Youth Sport-Travel Teams-Youth Sport Lessons
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.
