Woe to you, parents of goalies, kickers and pitchers!

If you have a kid who participates in sports, you know how simultaneously wonderful and agonizing it can be to watch them play.

Wonderful, of course, when they succeed. You hope it teaches them the value of hard work, effort, being part of a team, etc. The joy on their faces is like nothing else.

And agonizing, of course, when they fail. However terrible they feel, you as the parent feel 10 times worse. There are also lessons to be learned from failure, but they're less apparent (and less welcome) in the moment.

All parents of athletes know these emotions. But the people who feel them most are the parents of kids who are soccer/hockey goalies, football kickers, and baseball pitchers.

That's because those are the positions in which success or failure are particularly amplified. These are the players who are out there by themselves, standing in the most glaring of spotlights.

The goalie who saves a penalty kick, the kicker who puts a game-winning field goal through the uprights, and the pitcher who leads his team to victory are all heroes. But the keeper who lets in a weak goal, the kicker who botches that field goal attempt, and the pitcher who gives up 10 runs in an inning are all anti-heroes. Not hated, exactly, but certainly the root cause of everyone's disappointment.

Regardless of how they perform, goalies, kickers and pitchers are all to be commended just for putting themselves out there in such high-profile situations. The very act of trotting onto the field to try and kick an oblong spheroid through two narrow goal posts from several yards away takes guts of a high degree.

But as in the world of work, athletes of all ages are ultimately judged on whether or not they get the job done. And eventually they all learn what failure in those circumstances is like.

I am the parent of a soccer goalie (Melanie, age 14) and a football kicker (Jared, age 17). In Melanie's case, even beyond success and failure is the very real specter of injury. Soccer goalies are tasked with diving on balls amidst a swirling sea of flailing legs and rock-hard cleats. They get hurt all the time, as Melanie's twice-broken fingers can attest.

As for Jared, he had it relatively easy last football season when he only handled kickoffs. There's not a lot of pressure there, though he did have his ups and downs. This season he's competing to be the placekicker and kickoff guy, so the pressure increases exponentially. Botch an extra point and you could lose a game. No kick in football is easy, but kicking when the game is on the line is one of the most pressure-packed situations in all of sports.

So hats off to the young athletes who willingly step into those positions. And hats off and prayers to their parents, who rejoice and suffer right along with them to a level the kids can't even comprehend until they one day become parents themselves. I share in your nervous stares and sweaty palms.