An old wrestling head (not me!) laments the problems of youth sports
Sometimes in an unexpected, tucked-away place I’ll come across a piece of writing that hits home. Brandon Day, a veteran youth wrestling coach, wrote a piece for the Times Herald in Port Huron, Michigan, and he opens bluntly: “After 17 years coaching at the high school level, I am not a big fan of the youth sports culture in America today”.
In “Brandon Day: Our youth sports culture is broken,” Day, in what was his first column, writes:
I don’t think we are developing better athletes and/or people in our current system. We have developed a culture that will not serve our student-athletes well as they grow into adulthood. We have organizations and private coaches that are making a profit filling parents’ heads full of false information and dreams of scholarships rather than focusing on the development of the athletes, regardless of their skill levels.
The problem is fueled from multiple sources, as Day says, but many of us parents can take a look in the mirror to find the roots. I once had this dreamy view of sports, with teams that got to the top by battling it out and earning their keep. But as I’ve gotten older, I see things for what they often are. Recruiting and packed teams frequently get you there. Lots and lots of kids left behind.
I want to excuse the pro version of this. After all, it is literally the job of pro teams to pack their squads and win. But at every other level, including college, our desire to cheer, to stand on the sideline of the winner with the winning logo and the winning hat, has eclipsed competition, and teams stack themselves, with coverage in local papers adding to the problem. “Who won?” always eclipses “How was that team built?”
As a result, youth coaching, ostensibly an endeavor to help the many, has become focused on the few. Coach Day says coaches have lost the pleasure of coaching the “sixth man, the back-up, or the utility guy”–coaches gravitate, in a way Malcolm Gladwell described in Outliers, toward the talented, even at young ages. I have seen this; I have watched coaches pile all over themselves to take credit for high-level athletes, when any fool can see that it is the raw ability and toughness of the athlete themselves that is the main factor in their success.
Day also writes of a time when kids weren’t competing in organized leagues when young: “We weren’t burned out from constantly competing for meaningless trophies at a young age.”
At his school, Richmond, Day said he developed a system in which “We wanted to retain as many kids as possible, because oftentimes the kid who was great in third grade isn’t so great in 11th grade.” This has become increasingly difficult because, lured by the promise of scholarships, parents pull their kids from teams and clubs very early in the process, moving to what they perceive as better situations–which sometimes they are, but often they’re not.
Day concludes by saying “there is nothing more depressing than seeing that kid who was once a great youth or middle school-level athlete walk around the halls of your school and no longer competes because he or she can’t deal with potential failure because of the pressure they were put under as a 12-year-old.” Again, I myself have seen a kid, after one promising season, pulled out of a situation they were happy with to go to a “better” (and often high-priced) club. I share with Day the sadness of seeing that athlete a few years later completely out of the sport–too much, too early.
Our youth sports culture has destroyed a process of athletic development in the interest of academies and packed teams, an ethos driven by a misunderstanding of what “We’re #1!” should mean in youth sports–after all, what’s the point of being #1 if there’s hardly anyone playing?
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While this certainly exists, it is not universal. Both my kids had good experiences playing youth sports and continue to play into senior year in high school in very competitive programs. Even on a nationally ranked team, there is a culture of caring about the kids and wanting them to play and participate. If a kid gets burned out it’s usually on the parent for pushing too much. Or maybe the kid just doesn’t have the passion for the sport, and that’s ok.
I remember when I played soccer in high school in the 80’s, there was a small high school in our division, Riverside who had a nice five to eight year run as being one of the best soccer programs in the state of New Jersey. They produced a couple division one players and many other players who played at the collegiate level, but the philosophy behind their success had more to do with developing the “role” players on their teams. One man, Pete Hatton was the architect of the development of these kids. He was a former professional player in England who ran the Delanco Soccer Club, a small, sleepy town huddled next to Riverside on the banks of New Jersey, just across Northeast Philadelphia. His goal was to keep the kids together and develop them ALL in his Delanco program so that when they reached high school, they would have had many years of playing soccer together. He had his handful of star players, but he and his coaches really did a great job at developing the supporting players. By the time these kids made it to high school they were a solid team. Every kid on the field who wore their maroon and white jersey could play well. They all understood how to play the game and work together as one unit. Today, those star players would have most likely been lured by all star club teams.