The Youth Sports Industrial Complex

I’ve been meaning to send this one for several years, and the only reason it’s taken me this long is I know I’m going to eat my words. So there, I said it. This is more cathartic than anything. I don’t pretend to have the answers or even a sound argument. Tomorrow I might disagree with everything I’m about to say.

But for now, here is where I stand – “strong opinions held loosely” and all that:

The second weekend in June is a momentous and anxiety-ridden occasion for a lot of families across the United States: Tryouts for travel soccer (using soccer as a proxy for all travel sports; I realize they’re not all the same).

It’s a two-day game of musical chairs in which soccer clubs have players “try out” for their respective teams. Kids as young as four are given “offers,” sometimes by multiple teams, to commit thousands of dollars and several weekends of the year to have their kid kick a ball around with a bunch of other kids. If your kid doesn’t get an offer from the “top” team on the club to kick a ball around with other kids, a lower tier team is happy to take your money to have your kid kick a ball around with other kids (or a higher tier team on a lower tier club club; it gets complicated).

What’s presented is a meritocracy where the best kids get offers on the best teams, the worst kids get offers on the worst teams, and everyone else is sorted out in between.

But of course this is not a meritocracy; it’s a business enterprise. And in any business, the goal is to generate as much revenue as possible by retaining well-paying customers and attracting new ones. That’s not to say some of the best players don’t make the best teams, but even the most naive parents understand the politics. What about the kid whose parents bought all the new jerseys? Or maybe they sponsor a hole at the annual golf outing? Or maybe they’ve already had three kids come through the program and written checks to the club for 20k?

Most parents I know bemoan the whole thing – weekends spent in nondescript suburbs bouncing from Panera to B-Dubs to Olive Garden, sitting out rain delays in Clarion Inn lobbies making small talk about granite countertops with parents they don’t like or even care to get to know. But they keep coming back, year after year, as if resigned to the fact that there really is no other way.

But is there?

In my experience, there are four main reasons parents put their kids in travel soccer before middle school (which used to be the norm).

1. They want them to have a chance to make the high school team and are afraid they’ll be too far behind if everyone else is playing travel and their kid isn’t.
2. Rec soccer reaches a point of diminishing returns; it’s supposed to be recreational but if your child isn’t receiving good coaching and as a result getting better, he won’t actually have any fun.
3. Everyone’s kid is in organized sports, so if your kid wants to play anything, he’s going to have to be in it, and if all of his friends have bailed on Rec, he’s forced to as well.
4. Their kid begged them to do it and parents want to support their kids’ passions.

I’ve got plenty of rebuttals for 1-3, but #4 is the most difficult. We all want to support our kids and we’ll do so at almost any cost. If your kid is begging to do something that promotes physical health, teamwork, problem-solving, and all the other benefits of team sports, how can you withhold that from him?

This leads us to a deeper question about how our kids spend their time and with whom. Specifically, kids should be spending the majority of their play time with other kids, with few rules, and with limited adult supervision – whether that’s playing sports, climbing trees, or looking for frogs (plenty of literature out there on this topic but I’m too lazy to list it all here).

As for youth sports, Norway seems to have figured it out by having kids wait until age 12 before they commit to a sport.

Which brings us back to #3. If no one is out there playing like we did in the 80s, my kids are going to have no one to play with, and then it’s on me to entertain them, which quite frankly I’m not willing to do.

This topic brings up some difficult questions:

1. Should we have our kids participate in something we fundamentally disagree with because there is no alternative? Consider the slippery slope there.
2. At what point do kids know what’s best for them? What about your 12-year-old who says he’d rather not be in Advanced Math because he doesn’t like Math?
3. How much of the Youth Sports Industrial Complex is really about the parents and not the kids (around 70% quit by age 11)? This one is pretty obvious.

I think one of the reasons I’ve been hesitant to write this piece is because I don’t have a conclusion, let alone an answer. I love my kids. I love sports. I love watching them play sports. But in four years I don’t want to be in an Olive Garden in Perrysburg lamenting a system I chose to enter.

Then again, as I mentioned in the opening, I might just love it.

Especially if they’re still serving unlimited salad and breadsticks.