What Modern Youth Sports Can Tell Us About America

The photo on this post came to me in the daily “photos from this date” email I get from one of the cloud storage providers. It’s become one of my daily rituals to click that link, delete some of the chaff, and then send Erin a couple of good ones from when our kids were younger.

I’ll be honest, I miss coaching softball. Absent the pandemic year, I coached both my daughter’s teams from the oldest being in first grade to the youngest leaving sixth. It was the daily rite of spring.

I used to drive the dad who coached with me bonkers with the way I made the lineups. At the younger ages, I moved kids to new positions every inning. I also shuffled the batting order every game. (I kept a somewhat obsessively detailed spreadsheet to make sure I balanced out every girl in every position over the course of the season.)

If you’ve ever attended an age-eight-and-under community softball game, you know those innings can be loooong. Two innings standing in right field without touching the ball could be an eternity. I never wanted a kid to feel like they were always being relegated to the outfield – or to the bottom of the batting order.

This is not the approach you’ll find being taken on your local travel team. The parents of those kids are spending their time and money for a very different kind of experience. Competition and specialization are baked in.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that for those kids and those families. But I do worry a little bit about where this all heads for society as a whole.

I’m a Gen Xer of the “go play outside” era. Our childhoods were a lot less scripted than those of our own daughters. I played community sports. Little League, Biddy Basketball at the YMCA. But we just played those sports to … play those sports. It wasn’t a means to an end.

I am not looking to paint with a super broad brush here. Plenty of kids fall in love with a sport at an early age, want to play it as much as possible, and have families able to support them in doing that. It’s not any different from getting super involved in dance or agricultural clubs or other non-sport activities.

But I have heard a lot of parents over the years say that sports are how their kid will be able to pay for college, which to them otherwise feels financially out of reach, and without realizing how huge the gap is between “best player on a seventh-grade team” and “good enough to play Division I sports.”

Travel teams then become one more pressure point we put on parents. They have to get their kids into the best preschool, the best summer programs, the best travel team, the best dual-credit opportunities. We put all this pressure on families and kids to do everything the “right way” before high school graduation, with the fear that if they don’t, they won’t be able to make it afterwards.

I am convinced that this relentless feeling of economic precarity lies upstream of so many of the societal problems we face right now. When everyone’s worried about falling behind, or seeing other people pulling ahead, we lose something fundamental about being part of a community.

Everyone deserves the dignity of a good job, reliable healthcare, a place of their own and a family if they want one.

And kids should always get to play games together.

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P.S. And just like the rest of the economy, private equity is now destroying youth sports.