The bathroom door stays closed longer than it should on tryout morning, and when you knock, she says she’s fine. She isn’t fine. She just threw up, and the tryout starts in ninety minutes.
Your first thought is probably wrong: not a stomach bug, not your kid being dramatic. The vagus nerve is a direct line between gut and brain, and it fires when the brain flags a moment as high-stakes. An evaluation reads as a threat, and the stomach shows it first.
The sixty-second check
Fever, diarrhea, body aches, or a kid who still feels sick twenty minutes after the vomiting stops: that’s illness. Handle it like any sick day, tryout or not.
One clean episode, nothing else going on, and she’s back to normal the second she starts moving: that’s nerves. The same thing happens on the way to a college interview, a bar exam, a first date. Ten-year-olds get the same wiring with none of the practice.
What to do that morning
Don’t cancel the tryout over one clean episode. Pack the bag the way you would on any other morning, water bottle included. Skip anything new or heavy for breakfast.
Skip “are you nervous?” That question confirms the feeling and hands it more room than it had. Try “how’s your stomach” instead, since that’s the actual thing that just happened, and let her tell you how much she wants to say.
Don’t promise the tryout will go fine. She already knows you can’t promise that, and a hollow guarantee just adds one more thing she has to manage on top of her own stomach.
When it’s not just today
One rough tryout morning is a rough morning. The same thing happening before every evaluation, not just tryouts, for a season or more, is a pattern. So is avoidance that grows, where she starts finding reasons to skip things she used to want to do.
That’s worth a call to your pediatrician, not a crisis. A pediatrician rules out the physical causes first and points you toward a sports psychologist if the anxiety itself needs its own work. Caught early, this responds well; normalized for two full seasons, it gets harder to unwind.
Most kids who throw up before one tryout walk in, compete, and don’t do it again before the next one. The body was never broken. It just hadn’t met this particular stress yet.