High school football games have not changed in the past 30 years. Not really. The atmosphere is the same. The fields still look the same. The tinny bands still sound the same. The mingled aromas of newly mown grass and simmering cigars still smell the same.
The dynamics are still the same, too. To be on the field and to win is to occupy the pinnacle of high school society—the Friday night hero—at the most visible high school social events of the year.
But high school football today is an island. Everything else in the world of youth sports, everything save high school athletics, seems to have changed and changed utterly. A terrible beauty has been born.
The beauty is that youth sports are more accessible and popular than ever. Where once there were only Little League and peewee football, there are now soccer leagues, hockey leagues, swim teams, lacrosse teams, everything-you-can-imagine teams.
In a sedentary culture, more kids are benefiting from physical activity. Girls, almost entirely excluded from youth sports just a generation ago, are reaping some of the benefits—heightened self-confidence and assertiveness, networking and teamwork skills—that traditionally served boys when they reached the working world.
What’s terrible, however, is what we have lost: some of the sense that youth sports has no higher purpose than fun; much of the innocence; and all of the improvisational quality of the sandlot.
The very fabric of youth sports has changed because the fabric of society has changed, too. Our neighborhoods are different now. In our suburbs and subdivisions, there are few vacant lots for baseball or long, level yards for neighborhood football games. Or the houses are too far apart for the kids to get together at all.
Even where spaces are available, we’re more reluctant now to let our kids ride their bikes to the sandlot and play unsupervised. We fear who might be out there to prey upon them.
The result is the death of the neighborhood games that were a fixture of childhood for Americans now over 35. For today’s kids, sports must be pre-arranged. Parents provide both the transportation and, worse, the organization.
And the result of that is that children aren’t as free—or empowered, to invoke a ’90s word—to work out their own rules and relationships. Instead, the sidelines are filled with overscheduled, stressed-out parents who can’t always resist the instinctive impulse to intervene on behalf of their kids.
Incidents that children in unstructured settings would resolve on their own—disputed calls, rough play, cheating—are now the concerns of parents. It’s little wonder we’ve seen an alarming rise in cases of grown-ups who assault umpires or each other. And it’s almost impossible to imagine that a beef during a hockey practice session would drive kids to manslaughter, as it did one irate parent recently.
Sometimes, even positive social changes have generated unforeseen negative consequences. Title IX, for example, opened up a world of wonderful scholarship opportunities for girls and even reshaped how we view women athletes.
Unfortunately, it also led more parents to push their girls harder and harder at younger and younger ages, and for all the wrong reasons. Focus on your best sport early, runs the thinking (though doctors and psychologists warn that specializing in one sport at a young age can lead to burnout and even physical problems). Excel early. It’s not just about being your best or having fun; at stake eventually could be a scholarship worth $125,000.
The same logic, of course, also infects parents of boys—sometimes in even more potentially warping ways. It’s no longer rare, for instance, to see parents have their son repeat a grade in school, not to improve his academics but so he can gain size, strength, and a competitive advantage for football.
Today, the opportunities and pressures surrounding youth sports make it harder for parents to keep things in perspective. Recently, my wife and I allowed our oldest daughter to participate on her elementary school’s cross-country team because she wanted to (most of her classmates were doing it) and it was good exercise. As a second-grader, she won every race, and other parents began offering suggestions.
“You should cultivate her talent.”
“She could get a scholarship someday.”
“Let her work with a trainer.”
She still runs well but no longer finishes among the top five. And though I was filled with pride when she won, I confess that I’m also a little relieved now not to hear such urgings—or face temptations to focus her energies instead of dividing them between soccer, basketball, piano, and vegging.
When I was 10 or 11, my father gave me some advice I have come to appreciate: “Don’t be in a hurry to grow up.” Now, as a parent, I try to apply that philosophy, but sometimes I feel like I’m swimming upstream.
I think about what my dad said whenever I see 16-year-old tennis stars, and 13-year-old gymnasts at the Olympics. I marvel at what they’ve achieved at such a young age. But I can’t help but feel sad at what they have also given up.
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