Youth Sport Directed Syndrome

There have been so many changes in the field of youth sport that not only would it be hard to list them it seems impossible to determine the long range effects of these changes. But the short range effects do not look to good.
Today the youth of our nation is so over-coached and directed by adults one has to wonder how our children can think at all.

Gone are the playgrounds and parks where kids worked out their differences between themselves. Gone are the pick-up games where children refereed their own games and decided if a ball was fair or foul and made their own lineups. Can you imagine?

Given the current state of youth-directed sport I cannot imagine how we ever chose up sides and played so many sports and games without adult assistance or direction.

What is perplexing about the whole thing is that for the most part it is the baby-boomer generation who played so freely and creatively who ushered in the “youth sport adult directed syndrome” we have today.

How did we get here?  The exodus to the suburbs surely had something to do with it. I think the economic affluence of this generation also had something to  do with it. Children of today have so many more things than the baby-boomer generation. Perhaps it can be blamed on technology.  Let’s face it you do not have to go to far today to be connected to another human being. If you are  reading this then you are connected, or at least have the capacity to be connected.

How does the mindset of a free thinking generation create a generation that appears to be less active, less productive in creating new and different games to play? I am not sure. 

From The New York Times--William C. Rhoden

In the bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland world of the N.C.A.A., where up is often down, athletes are told that they are “regular students” but are treated as anything but. They are commodities who facilitate a semiprofessional on-campus entertainment industry. Through lucrative television contracts and sponsor partnerships, football and basketball finance the N.C.A.A. headquarters and an enforcement staff that polices overzealous coaches and keeps players in their place.

Nothing that we do not know---just something that we do not want to acknowledge.  Both football and basketball do not have minor leagues systems like baseball.  Their (football and basketball) minor league system is college. And right behind it high school. 

Highlands Ranch, a 9-year-old boy has special tutors in baseball, basketball and football and a certified athletic trainer who videotapes his workouts. In Bradenton, Fla., a Broomfield teenager practices basketball five hours a day at a sports factory that produces pro and Olympic stars.In Littleton, two dozen youngsters start the school day with a 90-minute soccer class, part of the experimental curriculum at Jefferson County's first charter school.In Thornton, a mother downloads the computerized results of a novel test that has measured her daughter's potential in 43 sports. And in Monument, a father writes a $2,500 check to a company that will scour the nation for a college scholarship for his daughter.Welcome to the high-tech, hypercompetitive world of children's sports, a bustling subculture where time-starved parents chauffeur their booked-up children from one activity to another, spend thousands of dollars a year chasing often elusive dreams and sacrifice their own social lives for child's play.

The Above is From The Rocky Mountain News-- From The Year 2000.

Not much has changed from seven years ago in fact things have probably ramped up a bit.  I have been to so many places that give private baseball lessons, watched thousands of kids getting lessons, been told by hundreds of parents that their kids are taking lessons, that if I had a dollar for all of these my fortune with rival Bloomberg's.  Actually I am a proponent of kids taking lessons for a number of reasons which I will address in another posting.

Along with the lessons high school sports has also been a growing industry. I like to call it an introduction to professional sports at the high school level.  You have kids coming home from practices and games at midnight.  I have found this is not a good time for a kid to do his homework, or study. But it is what it is-and once again it is what we have created.  It is bigger than what I can control and effect so I try and navigate it. 

It is no mistake that kids drop out of sports at age 13 and from what I see and read obesity is on the rise.  Now there are many more reasons for this drop-out rate and the scale going up other than the ones listed above.  But make no mistake about it, when you need to take lessons, try out for highly competitive school teams and pay huge sums to play on travel teams that go to Australia it can be daunting for parents and kids alike. And the  funny part about it, it is that after you pay you are not guaranteed that your child will play.

We need to have a strong two tiered system. There is nothing the matter with having serious competitive teams in youth sport, it is just at what age and when. However, we need places where kids can play well into their teens without having to be on a team. Schools need to stay open in the evenings and offer this for the kids. Towns need to have strong intra-mural programs that cater to the recreational athlete and we need to make our playgrounds places for kids to meet and play games.  This is just the beginning of an overhaul that is needed in the system.

The victory has redefined the 61-year-old Coughlin, the way it does any coach who wins a championship after so many years of trying. Coughlin, saying that it is “a very select group,” is one of only six current head coaches who can brag of leading a team to a Super Bowl victory.

“The perception of you does change,” Tony Dungy, the Colts coach who won his first Super Bowl in 2007, said Friday. “People are going to think that because you win, that now you have the answer. Now some of the things that you say do work.”

It has already happened to Coughlin. Against the backdrop of the scouting combine and the coming draft, reporters peppered him about the best way to nurture a young quarterback, given Coughlin’s success with Eli Manning.

The queries served as a jarring indication of how quickly things change. Before the Giants began one of the greatest playoff runs in league history — three road victories and a Super Bowl win over an undefeated team — the questions about Manning were far tougher, and usually centered on Coughlin’s inability to mold him into a consistent quarterback, never mind a championship one.

But now Coughlin is atop his profession, and even his peers said that the perception had changed.

“Championships define players, they define coaches,” Vikings Coach Brad Childress said. “I don’t think there is any question it changes the way you’re looked at.”

Coughlin enjoyed the warm reception, especially since championship teams