Last weekend, my son, Brooks, was the closer for his Little League team, striking out three hitters in a row. The crowd went wild, cheering and chanting his name.

That’s what I hear anyway. I wasn’t there.

“We were all looking around for you!” a very sweet team mom told me at the next game as I smiled over the sound of my guilty mom heart breaking. Instead, I had been on a panel at the well-regarded Annapolis Book Festival, scheduled months earlier at the same time as this eventually all-important game.

Neither my son nor I could miss our respective obligations, so he wound up staying with family who were there to cheer him on. But it wasn’t his mom. That’s just life as a sports parent, having to juggle increasingly demanding game and practice schedules with homework and pretty much everything else.

On this day after Mother’s Day, I’m struck by the constant delicate dance of the decisions we have to make on days when no one is taking us out to brunch. Does this game conflict with a family graduation? Work? A planned trip? How do you choose?

“It’s not like the time we invest is only from first whistle to last whistle,” said Felix Almazo, who has coached my son alongside his own kids on various soccer teams. “We’re preparing to go to the game, getting there, making sure we eat after and reflecting with the team. And then it’s finally like, ‘Cool, now the soccer day is over,’ because it takes five hours instead of just that hour and a half of the game.”

Almazo, like other parents I talked to, readily admitted the pressures of keeping all those balls in the air. Some have had to miss games like me or move things around the calendar for family obligations. But they do it because they like seeing their kids involved in something they love. And, as parents, they want to be a part of it as much as they can.

“I just appreciate being hands-on, being able to be with them, and it’s better than getting under another coach’s nerves, because I was going to do it anyway,” Almazo said. “I like it, too, whether it’s my kids or someone else’s kids.”

Nezhat Beghie of Baltimore County has also positioned herself to be up close and personal with her young athlete, working part time at the gym where her daughter trains for the popular obstacle-based sport Ninja Warrior.

“At one point she was in the gym 12-15 hours a week!” Beghie wrote in an email. “She’s there 5-7 hours a week now, so I’m there more than she is. They’re really great about schedule flexibility which is a large part of why I’m there.”

That busy Ninja Warrior schedule means Beghie’s husband has had to miss events that conflict with work. “I was never a team sports kid, so my mom didn’t have to be that kind of mom,” Beghie said. “But it was what my daughter needed, so I adapted.”

As a single parent with a demanding job, I am never going to be the kind of sports mom who organizes sign-ups or volunteers for every fundraiser. It’s not in my schedule. Sometimes saying “um, my book event conflicts with the first pitch” seems self-indulgent. Realistically, though, that’s what I have to do.

It’s not easy even with two parents. My friend Paige Lehr of St. Mary’s County and her husband raised two daughters who eventually became college athletes. The couple “went all in,” prioritizing family breaks and time around games and tournaments. But that was more about instilling a sense of commitment than creating champions.

“We always told them, ‘If you start the season, you’re going to complete this season. But, if you don’t wanna do this anymore, you don’t have to do it,” Lehr said.

The only time her youngest daughter missed a soccer game was for her First Holy Communion. “The coach was like, ‘We can’t do it without her,’ and I said, ‘Well, she’s gonna make communion. She’s 7. I don’t know what to tell you.’”

The key seems to be balance. Iona R. Rudisill, an executive life and health coach in Baltimore who specializes in preventing burnout, practices what she preaches in her life as a sports mom as well. She drops her middle school son off at football practice, while her husband stays. Those practices are just one part of a five-days-a-week sports commitment.

“Some days are going to be tiresome,” she said, preferring to remember that this period of her son’s life is going to go really fast and she and her husband want to experience as much of it as they can. “It might not go past this. He’s in middle school. But here is a thing he enjoys doing. I enjoy watching him do this, even if he’s sitting on the bench. He’s the most important thing.”

Rather than being the parents solely focused on wins, Lehr said, “We wanted to be the ones that asked — first thing when she came off the pitch — ‘Did you have fun? We love watching you play.’”

I love watching my kid play, too. But sometimes I just won’t be able to. Rudisill said that could be a positive because Brooks will know his mother knows how to take care of herself. And she told me not to feel too guilty.

“Here is the thing: You don’t make your life about sports. You make your life around who you are as a mother,” she said. “There are things you might not be able to make. That’s why they have videos now.”