The key success factor in youth sports and the consequences for failing to provide it
- David Verso
- Mar 4
- 5 min read
My wife and I participated in many youth sports as children, and both played in college. Yet our experience was of little help in determining how to start our oldest child, Eric, in organized youth sports. After talking with other parents and doing some research, they all seemed similar, so we ended up putting him in a youth baseball league run by our local community park.
Through some good fortune, he had a good experience in that league and subsequent ones. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized how lucky he and my younger son, Mark, were. It was only through years of coaching and research that I realized that the most common youth sports programs are inadvertently designed to cause children to fail.
While writing this book, I volunteered to mentor a few young coaches in the local Parks and Recs basketball league, where my boys played as children. When I arrived at the appointed time, I was met by the young staffer assigned to coach the team and by three children who had barely turned six. The smallest of the three was a girl I’ll refer to as Kat, who exuded the confident competence of Katniss Everdeen, the lead character in The Hunger Games.
Two of the children lacked nearly all the motor skills required for the sport. They couldn’t walk forward while bouncing the ball without losing control. Kat initially refused to dribble. When I asked why, she proudly dropped to her knees and started dribbling with her left hand while indignantly glaring at me as if to ask why she should waste her playtime by bouncing a ball for me.
Children don’t play basketball to dribble. They want to make baskets. Unfortunately, doing so required heaving an adult-sized women’s ball at an eight-foot rim. Although it made no developmental sense to reinforce such poor motor patterns, I tried in vain to help them learn to generate enough force to lift the ball above the rim. Undeterred by fatigue that made a difficult task almost impossible, only the end of practice time could convince this tiny girl to stop before she made a basket.
Kat was arguably the most advanced child relative to her age among the 32 players in the Under-8 (U8) league. She, at a similar age, was far more advanced than my son Mark and on par with Eric. When my boys reached high school and stopped playing organized basketball because of time constraints, each had become the MVP of their travel team. In his last season, Eric’s coach once asked his four teammates to clear out to the side of the court to see if Eric could score by himself against a 2-3 zone. Kat quit basketball within one year.
The reason for the stark difference in outcomes is captured in a famous clip from The Hunger Games website, President Snow states that "hope is the only thing stronger than fear." As the picture on the landing page of this website, of Eric standing on a step stool holding a basketball, demonstrates, we made sure our boys' hopes of making a basket could be turned into beliefs with effort. In contrast, our youth sports programs are needlessly structured to destroy the hopes of far too many children, including Kat.
In the opening game of the basketball season, one child refused to enter the building. Another ran across the court to her parents' arms before half-time and refused to return. Another boy acted out so much in practice that his mother was too embarrassed to continue bringing him. She said the same thing happened the last time he enrolled, two years earlier. These children would have been far better off if their parents had never enrolled them in the basketball program and instead played with them using a small basket.
The children were not the only people who quit the program. My attempts to help children succeed in a system designed to fail them were confusing to the coaches I sought to mentor and to the parents observing my practices. Soccer allowed me to overcome our failed system in a way basketball would not. The coaches readily recognized that my teaching methods improved each child's skills, but they felt they were far too inefficient to win games.
Change in highly bureaucratic organizations only happens from the top. The city's basketball program could be drastically improved in a few days if a few parents got together and loudly complained at a public meeting. I realized I could not help until a small group of parents took initiative. I wrote this book to encourage this to happen.
Learned helplessness
Psychologists have developed a term for the process of destroying hope. They call it learned helplessness. Much like asking children to shoot for baskets they cannot make, researchers have put animal and human subjects in conditions where they are guaranteed to fail. In a paper summarizing 50 years of experience with learned helplessness, Martin Seligman, who pioneered this line of research, stated that it “produced eight of the nine symptoms (of depression), with the only exception being suicide and suicidal thoughts—an unlikely symptom to be produced in the laboratory by mild aversive events.”
Researcher Peter Gray went one step further, indicting youth sports in his column on play in Psychology Today. In an 8-part column on teenage suicide, he pointed directly at Little League baseball and the emergence of other organized youth sports as some of the main contributors to the four-decade increase in teenage suicides starting in the 1950s.
To be clear, Gray was not suggesting that playing organized youth baseball will directly cause a teen to commit suicide. At age ten, I had about as bad an experience in youth baseball as a child could have, and I was fine. Similarly, when Kat later told me she quit basketball, she was more self-assured than ever.
A good analogy for understanding Gray’s argument is to think of play like a vaccine. Play is nature's way of inoculating children against the type of harm they will face as adults. When children are free to choose how they play, they naturally play in ways that help them meet future challenges. Our organized youth sports programs, which are centered on the needs of the team, no longer allow play to do what nature intended.
Youth sports are not the only “vaccine” available to children. When I spoke with Kat, she proudly explained that she was a dancer and that basketball was “not her thing.” Other children find music. One of Gray’s articles included his new theory about how the emergence of video games was the source of the long decline in teenage suicide.
As I explain in the book, the inflection point coincided with Nintendo packaging Tetris with its revolutionary gaming systems. Suddenly, children could turn on a TV or hold a game in their hands that delivered many of the benefits described in Section One of the book that playing sports with their friends once did. Unfortunately, the quest for increased monetization has undermined the effectiveness of many computer games.
The argument I present in my book is that it makes far more sense to return youth sports to their original purpose. In the worst case, we can easily make them the inexpensive, fun activities they once were. But rather than do that, why not take advantage of proven solutions that will make youth sports better than they ever were?
