The other day, in the precious two-hour gap between dropping my youngest off at his toddler program and picking him back up, there were any number of things I could have done (and had to do): pay bills, clean out the garage, work on an article, figure out what the orange stain on the mudroom floor could possibly be. Instead, I made a spreadsheet: of my kids’ youth sports commitments. The athletic options for 8- and 6-year-old boys are so many, and so frequent, I had to summon the powers of Excel to figure out which sports they could do, and when, without all of us going crazy. Or broke.
There are no more seasons anymore, really, in youth sports. In communities like ours, children as young as 4 or 5 can play pretty much anything they want, year-round, for town teams or “club” teams. And that’s a shame.
How can too much choice be a bad thing? Naturally, kids like mine who enjoy sports are all for, say, indoor baseball in November or the $1000 summer lacrosse “club” team, especially if their friends are doing it. But many parents grumble that town leagues are being diluted as for-profit club teams and developmental clinics pull the best of the best from the local teams. Others worry that if year-round or “elite”-level teams are available, their kids need to join ranks in order to have a shot at making increasingly competitive middle or high-school teams. Doctors like my orthopedic surgeon husband are concerned that young kids who specialize in certain high-level athletics week-after-week, month-after-month are at risk for overuse conditions and other sports injuries that used to only afflict adult athletes.
Those are all big problems, but when I watch my six-year-old practicing pop-ups in an indoor baseball “facility” while it’s snowing outside, what I think about most is burnout. I played a handful of sports as a kid, and I remember the excitement of dusting off my field hockey stick at the start of the school year, or my mitt when the snow started to melt. There was a sport for every season, at least until the high school years, and I welcomed the change. Just as snowfall seems more magical in December than March, so does a freshly Zamboni’d ice rink. This is what former NBA player Bob Bigelow talked about most in his book, Just Let the Kids Play. For kids whose parents afford them every opportunity to play any sport they want, at the highest levels attainable through the magic of money and Minivan chauffeurs, Bigelow feels only pity. “They’ve had their childhood robbed of them so their parents can create another athletic Frankenstein,” he told ESPN The Magazine earlier this year. While I was a writer for Sports Illustrated a decade ago, I wrote about many of these kids, and was often glowing—the talent that some precocious athletes exhibit today is, after all, nothing short of awesome—but at other times, skeptical.
What Bigelow and many other youth sport advocates want is not less sports, per se, but a greater variety of lower-stakes sports, especially at the young ages. This is a model we are embracing with our kids, but because you can sample from so many different kinds of sports all year, even this can create Frankensteins of a different sort: After a day of shepherding two children between four different athletic events, I’m left feeling a little monstrous myself. “More sports,” even town-based, low-pressure ones, can eat up family time, to the point that many of my friends feel that weekends are more stressful, scattered, and draining than weekdays. It takes real restraint to say “no” to an activity that the other kids in the class are doing—and military-grade logistical plotting to coordinate schedules so friends or siblings can participate in a sport together, on the same team. (And with tryouts becoming common in many sports starting in kindergarten, there’s no telling if your child will be able to play alongside his best buddy anyway.)
As for now, our general rules are that we: allow our kids to play no more than two sports per season at most; stand firm that our kids will every so often miss a game or practice in favor of important family events (or the occasional birthday party, because, c’mon, they are in first and third grade); and remind our kids over and over again that sportsmanship, effort, teamwork, and fun are more important than whether you are on the A1a team or A1b team. We’re still feeling our way through this, however, and realize the rules may change—particularly since our 3-year-old will no doubt try some things his brothers do, which means that the family sports machine, as taxed as it currently seems, is actually only running at about 66% capacity. Feedback is welcome from readers who’ve gone or are going through the same thing and have found a way to help their kids balance a healthy interest in sports with good mental and physical health generally. In the meantime, I have to go down to the basement to tell my older boys to stop playing “keep it up” with a day-old balloon so they can come up for breakfast. But it’s so hard; it sounds like they’re having the most fun they’ve had all week, and it has cost nothing.
photo credit: Simon Sees via Photo Pin, cc
