Parents Transforming Youth Sports
- David Verso
- Mar 1
- 6 min read
In a town in the Pacific Northwest, a parent has organized an informal soccer game where parents in the neighborhood bring their small children, and the kids just play. There are no children sitting on the bench. No children are being told what to do and when to do it. No mercy rules. No rushing to assigned practice and game times. No payments for uniforms.
When children want to play, they show up and play. When they get tired of doing so, they go home. It is the kind of play that countless generations of grandparents had as children, but adapted to the current norms of raising children. When children and parents are in control, they naturally focus on modifying play to support development. When organizations control play, they naturally focus on what they care about - ease of operation and finances.
The focus of the development model is not control of play, but rather how to use that control to optimize the experience for children. A far better example of the development model comes from a father I know who makes his living by working with elite baseball players. Like almost all new parents, he followed social norms and enrolled his child in T-Ball. He did the best he could as a coach, but it was not a great experience.
The following season, he became frustrated with the league's decision to adopt machine pitch despite his long presentation about development (an explanation of this and other development factors is found in section two of the book). When this decision forced him to step back and consciously consider the merits of youth baseball, he quickly concluded that there would be numerous developmental advantages for his child to play wiffleball in the street of his cul-de-sac with a friend instead.
The better cues for learning how to hit that initially sparked the dad’s questioning of youth baseball were just the start. Most of the time at T-Ball is spent organizing 25 – 30 little kids rather than actually playing. In contrast, wiffleball simplifies the game to its essence of pitching and hitting. As a result, one game of wiffleball provided each child with more at-bats than they would have in a whole season of organized play, without all the boring parts like sitting on the bench or standing in the field doing nothing.
Furthermore, the children didn’t just get far more at-bats; they also got far better at-bats. As each child improved, the father could begin to individually challenge them by throwing the ball faster and making it move. Instead of waiting two years, when enough children were ready to pitch, the father could act as a guide and let them take over pitching as soon as his child and his friend were ready.
Organized youth sports are, in many instances, nothing more than an empty facade of play. They have evolved to give adults the illusion of real play, but, like the heavily processed versions of food that companies suggest parents hand out as snacks after these games, they are devoid of the value that natural play provides. The critical part of play in baseball is creating a fun way for children to develop hand-eye coordination. Hank Aaron grew up picking cotton as a child in the Depression-era Deep South and learned to swing by hitting bottle caps with a broom handle. Yet Aaron ended up breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. Similarly, numerous professional soccer players learned to play by tying plastic bags or clothes together, as depicted by US National team star Christian Roldan in an Adidas ad he made as a child
Unfortunately, few parents can replicate the informal soccer game in the Pacific Northwest described earlier. The per capita income of that community is almost double that of the wealthiest metropolitan regions and multiple times that of most communities. Few children and families are fortunate enough to have such access to abundant green space and open facilities. In many communities, this space sits locked up and unused by anyone except organized youth leagues, which possess the bureaucrats capable of dealing with the bureaucrats in control of the resources.
Yet it is not the resources that matter most, but instead what parents do with them. We can rethink how we use our resources, such as school play areas and church parking lots that sit empty throughout much of the week. Members of the PTA and church councils can provide children from almost every community with a better experience than most privileged children receive if they choose to do so.
Organized sports are built around standardized games, for standardized children, living in standardized communities. The only metrics that matter are team results and operating finances. The former is important for coaches and parents, while the latter is important to administrators. The effectiveness of play is an afterthought. For efficiency's sake, play in rural North Dakota is organized just like urban Miami.
The development model takes the exact opposite approach. Children are constantly regrouped by their rapidly changing, unique needs. Rules are adopted to unique environmental constraints. Dribbling through the swing set is encouraged, while any ball in the flower garden is out of play. The brick wall on the goal line is encouraged to be used as a feature, prompting creative ways to score. It seems complicated, but it is not. Two generations ago, every child could do so.
It took humans thousands of years to develop basic things such as controlling fire, planting crops, and making a wheel. But with the right institutions and models, children continue to accomplish increasingly amazing things. They do so not because they are pushed, but because the rich environment they’ve been given enables them to express themselves in ways that were never before possible.
To help you understand what is possible, let me illustrate with childhood stories of some young adults whose parents are very close to me. As young girls, Emily and Erin both had parents and older siblings who loved sports and were very active in them. They, on the other hand, were known as “flower pickers,” the type of child who finds looking at butterflies, talking to friends, or virtually anything else more interesting than playing in the organized game their parents put them in the middle of.
Emily eventually became a dancer and, to this day, has never shown interest in sports, despite having the potential to be very good at them. She had exceptional control of her body, which allowed her to properly learn to execute an instep kick, far more quickly than anyone I have ever taught. Erin, on the other hand, became a state champion soccer player. The difference was that Erin was consistently placed in an environment that would lead to success. This eventually allowed her to experience what makes soccer so enjoyable to play for so many people in so many regions of the world. As an adult, she has become a soccer coach to help the next generation experience this joy.
Then there is a young man I’ll call Phil, because of his selfless nature and the ability to play the piano and sing, much like the character Phil Connors at the end of the 1990s comedy movie classic, Groundhog Day. Phil is also a straight-A student, a high school baseball state champion, and a martial arts black-belt who is pursuing his dream of flying jets at a service academy.
Movie fans estimate that it took Phil Connors between 30 to 10,000 years to acquire his skills. Parents have been led to believe that it takes 10,000 hours of specialization from a young age to achieve a level of performance in each of these activities for the real Phil. There aren’t anywhere near enough hours in the day for this, especially when you consider the amount of time he spent participating in leisure activities that were popular with friends his age. The reason Phil was able to acquire a diversity of skills and ability level that far exceeded his parents' comes from a developmentally sound environment.
It should be acknowledged that Phil’s family had the resources needed to work around the limitations of youth sports systems that most children face. But as countless athletes from the Aaron brothers, the William sisters, and soccer players like Cristiano Ronaldo demonstrate, parents do not need exceptional wealth to create an exceptional developmental environment. The goal of this book isn’t just to help parents return the lost opportunity of play to their children. It is to help parents provide a play environment that gives their children the opportunity to dream and learn how to achieve those dreams.
