg does not end everything — there is a team around you, or another race next month. In a trial like this, every event counts toward one yes-or-no outcome, and I do not think we prepared her for what that pressure actually feels like in the body, not just in the head.
I also think I underestimated how much her confidence was riding on being the favorite. Going in already ranked nationally probably added weight rather than comfort. Next time, I want to talk with her beforehand about treating each event as its own small race, not as one link in a pass/fail chain.
What I said to her afterward was simple: everyone who tries this trial again next year is going to watch this video and learn something from her bad day. That is a strange kind of win, but it is a real one. The failing itself is not the story — what she does with it is.
She has already said she wants to try Platinum Kids selection again. For now we are back to regular training and regular races, where one off day does not decide anything.
The video walks through what went wrong event by event, in her own words — worth watching if your child is thinking about trying the Platinum Kids trial themselves.