Book Overview
“Fun” or achievement? Parents today are generally limited to a choice between two completely different types of youth team sports programs for their children. When radio and television networks began broadcasting the Little League World Series (LLWS) nationwide in the early 1950s, it sparked a revolution that transformed how children play sports today.
In just four decades, children went from creating their own informal games to competing in adult-organized competitions that mirror adult sports, with an emphasis entirely on team results. Previously, each child learned to pitch in informal neighborhood baseball games. Now, adults select which children will have the opportunity to pitch and control where, when, and how these pitches will be thrown.
For eons, informal play among children has provided opportunities for enjoyment, achievement, and far more. This societal-wide shift away from informal play fundamentally altered a key factor in helping children grow into functional adults. How has this change impacted our children? Do parents have an alternative?
"Fun"
Recreational programs are supposedly for children who “just want to play for fun.” Sports programs throughout the country provide young children with uniforms and a place on a team to play games that mimic professional sports, where one team doesn’t score much more than the other. Administrators and parents believe this constitutes fun, especially when some post-game snacks are included. Yet when compared with informal games played among themselves, our current adult-organized games are inferior at providing enjoyment. In fact, the way children are placed on teams is the exact opposite of what countless research studies show is needed to create optimal enjoyment.
Acheivement
Travel teams are supposedly for children (or their parents) focused on achievement. This achievement is measured by the team winning as much as possible. In recreational sports, everyone gets a trophy. In travel sports, only players on winning teams get them. If children don’t commit early, they’ll supposedly be left behind. As will be made abundantly clear throughout the book, early exposure is beneficial, while early specialization is harmful. Yet hundreds of thousands of parents today are being misled into putting their elementary-age children in year-round sports programs and focusing on just one sport.
In reality, so-called “elite” youth teams and tournaments are designed to maximize financial returns for operators, not to nurture participants' long-term success. Winning games and prestigious tournaments help clubs and coaches recruit the parents they need to generate revenue. But doing so comes at the expense of player development. Year-round play in grade school-aged children ensures year-round revenue, not year-round development. Early specialization just limits opportunities and increases the potential for injury. When compared with informal games played among themselves, most adults don’t realize that our travel leagues are inferior at building physical abilities and developing psychological capabilities.
Costs of organized youth sports
Articles on the costs of youth sports typically focus on club fees, coaching fees, tournament fees, uniform costs, equipment costs, and, for most kids over eight, travel costs. Twenty years ago, I saw articles detailing costs of over $10,000 for high-level, high-school-aged players. Now, children under eight are starting in club teams and taking private lessons. But the greatest costs are indirect and not easily linked. The sad part is that many direct costs and almost all indirect costs are unnecessary and avoidable.
For administrative convenience, we purposely put many young children in the same kinds of conditions that psychology researchers have used with college students over the past 50 years to induce eight of the nine symptoms of depression. As a result, the average age at which children stop playing sports is now age ten. Play is nature's method of teaching. When children quit playing sports, they lose a tremendous learning opportunity that affects the rest of their lives.
Book structure
“It’s No Fun Standing in Right Field” is about optimizing enjoyment, confidence, and achievement through youth sports. Doing so is much easier and far less costly than we’ve been led to believe. The book shares stories of parents who bucked the youth sports system to help their children succeed, along with the methods they used to do so.
This includes a liberal number of personal stories about coaching and my two boys on their very different journeys that ended up in almost the same place. My older son Eric loved basketball and started at the top of the youth soccer pyramid, while his younger brother Mark loved baseball and started at the bottom. Yet each made an important goal-scoring contribution needed to help Stanford win its first NCAA Men’s Soccer national championship game. This book reframes how we think about youth sports and explains how we can restructure them so parents don’t have to fight the system to help their children become winners in life.
The book is divided into three sections: The first focuses on how children develop. The second section focuses on youth sports programs. The final section provides a framework for parents to optimize their child’s youth sports experience.
The chart below provides insight into the book's organization. The fundamental benefit categories are covered in the book's first section. It’s difficult, for example, to understand why recreational play is inadvertently designed to minimize fun unless you have a basic understanding of theory and research on enjoyment. Similarly, it’s hard to understand why so many professional athletes now require remedial training in fundamental movement patterns unless you understand how these skills are acquired.
The ratings in the chart are generalized and very subjective. More importantly, they will vary from child to child across teams and programs. My two boys generally had a very good experience in almost every category across all five program types, while their teammates often did not. What is not in question is the poor quality of recreational programs in almost every developmental area.
Many youth sports researchers blame the parents of children on travel teams for their unrealistic expectations. The only thing that is irrational would be for parents to keep their children in such developmentally deficient recreational programs of last resort unless they had no other realistic option. The objective of the first two sections is to help you assess the best alternatives for your child.
The Developmental Model paradigm shift
The term "Developmental Model" originated in a 1999 research paper I wrote about two highly successful pilot programs I implemented in AYSO that grouped children by developmental level rather than by chronological age to increase their enjoyment. My work has been well-received by a few highly regarded members of the academic community who became aware of it. But after years of researching youth sports and struggling to gain support for an obviously successful program and training methods among the general public, I realized we desperately needed to reframe how we think about youth sports.
The word paradigm is defined as a model or a philosophical and theoretical framework. Well-known examples include Copernicus’s theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The transition from the general population's belief that the stars revolved around the Earth to the Earth's orbiting the Sun is called a paradigm shift and took several hundred years. Prior to the LLWS, adults viewed youth sports as informal, self-organized games among children. In contrast, parents today view youth sports as adult-organized competitions modelled after Little League. This paradigm shift took about four decades. The current crisis in youth sports should enable the next paradigm shift to occur much more quickly.
The Developmental Model framework combines the self-determination of free play with the effectiveness of Eastern European physical education models, integrating them in a way compatible with our existing societal structures for youth sports participation. It also provides parents with a framework for determining when children are better off playing informally and learning from their parents and friends, and when to seek help and better competition. It offers guidance on selecting programs and coaches that best fit their children’s developmental needs and on more realistically evaluating their children’s progress. This new lens will quickly bring into focus the ways, large and small, in which we can structure children’s sports to enable enjoyment, build confidence, and achieve results never before possible.