Causes for Concern

Today's blog was guest-written by Pete Piscitello.  Pete is the Executive Director of the CYO of Johnson and Wyandotte Counties in Kansas.  They CYO-JWA is doing a new series on trouble spots in youth sports, and we hope you will find his comments interesting.  

Dear Sport Community,

As parents, we all have decisions to make when it comes to what activities our children are involved in. For the majority of Americans this includes a form of sport. The common belief is that youth sports are great for keeping kids active, encouraging social interaction and developing character. It's an easy sell since children love games and they love to run around, making youth sports an easy hit. There's also a sport for every season. Mom and Dad can keep the kids busy year round and enjoy watching their son or daughter play on the weekends. For decades it seems the cycle repeated itself: sign-up for local league, drop the kids off at practice once or twice each week, game on Saturday, rinse and repeat. The kids would reach high school and if they had the talent, continue to play. It was easy to discern we were doing right by our kids because there was not much harm in sports.

If this sounds like a story from the good old days, you should know the good old days weren't that long ago. That was my own experience in youth sports and I graduated high school in 2003.  The times have changed.

A brief history of youth sports in our country may help to provide some context when considering current issues. For  the first half of the twentieth century, youth sport was a realm dominated by lower class families and immigrants in large American cities. City tournaments were about as high profile as competition got outside of schools. Scholastic sports also gained popularity with elementary, middle and high school sports spreading. The YMCA began to offer organized programs, but suffered during the Great Depression. 

It was not until after World War II that middle and upper class families got more involved and things became competitive outside the schools. Perhaps the best known national competition, the Little League World Series was first held in 1947 (though ESPN was not around to provide national coverage). Other sports soon followed. By the 1960’s families engaged in “pay to play”, which marks the beginning of the modern era of youth sports. This mirrors the path of our own CYO, which began in earnest in 1946 under the guidance of Tom Dorney as the first full-time director of CYO. It's interesting that our local CYO was going against the grain at that time by focusing on sports that based in the schools. Many elementary school leagues closed down when confronted by “pay to play” competition and fears over the safety of sports. Regardless, by the early 1970’s our program took off and it began to resemble what you see today.

For much of the period we’re calling the modern era, youth sports were played pretty much as described above. Families began to see more and more options for their children (particularly for girls) but participation levels continued to rise and kids switched sports by the season. Leagues were usually confined to a single season, games were played within the community, and practices were limited during the week so that kids could focus on schoolwork.

As far back as the 1960’s there was a subset of the population who began to see sports as an avenue to gain admission and receive scholarships to college. That idea became more prominent during the 70’s and 80’s, but seemed to reach a different level in the 1990’s. That bred more competition among parents and children to find the best instruction or the best team to showcase talent for recruiters. Not coincidentally, it’s also during the last decade of the 20th century that the proliferation of what we now call “club” or “travel” sports began to take-off. According to The Atlantic article referenced earlier, “in 1995 the Amateur Athletic Union sponsored about 100 national championships for youth athletes; about a decade later that number had grown to over 250.” The AAU, as it is commonly known, may be the most popular long-standing example of this new frontier, but it wasn’t alone. After the explosion of youth soccer in America during the 1980’s, the club soccer model used for years in Europe and South America became more popular stateside. "Premier” teams became a common goal for ambitious youngsters. With all the elite athletes in a community on one team, those teams now had to travel to find competition. This spurred a dramatic growth in the business of weekend tournaments as a sort of local tourism industry. It seems the 1990’s brought to the forefront what we had known since the 60’s: people will pay a great deal to take part in sports. In our efforts to “get ahead”, adults had created a world where sports were no longer just a kids game. These games were big business and everyone wanted a piece.

All this brings us to our youth sports culture today. In the past decade, community based “recreation” leagues have taken a backseat to expensive club programs. School based sports are a thing of the past in many communities. For example, a standout soccer player between the ages of 15-18 is likely to never play for his or her high school team. A basketball player may play high school ball, but in most places they consider that inferior to their AAU program. That’s where the college coaches recruit anyway. But it does not just start in high school, because these things trickle down. Now the competition is fierce just to get on the high school team or their club counterpart. This has led some parents to start training their kids year-round in a specific sport as young as 3-5 years old. That child can’t tie her shoelaces, but we have already decided for her what activity she’s going to spend 40+ hours each week perfecting for the next decade…

This isn’t to suggest that today’s sports culture is all bad, far from it. For one, there are many more opportunities for participation today than there once was (even if those opportunities have a price tag). There are also some great coaches helping boys and girls grow up and build virtue, just like they always have. Yet the good stuff doesn’t need fixed, it’s the concerns that need addressed. That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks here on the website addressing the causes of concern in youth sports today. More importantly, we're also going to consider how we go about changing things for the better. We’ll discuss the growth of specialization, the excessive pressures placed on young athletes, the “professionalizing” of amateur athletics, rising costs and growing injury concerns. We hope to provide some possible solutions while stimulating discussion in our parishes, schools and homes. Throughout this series, be sure to get on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels to share your own experiences and join the discussion.

We all want our kids to have the best childhood possible and we want them to have fun while participating in sports. The vast majority of parents are trying to do the right thing when they make decisions on youth sports. It’s just that making the right decision today is so hard. It should not be that way. Sports should be fun for the kids involved. It should also be fun for the families who get to watch children take part with a big smile on their faces. We hope you’ll join us over the next several weeks as we dive into the concerns, questions and  solutions to assuring a great environment in youth sports!