Youth Sports (i.e. the thing we all loved which parents have now ruined)

I joined a Facebook group for area football, which has turned into a youth football coaches "pound your chest" group, none of whom apparently can write a coherent sentence. One of the latest, a direct quote: "What type of guy wants to be a bully in youth sports. Grow up tough guy . And this is who you want your kids coach by the fake tough guy."

 

Nah. You just got block angles - SAB, GOD, TKO.

 

Yeah I’m in one of those groups.

It’s … enlightening?

 

I always got a special joy at mocking the T-ball All Star teams. The most baseball thing these kids can do is scratch themselves and you want to stick them on an All Star team to watch them not field, barely know to run to a base and get a home run because the ball left the in field?

 

One of the great blessings of my life is that none of my kids were good at sports, nor had any real interest in them.

Each of my three kids played exactly one year of sports. My oldest played soccer. I used to think you couldn’t tell the difference between a good 7-year-old soccer player and a bad 7-year-old soccer player until I saw her play. She certainly fell into the latter category.

My middle son played one year of youth football. He was 5. It was the level where a coach is on the field lifting the players into position. One of his team’s coaches got thrown out of a game, which meant he also was suspended for the next game. Said coach spent the next game sitting on the roof of his pickup, calling in plays to a coach on the sideline on a cell phone. The boys were FIVE.

My youngest played one year of basketball and was 0-for-2 from the field for the season.

The main impact organized youth sports had on my kids was to make their friends unavailable most weekends for socializing.

 

Same with our daughter. Two seasons of rec league soccer at 5 and 6, and thankfully, she had little use for it. Then she discovered theatre, which now will take her to college in NYC.

Now, that said, stage parents...

 

From age 14-16, my daughter was an average volleyball player in an above average area. Three years at a high-powered club. She did OK, made the high school freshman team and started. Made JV as a sophomore and played a lot as a reserve. Before her junior year, the coach told her she was going to be on Varsity, but wouldn't play. Volleyball was never going to be in her future. It ended right there.

 

I had no idea travel football was a thing but I suppose it makes sense considering all the other nonsense out there.

I have one kid who is a sports kid. He plays flag football (his mom may never let him play tackle), baseball and basketball. He's 10 and for 10 he is really good at all. Will he be really good at all when he's 12 or 14 or in high school? Who knows. And I definitely don't have him slotted for the majors yet.

Baseball is his best sport. We did travel for the first time this year. Never thought we'd do it but he got too good for rec and thought why not. He had a blast and it was good competition. He found an organization that really doesn't put a crazy emphasis on winning and going apeshit on the kids. We have friends where that is not the case. Like who gives a crap if a 10U team comes home with hardware every week? Then the kids burn out already.

One thing that's happened in our area is all these organizations are trying to corner the market on players. There are two other travel teams by us and they both are trying to get two teams per age. I have been around baseball enough in this town to know there are not enough players to fill five travel teams. But hey, I guess if they pay and parents are happy little Jimmy is on a team. Who cares if it is totally watered down and no growth or fun happens. It will take over for rec soon and that's not good for simple fun and learning the game.

My kid's basketball coach also tried a tournament team basically year round and couldn't get the interest in the fall. Most of the team plays multiple sports and it was too much. I think we'll end up playing rec to start. That way he gets lots of reps, has fun with friends and can still play flag football until it's over without worrying about running to basketball. It's also a heck of a lot cheaper.

He's going to play multiple sports as long as all are fun and he wants to.

 

LOL. Fanboi looser moran!

 

My 11 year old is just a good player. One of those "fundamentally sound good attitude" kids. I have no dreams of him playing college football or anything like that, and the day he's not enjoying it, he can quit. ... but he does like it.

The pipe dreams these parents have - where taking the team of 10-year-olds on the road every weekend four, five and six hours away is somehow going to be the difference in earning a scholarship - is ... weird.

Someone needs to tell them, "Look - you see those four kids who are clearly the best and biggest athletes on the team? One or two of those kids will play college football, most likely because they were born with superior athletic ability. No amount of travel tournaments is going to change that."

I shit you not: With Spring football, "preseason" classics, a regular season, and postseason tournaments, these travel teams are playing 30-40 tackle football games a year. Sometimes more than one in a day.

I want to be like, "You know - NFL players throw a fit when asked to play a 17th game. Why do you think they're less prepared to play a 30-game season than your 12-year-old?"

 

Yeah that’s horseshit. That’s people who care more about money than what’s best for kids. No chance in hell a kid should play that much tackle football.

 

That's the thing though: No one is getting rich doing it. It's a bunch of dads living vicariously through their kids, for mostly misguided reasons.