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Win at All Costs
Sara Simpson averaged ten points per game as she helped lead her Bloomington, Indiana, basketball team to a winning season in her second year on the competitive youth squad. "I really like playing," the tall ten-year-old told her parents. But, when the team got off to a slow start in 1999, the coaches upped the tempo in arduous two-hour practices and treated tournaments like life-or-death matches. "Everything is about winning," Sara complained to her mother.One afternoon, Sara and a friend were giggling during a break in practice and didn't hear the call to a huddle. The coach, an imposing man in his 40s, grabbed them both by the elbow and pulled them aside. "These practices aren't about fun," he barked at the young girls. "Laugh someplace else." When the coach, who would not comment for this story, began to cut her playing time to almost nothing for no apparent reason, Sara had had enough. "I don't want to go through this anymore," she told her father. She hasn't played on a basketball team since.
Across the country, children are rejecting sports because adults are draining all the fun out of it, says Fred Engh, president of the National Alliance for Youth Sports and author of Why Johnny Hates Sports. Kids are dropping out due to burnout, the emphasis on competition, and a lack of enjoyment. Meanwhile, for every kid who quits there's often another less talented child who wants to play but never gets a chance. The trend is particularly alarming at a time when public schools are cutting back on sports programs, and obesity has become a national epidemic. What's happened?
One of the big shifts is the decline in the spontaneous pickup game and the rapid growth of private leagues outside of school. With parents' heightened fears about leaving kids at the playground unsupervised, concerns about liability in parks, and the popularity of video games, the pick-up game of soccer or stickball is going the way of the home-cooked meal. Another change is the upsurge in what experts call "competitive parenting," where parents make sure their kids are enrolled in every program and activity that the neighbors' children are in. In a way, it's the perfect storm: the falloff of the pickup game, the uptick in competitive parenting, and the lack of available positions on school teams. The not surprising result is that the majority of kids who play sports in this country do so on private teams. And a lot of these young players specialize in just one sport.
With ten-month seasons, often daily practices, hefty participation fees, paid coaches and elite travel teams that play in state, regional and national tournaments, youth sports are a far cry from the after-school choose-up-sides games played a generation ago.
Traditionally, non-school squads, including Little League Baseball and Pop Warner football, were focused on the kids, not on their records. But nowadays many have become "minor leagues" of sorts, identifying talent early on and encouraging only the best kids. While striving for excellence is valuable, the win-at-all-costs model can undermine a child's physical and social development, says Gregg Heinzmann, director of the Youth Sports Research Council at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who extols the benefits of choose-up teams, making rules, and mediating disputes.
Today, it's often a lose-lose situation: Either you're athletic and you get pushed until you burn out, or you aren't seen as talented and are discouraged from playing altogether. "Too many parent-coaches are taking their cues from the professional ranks and ESPN," says Bob Bigelow, a former NBA pro and co-author of Just Let the Kids Play. "What they often don't realize is that in their rush to nurture the kids they think are the best, they're ignoring the rest."
Brooke de Lench, a mother of triplets in Concord, Massachusetts, knows how the youth sports system affects youngsters with different skill levels. When her boys tried out for a 12-and-under travel soccer team, only Hunter was selected. Spencer and Taylor didn't make the cut. "The basic message was, 'Sorry chump, you don't have what it takes to be a champion,'" de Lench recalls. "The boys were crushed."
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