I grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, started playing soccer at 5 and played through high school. At this time, there were no club sports. I went to a Catholic school that let everyone be on the team. I started varsity for three years. I was a mediocre player at best, and our team was the worst in the league. I look back on this time with much fondness and am so grateful for this opportunity because I know it doesn’t exist for kids like me today. I have one seven year old son who plays rec soccer (I coach), and we are already seeing the effects of club soccer. My husband and I are older parents with the benefit of observing our friends and relatives parent for the last fifteen plus years. We have decided there will be no club sports in our house for all the reasons stated above. My son will never get a scholarship to play sports. We can invest the money we would have spent on club sports into his college fund (if he chooses to go). However, we will encourage him to try multiple sports at the rec level and to play for as long as he can. We will introduce him to tennis - very low cost - and pay for lessons so we can play as a family. I refuse to participate in the insanity of club sports, and we are consciously opting out of this system.
Just a note of encouragement to say that your son might find a sport where he excels. Most boys don't hit peak athleticism until mid-high school. My son was cut from the high school basketball team and we pushed him to try track. After one season he qualified for both the state and New England championship meets and, if he can run ~5% faster over the next two years, will be in line to be recruited by colleges. There are so many reasons to keep kids playing sports, and sometimes they will surprise you!
Totally! I was just telling my husband this after a particularly rough soccer game. My son has ADHD, and I’ve had conversations with other moms about how multi-player team sports can be more challenging for ADHD kids. Her boys did better at swimming, golf, tennis, track, etc. He enjoys being active, so as long as he’s learning to be part of a team, getting exercise, and having fun I’m happy.
It occurred to me a few years ago that the most popular activities for kids are all things that can be performed for adults: sports, music, dance, theater. Try finding after school enrichment for the little girl who loves writing stories and poetry, or for the boy who just wants to walk through the woods.
Folks will claim that there’s all sorts of documented benefits to kids’ participation in organized sports, but I think that ignores all the ways they are designed to turn kids into willing middle-class “team players.” The chief beneficiary isn’t children. It’s capitalism.
Such good points, Ben. And I’d add that the version of a “team player” that youth sports churns out is one that’s still slanted toward producing a handful of stars who command most of the attention (which underscores your point about preparing kids for a capitalist marketplace). A very different vision of “team” than one would learn in a religious community or volunteer setting, for instance.
Yes! Very true. But then volunteerism and civic engagement are also often commodified into activities meant to burnish a college application, which undermines the community building that could happen through them. grumble grumble.
This is part of why youth sports has killed Scouting (or vastly weakened it). Scouting has awards and badges and such, but it’s less focused on performing for adults in the way you describe.
The pull of the pay-to-play travel teams is so hard to resist. I have spent a huge amount of time helping bring our community sports teams back to life. And, for my own kids, I love playing sports and played competitively in college, so I make up the difference with extra practice. Now my older sons are in high school and are the only kids to have not played any travel sports. They are on track to potentially get recruited to play college sports and they play three different sports throughout the year according to the season.
I think the keys are if a parent is athletic and is willing to spend the time to provide extra practice, they can skip travel sports. Or, if they are wealthy and can hire private coaching. But, so many lower income kids in my town get left behind at exactly the age when teen boys need to be on a team. So we have a booming high school rec basketball league. It can be done, but it such an uphill battle.
Dewey, thanks for sharing your perspective and observations. I suspect you are right that kids with access to expertise and coaching outside of the pay-to-play system have different opportunities to develop, not to mention the benefits of playing multiple sports which build cross-training skills and abilities. And kudos to you for investing in community sports! I'm glad to hear stories like yours!
The travel sports world is such a weird market. College coaches overtly say that kids should play multiple sports, need structured practice more than games, and often would benefit most from a rigorous workout plan. Driving kids around to meaningless tournaments is the exact opposite experience but the fear of missing out causes parents to buy into the pyramid scheme.
One aspect you did not mention is competitiveness. The kids who care, want to excel, want to improve, and want to win will defect to club because that’s where they will play with and against other players with the same attitudes. All of them get better as a result. The kids who just want to kick the ball around but don’t really care will play rec, and that’s fine.
Nothing is more frustrating for a kid who cares about excellence than to be on a team with kids who don’t really care and don’t have the determination to win. My son played rec as well as club and I could very clearly see the difference between the types of players. And very often my son was fuming at the end of a rec game because they could have won if not for the players who didn’t care.
I have no problem with their being club teams in grade school.
Incidentally my son started playing club at about age 7 and he continued through age 17. Many of the kids who were on his club team kept playing through high school, though not always on the same team. But I’m in an area that “cares a lot” about his sport, so the number of players who persist with club might be unusually high.
This is a good point and I observed that tensions with my own kids, too -- the unevenness of kids' investment and ability (for lack of a better word) at young ages is a factor. Some rec leagues do have tryouts for the "A" team which is one way to address this. But that only works if you're playing other community teams. The sweet spot for that approach seems to be smaller sports where there's not enough interest to have adequate teams to play each other in house.
The counterpoint to this is telling the hyper-competitive kids to like maybe chill out?
No one will remember that you won an under 8s tournament 20 years from now. Have fun and do your best. There’s a time and a place for competitiveness. I feel like Middle School age is about that time?
That could be what the person above means but I definitely have encountered competitive kids (and parents) at younger levels and it’s honestly ridiculous.
I've ref some under 10 rec soccer for a while. Some parents thought that the games were World Cup games or something. I got out, didn't want to deal with that, now there's a shortage of refs state wide ... I wonder why.
I think it’s sad that everything down to sports for kids is competitive instead about play, development of skills and connection. I felt like sports in the US ends up just being about the competition rather than just recreational
Oh man…none of my kids were very into sports but this bleeds to all kids activities. For many of the reasons listed in the article we wouldn’t let my daughter do competitive dance, just let her take classes and around 11 she really wanted to get serious, auditioned for the team and wasn’t good enough, but the kicker was all the serious “real” classes were behind the team wall and only available to team dancers. It was so frustrating! How could she get better if the “rec” classes they offered weren’t teaching technique and everything else was walled off only for kids who had been on the team for years? We found a studio eventually but the feeling of being behind is so real. Behind what?? Agh.
This story rings true to what I’ve seen myself and heard from other parents, Janine. We slot kids into these tracks way too early. 11 seems like exactly the right age to start to “specialize” in this way — when a child can choose to invest, for instance — and it’s ridiculous that the system is set up *not* to support that. I’m glad your daughter eventually found a studio that was the right fit!
This was also true in the 90s fwiw. When I didn't try out for the dance team at age 13/14 (no interest + knew I wasn't good enough) my next step was to join the adult class! So I was doing tap with like 30 and 40 year olds. Maybe nice for potential intergenerational experiences? I didn't really have any meaningful connections in that class though. The message I got as a teenager was "you can take this class until you die, bye". I quit dance and did martial arts instead.
It has become ridiculous. I also think it is simultaneously destroying and holding some marriages together. The frenetic pace wears down family bonds and simultaneously papers over the growing problems with busyness. I know couples who haven’t spent a weekend together in years as they alternate duties. At this point, time alone with each other terrifies them.
I totally agree with you, Scott. A friend also sent me a piece shortly after I published this that was making the case that adult lives are, in some cases, so devoid of meaning and purpose that parents get too invested in the joys and thrills that can come with the feeling of winning or excelling in sports. I think that has some explanatory power. And yet, I think the real secret to parenting successfully is finding ways to invest in our own adult wellbeing and fulfillment (and yes, our relationships, too). Thanks for writing!
It also undermines church and other religious activities (gone are the days when Sunday mornings were off-limits for kids’ activities), scouting, and any type of kid activity that can’t easily be quantified and translated into your future college application.
I don't have children, so the ramping up of this arms race had been going on for several years before I noticed it.
When I did notice it, though, I was appalled. Weird parental fantasies about fostering the next Messi or Biles are stealing people's childhoods, and you only get one childhood to live through.
I am not anti-sports. I played organized baseball, basketball, and football, and I am or have been a fan of soccer, tennis, boxing, and golf. Sports have a lot to teach kids about discipline and resilience. Sports are beautiful. When you're ten years old, though, and every weekend you're on the road again, and your coach is all about winning instead of playing--something is seriously wrong.
Love this post. I started playing soccer at 5, was in club by 10, and playing club and high school sports at the same time. I was good but not enough to get a college scholarship. I was so burnt out by college I couldn't even play intermural or rec.
It wasn't until I had my own kids and started coaching that I could heal those wounds a bit. My husband and I have agreed not to put our kids in anything but rec leagues. We are having our kids try lots of different activities, cycling through seasons with plenty of down time (no summer or winter).
And yet, as a coach of 6-year-old boys in AYSO I had a dad talk shit to his son and tell me in front of him how much his son was going to suck at goalie (which he'd never tried before). The parents (particularly the dads) made me never want to coach again. The kids were pretty great and I really loved reconnecting to the fun of the game. But the adults refuse to relax and it makes me want want to put my kids in non-sports, non-competitive activities. But there is the very ingrained part of me that feels like sports are the only legitimate form of activity.
Elizabeth, thanks for sharing this story and your reflections. I don't know what the answer is to this culture we've created, except that part of it is clearly that the parents (by which I mean us) need to calm the %&$# down. I hope you keep coaching and that your kids get to try lots of different sports and find something that they love.
I love that you wrote this. The commercialization of the youth club sports movement, in which my own kids have been deeply invested for years and —tens of thousands of dollars— is concerning. For kids who want to play in college, club sports are the gateway. This means rural middle class kids are excluded — in fact middle class kids are excluded by the club price tag. So kids who play in college (and receive scholarships) had a heavy prep ticket price. On the other hand, jobs coaching club sports and refereeing games and tournaments is a way for athletes to and find income through the sport they love. It’s a multifaceted dilemma for sure.
Thanks for your comments, Christy. It is multifaceted, for sure, and I have no illusions about diminishing the allure of club sports anytime soon. The for-profit infrastructure, which includes not just teams but sports centers/complexes and eventually NIL payouts to college athletes is just too powerful. But I do think we could benefit our kids (and ourselves) if we shifted the cultural norms to make it unusual to start these programs before kids are 11 or 12 (middle school ages).
Over here in Germany Club football (soccer) is pretty much for free, the yearly club fee is 60 Euros and that is all you have to pay. Kids get shirts and equipment for free (some wealthy parent sponsors usually pay, everyone else gets free stuff). Only shoes need to be bought but many Kids get used hand down shoes for free.
There is no cheaper activity than club sports over here. All the poor kids play club soccer and they are the most vicious and best players.
I love our local soccer club here, I spend most of my free time coaching there or just watching games, drinking free beer with the gang.
My nephew played travel baseball, got a full ride scholarship and then got into the minors. To then make a whopping $25k a year, not including housing or food. It's wild. I did the math and my brother basically did pay for college in the amount he paid for travel ball and all the specialty clinics.
Great post! My kids were late bloomers athletically and also didn't have the drive and "passion" that some kids might. They just wanted to have fun, be busy, and be part of a team. Now in middle and high school it's too late! Even though they are now more developmentally suited for sports and decent enough athletically, they don't have the knowledge and skills from years of rec and trying different sports to make school or club teams and the rec leagues don't really function at their ages. Which makes me sad as HS sports can be such a positive experience - they certainly were for me. It's really shame what adults have done to youth sports.
I agree with you, Julie. I wish I had a clear sense of how to create more shared investment in changing this problem, too. It clearly resonates with many others’ experiences and our kids would benefit so much from a different approach to youth athletics.
My kid went through several sports he kinda liked and wasn’t great at initially, and the pseudo-professionalization of the game pushed him right out after a year or so. It seemed crazy that he was already too old to play B-ball or soccer at 7 or 8.
This makes me so sad. I agree, this is not the society we want to live in. But I do believe the data that shows kids cycle in and out and that there is room for new kids every year. But it’s hard to be the kid that’s still developing on a team of pseudo-professionals.
I love this post! And this idea: "Like the Wait Until 8th movement to delay smart phones, a critical mass of today’s parents could decide to wait until their kids are at least in middle school to specialize in one sport."
Oh boy, this is spot on. I coached HS Track and XC for years. College coaches always asked - always - ‘do they play another sport?’ Coaches love well-rounded kids.
One other thing about parents. I was often asked, what does my 4th, 5th, 6th grade athlete need to do to get ready for HS track? My answer - ‘let them play, be joyful and active, those kids will be successful’. 4th graders doing 400 repeats will learn to hate running.
So very true, Tim! A friend of mine says the same thing about rowing — start kids in middle school and you’ll make absolutely sure they don’t want to continue in high school or beyond.
I'm not even a parent, but all of a sudden I care deeply about this dang sports arms race and your proposed collective action de-escalation. Where can I sign the petition?
Great writing, and honestly, something that super should happen for all the reasons you outlined. I have volunteered in church youth groups over the years and it's wild the hoops I watched some parents jump through for sports (paying through the nose, acquiescing to every demand from the league or coach, including some pretty onerous ones if you ask me) but resented anything we asked of their girls. I'm like: "You guys! You have some choice here!"
All this to say, I'm a fan of offering less structured options and parents and community members being involved in creating those. (But then I guess we get into the subject of intentional living and us not just living on default, busy, mode)
Very well put, Emily. We do have choices here, although I think many parents feel like "everyone else" is engaged in this arms race and therefore their participation is compulsory. You're exactly right that it crowds out other forms of more intentional, values- and community-based organization -- religious life, for one -- that are probably more beneficial for kids and certainly more likely to be part of their lives into adulthood. Thank you for writing!
I grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, started playing soccer at 5 and played through high school. At this time, there were no club sports. I went to a Catholic school that let everyone be on the team. I started varsity for three years. I was a mediocre player at best, and our team was the worst in the league. I look back on this time with much fondness and am so grateful for this opportunity because I know it doesn’t exist for kids like me today. I have one seven year old son who plays rec soccer (I coach), and we are already seeing the effects of club soccer. My husband and I are older parents with the benefit of observing our friends and relatives parent for the last fifteen plus years. We have decided there will be no club sports in our house for all the reasons stated above. My son will never get a scholarship to play sports. We can invest the money we would have spent on club sports into his college fund (if he chooses to go). However, we will encourage him to try multiple sports at the rec level and to play for as long as he can. We will introduce him to tennis - very low cost - and pay for lessons so we can play as a family. I refuse to participate in the insanity of club sports, and we are consciously opting out of this system.
Hear, hear, Jillian! Thanks for writing. There is so much wisdom in what you say above!
Just a note of encouragement to say that your son might find a sport where he excels. Most boys don't hit peak athleticism until mid-high school. My son was cut from the high school basketball team and we pushed him to try track. After one season he qualified for both the state and New England championship meets and, if he can run ~5% faster over the next two years, will be in line to be recruited by colleges. There are so many reasons to keep kids playing sports, and sometimes they will surprise you!
Totally! I was just telling my husband this after a particularly rough soccer game. My son has ADHD, and I’ve had conversations with other moms about how multi-player team sports can be more challenging for ADHD kids. Her boys did better at swimming, golf, tennis, track, etc. He enjoys being active, so as long as he’s learning to be part of a team, getting exercise, and having fun I’m happy.
It occurred to me a few years ago that the most popular activities for kids are all things that can be performed for adults: sports, music, dance, theater. Try finding after school enrichment for the little girl who loves writing stories and poetry, or for the boy who just wants to walk through the woods.
Folks will claim that there’s all sorts of documented benefits to kids’ participation in organized sports, but I think that ignores all the ways they are designed to turn kids into willing middle-class “team players.” The chief beneficiary isn’t children. It’s capitalism.
Such good points, Ben. And I’d add that the version of a “team player” that youth sports churns out is one that’s still slanted toward producing a handful of stars who command most of the attention (which underscores your point about preparing kids for a capitalist marketplace). A very different vision of “team” than one would learn in a religious community or volunteer setting, for instance.
Yes! Very true. But then volunteerism and civic engagement are also often commodified into activities meant to burnish a college application, which undermines the community building that could happen through them. grumble grumble.
This is part of why youth sports has killed Scouting (or vastly weakened it). Scouting has awards and badges and such, but it’s less focused on performing for adults in the way you describe.
Agreed, and scouting at its best promotes the kind of teamwork that volunteerism fosters.
The pull of the pay-to-play travel teams is so hard to resist. I have spent a huge amount of time helping bring our community sports teams back to life. And, for my own kids, I love playing sports and played competitively in college, so I make up the difference with extra practice. Now my older sons are in high school and are the only kids to have not played any travel sports. They are on track to potentially get recruited to play college sports and they play three different sports throughout the year according to the season.
I think the keys are if a parent is athletic and is willing to spend the time to provide extra practice, they can skip travel sports. Or, if they are wealthy and can hire private coaching. But, so many lower income kids in my town get left behind at exactly the age when teen boys need to be on a team. So we have a booming high school rec basketball league. It can be done, but it such an uphill battle.
Dewey, thanks for sharing your perspective and observations. I suspect you are right that kids with access to expertise and coaching outside of the pay-to-play system have different opportunities to develop, not to mention the benefits of playing multiple sports which build cross-training skills and abilities. And kudos to you for investing in community sports! I'm glad to hear stories like yours!
The travel sports world is such a weird market. College coaches overtly say that kids should play multiple sports, need structured practice more than games, and often would benefit most from a rigorous workout plan. Driving kids around to meaningless tournaments is the exact opposite experience but the fear of missing out causes parents to buy into the pyramid scheme.
One aspect you did not mention is competitiveness. The kids who care, want to excel, want to improve, and want to win will defect to club because that’s where they will play with and against other players with the same attitudes. All of them get better as a result. The kids who just want to kick the ball around but don’t really care will play rec, and that’s fine.
Nothing is more frustrating for a kid who cares about excellence than to be on a team with kids who don’t really care and don’t have the determination to win. My son played rec as well as club and I could very clearly see the difference between the types of players. And very often my son was fuming at the end of a rec game because they could have won if not for the players who didn’t care.
I have no problem with their being club teams in grade school.
Incidentally my son started playing club at about age 7 and he continued through age 17. Many of the kids who were on his club team kept playing through high school, though not always on the same team. But I’m in an area that “cares a lot” about his sport, so the number of players who persist with club might be unusually high.
This is a good point and I observed that tensions with my own kids, too -- the unevenness of kids' investment and ability (for lack of a better word) at young ages is a factor. Some rec leagues do have tryouts for the "A" team which is one way to address this. But that only works if you're playing other community teams. The sweet spot for that approach seems to be smaller sports where there's not enough interest to have adequate teams to play each other in house.
The counterpoint to this is telling the hyper-competitive kids to like maybe chill out?
No one will remember that you won an under 8s tournament 20 years from now. Have fun and do your best. There’s a time and a place for competitiveness. I feel like Middle School age is about that time?
That could be what the person above means but I definitely have encountered competitive kids (and parents) at younger levels and it’s honestly ridiculous.
I blame Gladwell and his 10,000hrs.
I've ref some under 10 rec soccer for a while. Some parents thought that the games were World Cup games or something. I got out, didn't want to deal with that, now there's a shortage of refs state wide ... I wonder why.
I think it’s sad that everything down to sports for kids is competitive instead about play, development of skills and connection. I felt like sports in the US ends up just being about the competition rather than just recreational
We can and do talk a good game about how the goal is just to “have fun” but the kids aren’t fooled.
Oh man…none of my kids were very into sports but this bleeds to all kids activities. For many of the reasons listed in the article we wouldn’t let my daughter do competitive dance, just let her take classes and around 11 she really wanted to get serious, auditioned for the team and wasn’t good enough, but the kicker was all the serious “real” classes were behind the team wall and only available to team dancers. It was so frustrating! How could she get better if the “rec” classes they offered weren’t teaching technique and everything else was walled off only for kids who had been on the team for years? We found a studio eventually but the feeling of being behind is so real. Behind what?? Agh.
This story rings true to what I’ve seen myself and heard from other parents, Janine. We slot kids into these tracks way too early. 11 seems like exactly the right age to start to “specialize” in this way — when a child can choose to invest, for instance — and it’s ridiculous that the system is set up *not* to support that. I’m glad your daughter eventually found a studio that was the right fit!
This was also true in the 90s fwiw. When I didn't try out for the dance team at age 13/14 (no interest + knew I wasn't good enough) my next step was to join the adult class! So I was doing tap with like 30 and 40 year olds. Maybe nice for potential intergenerational experiences? I didn't really have any meaningful connections in that class though. The message I got as a teenager was "you can take this class until you die, bye". I quit dance and did martial arts instead.
It has become ridiculous. I also think it is simultaneously destroying and holding some marriages together. The frenetic pace wears down family bonds and simultaneously papers over the growing problems with busyness. I know couples who haven’t spent a weekend together in years as they alternate duties. At this point, time alone with each other terrifies them.
I totally agree with you, Scott. A friend also sent me a piece shortly after I published this that was making the case that adult lives are, in some cases, so devoid of meaning and purpose that parents get too invested in the joys and thrills that can come with the feeling of winning or excelling in sports. I think that has some explanatory power. And yet, I think the real secret to parenting successfully is finding ways to invest in our own adult wellbeing and fulfillment (and yes, our relationships, too). Thanks for writing!
It also undermines church and other religious activities (gone are the days when Sunday mornings were off-limits for kids’ activities), scouting, and any type of kid activity that can’t easily be quantified and translated into your future college application.
I don't have children, so the ramping up of this arms race had been going on for several years before I noticed it.
When I did notice it, though, I was appalled. Weird parental fantasies about fostering the next Messi or Biles are stealing people's childhoods, and you only get one childhood to live through.
I am not anti-sports. I played organized baseball, basketball, and football, and I am or have been a fan of soccer, tennis, boxing, and golf. Sports have a lot to teach kids about discipline and resilience. Sports are beautiful. When you're ten years old, though, and every weekend you're on the road again, and your coach is all about winning instead of playing--something is seriously wrong.
Love this post. I started playing soccer at 5, was in club by 10, and playing club and high school sports at the same time. I was good but not enough to get a college scholarship. I was so burnt out by college I couldn't even play intermural or rec.
It wasn't until I had my own kids and started coaching that I could heal those wounds a bit. My husband and I have agreed not to put our kids in anything but rec leagues. We are having our kids try lots of different activities, cycling through seasons with plenty of down time (no summer or winter).
And yet, as a coach of 6-year-old boys in AYSO I had a dad talk shit to his son and tell me in front of him how much his son was going to suck at goalie (which he'd never tried before). The parents (particularly the dads) made me never want to coach again. The kids were pretty great and I really loved reconnecting to the fun of the game. But the adults refuse to relax and it makes me want want to put my kids in non-sports, non-competitive activities. But there is the very ingrained part of me that feels like sports are the only legitimate form of activity.
Elizabeth, thanks for sharing this story and your reflections. I don't know what the answer is to this culture we've created, except that part of it is clearly that the parents (by which I mean us) need to calm the %&$# down. I hope you keep coaching and that your kids get to try lots of different sports and find something that they love.
I love that you wrote this. The commercialization of the youth club sports movement, in which my own kids have been deeply invested for years and —tens of thousands of dollars— is concerning. For kids who want to play in college, club sports are the gateway. This means rural middle class kids are excluded — in fact middle class kids are excluded by the club price tag. So kids who play in college (and receive scholarships) had a heavy prep ticket price. On the other hand, jobs coaching club sports and refereeing games and tournaments is a way for athletes to and find income through the sport they love. It’s a multifaceted dilemma for sure.
Thanks for your comments, Christy. It is multifaceted, for sure, and I have no illusions about diminishing the allure of club sports anytime soon. The for-profit infrastructure, which includes not just teams but sports centers/complexes and eventually NIL payouts to college athletes is just too powerful. But I do think we could benefit our kids (and ourselves) if we shifted the cultural norms to make it unusual to start these programs before kids are 11 or 12 (middle school ages).
Over here in Germany Club football (soccer) is pretty much for free, the yearly club fee is 60 Euros and that is all you have to pay. Kids get shirts and equipment for free (some wealthy parent sponsors usually pay, everyone else gets free stuff). Only shoes need to be bought but many Kids get used hand down shoes for free.
There is no cheaper activity than club sports over here. All the poor kids play club soccer and they are the most vicious and best players.
I love our local soccer club here, I spend most of my free time coaching there or just watching games, drinking free beer with the gang.
This is a model that is clearly better than the one that we have in the US!!
My nephew played travel baseball, got a full ride scholarship and then got into the minors. To then make a whopping $25k a year, not including housing or food. It's wild. I did the math and my brother basically did pay for college in the amount he paid for travel ball and all the specialty clinics.
Great post! My kids were late bloomers athletically and also didn't have the drive and "passion" that some kids might. They just wanted to have fun, be busy, and be part of a team. Now in middle and high school it's too late! Even though they are now more developmentally suited for sports and decent enough athletically, they don't have the knowledge and skills from years of rec and trying different sports to make school or club teams and the rec leagues don't really function at their ages. Which makes me sad as HS sports can be such a positive experience - they certainly were for me. It's really shame what adults have done to youth sports.
I agree with you, Julie. I wish I had a clear sense of how to create more shared investment in changing this problem, too. It clearly resonates with many others’ experiences and our kids would benefit so much from a different approach to youth athletics.
My kid went through several sports he kinda liked and wasn’t great at initially, and the pseudo-professionalization of the game pushed him right out after a year or so. It seemed crazy that he was already too old to play B-ball or soccer at 7 or 8.
This makes me so sad. I agree, this is not the society we want to live in. But I do believe the data that shows kids cycle in and out and that there is room for new kids every year. But it’s hard to be the kid that’s still developing on a team of pseudo-professionals.
I love this post! And this idea: "Like the Wait Until 8th movement to delay smart phones, a critical mass of today’s parents could decide to wait until their kids are at least in middle school to specialize in one sport."
Brilliant analysis and much needed! Thank you.
Oh boy, this is spot on. I coached HS Track and XC for years. College coaches always asked - always - ‘do they play another sport?’ Coaches love well-rounded kids.
One other thing about parents. I was often asked, what does my 4th, 5th, 6th grade athlete need to do to get ready for HS track? My answer - ‘let them play, be joyful and active, those kids will be successful’. 4th graders doing 400 repeats will learn to hate running.
So very true, Tim! A friend of mine says the same thing about rowing — start kids in middle school and you’ll make absolutely sure they don’t want to continue in high school or beyond.
I'm not even a parent, but all of a sudden I care deeply about this dang sports arms race and your proposed collective action de-escalation. Where can I sign the petition?
Great writing, and honestly, something that super should happen for all the reasons you outlined. I have volunteered in church youth groups over the years and it's wild the hoops I watched some parents jump through for sports (paying through the nose, acquiescing to every demand from the league or coach, including some pretty onerous ones if you ask me) but resented anything we asked of their girls. I'm like: "You guys! You have some choice here!"
All this to say, I'm a fan of offering less structured options and parents and community members being involved in creating those. (But then I guess we get into the subject of intentional living and us not just living on default, busy, mode)
Very well put, Emily. We do have choices here, although I think many parents feel like "everyone else" is engaged in this arms race and therefore their participation is compulsory. You're exactly right that it crowds out other forms of more intentional, values- and community-based organization -- religious life, for one -- that are probably more beneficial for kids and certainly more likely to be part of their lives into adulthood. Thank you for writing!