Unorganized Youth Sports
Before getting into things, I wanted to clear the air. I want this to be read as, “wounds from a friend” rather than a condemnation from a critic. A loving, “I see your potential and you could be so much more than you are” sort of feedback. I love sports, and exercise in general. I think they are valuable for kids and adults alike. When my parents spring clean, they occasionally send some old school work they saved. I recently received a paper I wrote about my future profession as a fifth grader, and mine prophetically stated I would, “teach kids how to exercise.” I started playing soccer at 4 and grew up in a neighborhood full of friends that regularly organized 10 team, 4-on-4 basketball tournaments and Wiffle ball leagues, complete with tape recorded, ESPN SportsCenter-inspired commentating on said league. It was my life throughout high school, and I continued to play football as a walk-on in college at Texas A&M University, and planned on going into strength and conditioning as a professional after college. Strength training remains my primary hobby today and I even participated in a powerlifting meet as a near 40 year old father of two. Today, I still work with athletes as a physical therapist. Suffice it to say, I love sports. Over time, however, what I’ve learned I really appreciate are the intangibles, developed not exclusively through sports, but remains an invaluable tool of sport to nurture many life skills: self discipline, confidence, team work, persistence, time management, healthy habits. However, in pursuit of shorter term, less noble ends, I fear we are missing out on these benefits for a less fun, overly-organized-by-adults version, complete with professional coaching (maybe even a nutritionist and strength coach on speed dial), and year-round travel teams with a win-at-all-cost mentality, spending most nights of the week practicing, travel far and wide to fill every weekend at tournaments (where winners receive large, gaudy championship rings that make a perfect metaphor for modern youth sports…a lot of flash with no value), and eventually chew up these promising young athletes and spit out the modern adult I see every day in the physical therapy clinic: passive Fantasy League (the word “fantasy” tells plenty) “players,” too unhealthy and sedentary to be active themselves. There is no apparent change of trajectory in the near term, either. I don’t hear anyone talking about it, and most parents don’t even see a problem. I would love to share the values and character development I received from sports with my own children, but as things stand currently, the cost-benefit analysis is all out of whack, so we have opted for lots of free play around the neighborhood. Further, I would love to see those active kids naturally transitioning into fit adults that still host weekend pick-up basketball tournaments with other neighborhood parents (rather than Saturday and Sunday spent on the couch, accumulating water cooler commentary for the following Monday about what Coach should have called on that final play that could have saved the season). The following critique is to hopefully do my part to start that conversation.
As I mentioned, I have always enjoyed sports and always wanted to make it my profession. Like the other 99.9% of student athletes, I didn’t have the size or talent to make it in professional sports, but I did want to be close to it. So once I finished college, I found my way to a company across from a wealthy neighborhood in Dallas, TX. This was the first time I’d been close to youth sports since my own childhood. Things had certainly changed. Parents paid a premium for their kids to run faster, and the pressure showed. I had a coworker that had competed in the summer Olympics and he told many tales of his individual coaching sessions with high pressure parents and burned out kids. One story, in particular, still sticks out. Some kids develop earlier than others, and one of those more dominant 11 year olds was beginning to not be so dominant as his peers were catching up to his size. As his place on the rankings began to slip, he paid for more private lessons, providing more pressure to a child giving more resistance because he no longer had fun. My Olymian friend reported the dad offering gifts such as a new go cart if he would participate in his coaching sessions. Finally the child told the dad to, “get his fat a** out here and jump if you want me to jump.” On weekends, the facility hosted birthday parties where we oversaw what were supposed to be fun games. What happend more often than not, however, was we spent a majority of our time breaking up literal fist fights of kids competing against each other in silly games like capture the flag and dodgeball! That experience is when I began to rethink my relationship with sports and decided to go back to PT school.
To my surprise, though, I began to notice a recurring trend. The same sorts of kids I worked with as youth would often move on to college sports, then age out and go into the working world and I wouldn’t see them again until I began seeing unhealthy, former athletes, frequently announce their chronically “bad knee” as a source of their ongoing physical ailments. A frequent story of a promising athletic career ended too soon by an injury that never had the opportunity to heal, and a resultant adulthood physically limited and overly sedentary because of the nagging issues that began so long ago. The story usually sounds something like this: a promising young athlete who played year-round for her chosen sport throughout childhood, usually competing on demanding travel clubs to maximize her potential with higher level coaching and competition. Her weeknights consisted of multiple practices consummated by a weekend full of tournaments. Fall ball extended into the spring season, with summer break allowing more time for longer, more intense training. Sometime in her early teen years she began having some nagging knee issues related to the frequency and volume of play. Having competed at such high levels, she can still outplay her competitors, allowing for continued competition, but no rest for a weary knee. More coaches. More practice. More tournaments. But the knee only got worse, and it started to show. But, in high school there is no time for a break; college recruiters are paying attention, not to mention the sunk cost of years of time and financial investment. At this point, some players simply burnout. Tired and frustrated, it all begins to feel more like a 9-5 job than fun. The ones that do go on to college sports have more and better resources, but with no ability to recover, she continues pushing through the knee pain. The story has several common endings: (1) a career ending trauma from years of compromised play forces early retirement, (2) worsening nagging injuries degrade performance to a point where she is no longer competitive, and rides out her career on the bench, (3) or after all this time and vitality spent on this sport, the opportunity-cost of continuing no longer makes sense and she quits in frustration. This apocryphal story is not everyone’s reality, of course, but one that I frequently hear. I have a biased sample as a rehab professional, but the broader, more important point is that I continue to observe an increasingly common thread when I treat these former athletes in their 40s; they can trace many of their current musculoskeletal problems back to, a “bad knee” that started as a youth athlete.
Once a person begins to notice cracks in the drywall of their old home, it’s often an indication of more serious, fundamental problems with the house. In my opinion, youth sports are a house with a busted foundation. And my proof are these sedentary, often overweight (and frequently prediabetic and hypertensive), middle aged parents now forced to deal with these long-standing issues. And since it’s part of the suburban playbook for raising children, they are usually leading their own children down the same path. As a society, our short-sighted goals for our children appear to reward the win-at-all-cost, all-work-and-no-play mentality.
As I mentioned, I played sports throughout my own youth, and still love to play sports today. But what I took from sports was more than becoming a high level athlete. I certainly don’t see a need or benefit to jettison youth sports all together. I’m afraid, though, we are squandering the fertile field sports to provide to tend kids into well-rounded, mature, and active adults, and simply settle for maximizing athletic performance for a small window of time in the athlete’s life (and that window that’s confined to the teenage years is often to the detriment of quality of life as adults). I think we can manage a more meaningful goal than a college scholarship. And do we REALLY expect our child to become a professional athlete? The sobering statistics are estimated to somewhere around 0.00075%. Is that what we think would be best for our child, or even logical? Is that what THEY want (and we all know 16 year olds know what’s best for themselves)? Of course we want to win, but it’s equally valuable to encourage winning with integrity, good sportsmanship and humility. As parents, our kids aren’t so fragile to require stacking teams to guarantee victory, thereby flattening their small world and leaving them helpless to face the much bigger world they will soon face when their official sporting career is over. A little taste of failure is naturally bitter, but fortifies kids to bravely face adversity, and helps them find the strength and courage to overcome it. I’ll take that over winning in the short term any day.
Aside from the obvious benefit of getting some exercise (a great goal), the higher value is the long term habit of exercise. We could utilize sport to help youth to learn proper exercise technique and how to efficiently use their bodies as a tool, in addition to helping prioritize other healthy habits like getting to bed on time, and routinizing life in preparation for training and managing time to leave room for all the other tasks that need to be accomplished that day. We need less specialized sports training and more general, foundational (maybe even fun) physical development. We are an unhealthy and sedentary society, badly in need of more. It’s ironic, in fact, how common youth athletes-turned-adults abandon exercise. And yet, the dominance of sedentary knowledge work in today's economy, it’s never been more important that exercise be a part of a healthy lifestyle. If I could sell the benefits of exercise to a pharmaceutical company, I would be writing this article from my own private island, and save a boatload on my insurance premiums. We would slash the need for the ongoing management of largely preventable diseases like diabetes and obesity, which currently increase morbidity of millions Amercians and unnecessarily burden our already strained healthcare system in the process. And the problem is only getting worse. This is the first generation of children not expected to live longer than their parents. Rather than exclusive, expensive, time consuming leagues, we should be reducing the friction to be active and overcome the inertia of modern life that causes so many kids to remain at rest and playing on phones and gaming systems.
Athletics should be fun and challenging. When we remove the pressure to BE the best and, instead, DO their best, children will more likely enjoy and engage in spontaneous and creative play. When coaches and parents passively impose and dictate specialized training, students don’t inherently learn the skills of becoming a mature adult like conflict resolution, cooperation to achieve a goal, flexibility. They are also robbed of the personal responsibility to manage long term health habits by listening to, and caring for their own bodies by looking to an outside authority for guidance. Further, my observation is that they begin to resist the constant management. An implicit (or explicit) expectation to compete in year round sports is a recipe for a dislike of exercise (and nagging physical, as well as behavioral, problems).
If our goal is achieving peak athletic performance for a short window, I will continue to see chronically injured, burned out athletes that haven’t stepped in a gym since they quit in college, and I think our culture at large will continue to show the fruits of that mentality. Sports aren’t an end in and of themselves, but a microcosm of a bigger picture. And I think we are wasting it. I wish we could see past the potential scholarship opportunity and the even more remote professional career, and help our children develop into the people they could be. Sports are a relatively short, but influential window of time that we could parlay into healthier, happier adults and, therefore, families and communities.