Inside The Crazy Culture Of Kids Sports

By ANDREW FERGUSON

Kelly Donnelly is bright and pretty and lives in Cranford, N.J. She is 13 years old, and she plays soccer. Boy, does she play soccer! Her sister Katie is 15. She plays soccer too. And their dad Pat--well, Pat drives. He drives one girl or the other to soccer practice most every day, and to Virginia for the occasional soccer tournament, and even to Canada once in a while, for more soccer. Last week he drove the girls home from soccer camp in Pennsylvania. Not long ago, Pat logged 300 miles in his green 1994 Dodge Caravan so that Kelly could play in three games on Saturday. Katie had two games that day.

Then they had five on Sunday.

And how was your weekend?

Pretty much the same, probably, if yours is among the growing number of American families that have succumbed to the mania of kids' athletics as they are conceived in the late 1990s: hyperorganized, hypercompetitive, all consuming and often expensive. Never before have America's soccer fields, baseball diamonds, hockey rinks and basketball courts been so aswarm with children kicking, swinging, checking and pick-and-rolling.

Some estimates put the number of American youths participating in various organized sports at 40 million. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the number of kids playing basketball now tops 12 million. Not to mention the nearly 7 million playing soccer. Or the 5 million playing baseball. Hockey, originally played on frozen ponds, is now a year-round sport involving more than half a million kids from Maine down through the Sunbelt. The Turcotte Stickhandling Hockey School, based in Ormond Beach, Fla., of all places, expects 6,400 kids to take part in its clinics this summer, up from 2,600 in 1992.

But it is not just the number of kids playing an organized sport that's unprecedented. It's the way they're playing it--or, to be more precise, the way their parents are arranging for them to play it. Kelly Donnelly's team, the SMC Strikers, offers a good illustration of what is happening to kids' athletics. Not so long ago, games were weekly, teams were local and each sport had its own brief season. And now? "I played varsity soccer in high school and college," says Bob Seiple, a coach for Kelly's team. "During that time, I might have played a total of 50 games. Kelly might play 50 games in a single year."

The Strikers are a travel team--sometimes known as a select or club team--comprising kids who have risen through local soccer squads to be selected for more competitive play. They're drawn from a variety of mostly suburban neighborhoods and towns in a given region, and they will make single-day or weekend-long pilgrimages to meet other similarly skilled teams on distant soccer fields. Their coaches are not volunteer dads but traveling professionals, some of them imported from countries like Britain. Kelly's parents will pay roughly $3,000 a year for her soccer experience, including club dues (which cover the coaches' pay), private clinics, summer camps, travel and hotels. For the kids, the commitment sometimes seems almost total. Many have abandoned other organized sports--and sometimes even their school's team--to concentrate on the travel squad. "It's tough to play at this level if you don't do it year round," Seiple says.

To be sure, plenty of kids still participate in sports through lower-intensity recreational leagues. But kids' sports, like other American institutions circa 1999, have succumbed to a cycle of rising expectations. More and more parents and kids want better coaching, more of a challenge and the prestige that comes from playing with the best. All of which fuels the growth in travel teams. Says Judy Young, executive director of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (a professional coaches' association) in Reston, Va.: "Nobody seems to want to play on a little neighborhood team for more than one season." Kids who want to make the big step up from "rec" sports to a travel team often take private instruction, at $70 an hour or more, or attend specialized summer sports camps and clinics, where attendance is booming. The governing body of Little League baseball, for example, has seen attendance more than double, to 2,900 kids, at its five summer-camp locations around the country. Kids' athletics today is not a pursuit for dilettantes--even among 13-year-olds, who used to be dilettantes by nature.

Coaches are recruiting talented children as young as eight, whose after-school hours, weekends and summer vacations are occupied by clinics, practices, tournaments and fight-to-the-death competition. The old childhood ideal of goofing off--what the grimmer parenting books term "nonstructured play"--isn't an option. As the kids get older, the more talented rise to ever more selective teams, perhaps representing an entire county, while their less gifted (or less committed) teammates drop away. Family holidays, including Christmas and Thanksgiving, dissolve into long treks to tournaments.

Coaches can get caught in bidding wars--recruited and signed to contracts drawn up by team managers and parents, for annual salaries as high as $60,000. If they don't perform according to expectations, they can be dumped with a dispatch that would make George Steinbrenner smile.

And waiting at the end of the young competitor's rainbow is more than a trophy, more than the thrill of victory, more even than the molding of good character that has been the traditional purpose of children's sports. Now the goal might be a scholarship to defray the stratospheric costs of college, or at least a record of athletic accomplishment that could provide the edge in gaining admission. The dream might be a berth on an Olympic team, or even a career in professional sports.

If all this sounds familiar, it probably should. Throughout the cold war, complacent Americans watched with disdain as promising youngsters behind the Iron Curtain were plucked from home and hearth and sent to spend their childhood in athletic camps where they would be ruthlessly forged into international competitors, exemplars of the totalitarian ideal.

But that was years ago. Watching the crazy culture of kids' sports in America today, a cynic might marvel at how the world has changed. The good news is that the cold war is over. The bad news is that the East Germans won.

That's a harsh view, of course, and it is one not shared by many of the families who crowd the playing fields and gyms. Even in the most intense programs, the kids will tell you this is what they want: the sheer fun of the game, the tribal bond with teammates, the pride of being selected for a team, and the attention from busy parents who might not make as much of a fuss over a triumph in algebra or Spanish.

Any parent knows that few pleasures match the sight of a child who's flushed and beaming after a romp on a stretch of turf. Travel teams in particular can do much to melt away the inhibitions between parents and their teens. "On about the seventh hour of a road trip from western Pennsylvania," says lawyer Robert Luskin of Washington, "you tend to hear things you wouldn't otherwise."

On the practical side, a child busy with sports is less susceptible to the lure of drugs and gangs and the despair we've lately seen in places like Littleton, Colo. "It keeps kids out of trouble and away from the TV," says Leea Kielpinski, 28, a nurse in Oakland, Calif., whose nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son play competitive basketball. Most sports programs, despite their excesses, manage to promote the old virtues: self-confidence, personal responsibility, teamwork, persistence, the ability to win and lose with grace. "In an organized sport, Danny's got to learn a little teamwork, some structure and discipline," says Terrence Straub, a Washington steel executive and father of Daniel, 9, and two older sons.

The benefits can even be measured on the child's report card. "We know from a lot of research that kids who participate in sports tend to do better academically," says Mark Goldstein, a child clinical psychologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago. "It forces them to be more organized with their time and to prioritize a lot better."

Of course, the traditional virtues come wrapped in the garb of the less than traditional 1990s, when prosperity is at an all-time high and leisure at an all-time low. In the Glennon household in Lake Forest, Ill., parents John and Kathy and their three younger daughters have re-arranged family life around the hockey schedule of son Nick, 10. One week's lineup: Sunday: practice from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Monday: power skating from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday: game night. Friday: a fund-raising dinner dance for the team. Sunday: another game. And several days a week, Nick joins a group of kids who take an hour of private instruction from the former speed coach of the Chicago Blackhawks.

Beyond the expense in time, there is the expense of, well, expense. Hockey is easily the most costly of the team sports. Nick has been playing since he was five, and this year, says John, 46, an investment banker, the family will spend as much as $4,500 on the boy's hockey habit: for equipment, gas and hotel rooms, summer training camps and the membership fee to the local hockey association, which covers coaches' salaries and rink rentals. "It's worth it," says Nick's mom Kathy. "It provides exercise, discipline and camaraderie." Nick has a slightly different take. "I play to win," he says. "I don't play to play. If I find out I have a team that's going to be 0-8, I'll go with a different team."

Some parents hope their kids will win a college scholarship. Single mother Mar Rodriguez of Orlando, for example, is a graduate student at the University of Central Florida. Money is tight. She shuttles her three kids--Virgil, 14; Eva, 13; and Sara, 10--to dozens of youth-basketball events every week, year round. In a recent month, Rodriguez counted only three days without a practice or a game.

Inspired by her idol, Rebecca Lobo of the Women's National Basketball Association, Eva plays on five teams at once. Meals are on the fly, and other social activities are rare. Mar can only pray that the sacrifice will pay off in college aid. "By the time I graduate, it's going to be almost time for the two eldest kids to go to college," she says. "I'll need all the help I can get to pay for their education."

The Saunders family, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., nurtures the same hope. Every morning at 4 o'clock, 13-year-old Barry rises groggily from bed, pulls on his sweat suit and heads out for a 30-min. run at a nearby golf course. Every afternoon he has two hours of track practice. Barry has followed the same routine five days a week since he was seven--all in hopes of winning a college scholarship and eventually a shot at the Olympics. It's not a farfetched dream: already Barry holds the U.S. record for his age in the long jump and for 55-meter hurdles.

Barry's father Stan, an Olympic alternate in track in 1976, coaches his son's club track team, the Roosevelt Express. Last year the club spent $60,000--most of it raised from local companies--to travel to tournaments as far away as Seattle and Antigua. Saunders estimates his out-of-pocket expenses last year at $12,000.

But it's worth it, he says. The kids on the team, many from underprivileged backgrounds, get to go places and meet people they otherwise would not. Also, college coaches are scouting the national competitions for recruits, even among kids as young as Barry. "We just feel very fortunate," Stan says, "that we're able to afford for him to compete at the next level. Because that's where the recruiters are."

For most kids, though, the odds of a scholarship are long. Robert Malina, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, says most parents would be better off putting the money they spend on travel teams into a savings account. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, fewer than 1% of the kids participating in organized sports today will qualify for any sort of college athletic scholarship.

Still, Mar Rodriguez knows parents who have hired private coaches for girls as young as 10. Andrew Roderick, who heads UK-Elite, the company that supplies British coaches for Kelly Donnelly's team, says such parents may be setting up their kids for disappointment. "The big thing is fun," he says. "If you're not having fun with it, you shouldn't be doing it."

Ah, yes, fun. The primary importance of fun--of sport pursued for sheer exhilaration--is a credo repeated, and often honored, by coaches, kids and parents. At the same time, though, the pushy parent, red-faced and screaming from the sidelines or bleachers at a hapless preteen fumbling on the field, has become an American archetype and a symbol of the unmeasured costs of kids' sports.

Violence is rare but not unheard of. Military police were called in to stop a parents' brawl at a "tinymite" football game in Repton, Ala., last October. A T-ball coach in Wagoner, Okla., was sentenced to 12 days in jail for attacking a 15-year-old umpire. California recently passed a law making it a felony to assault a sports official in an amateur contest.

More common is the low-voltage ugliness of parents who just don't know when to let up, or shut up. Hockey parents in suburban Washington are used to such sights as the dad who ran up to his son after an unexpected loss recently to rage at him, "I'm very, very disappointed." The boy sighed, staring at his scuffed toes. "Yeah, Mom's gonna chew me out too."

Jay George, a Washington biochemist whose son Jason, 12, plays on Washington's Little Caps team, had to summon a referee to remove some parents from the opposing team who were overheard telling their kids, "If you're going to get a penalty, really hurt someone." Then there was the time a Squirt-level tournament match ended in a tie and one of the opposing moms celebrated by clawing two of George's son's teammates as they filed off the ice.

And if parents don't spoil the fun, sometimes the coaches will. Bob Bradley, 41, of Chicago tried to suggest quietly to his daughter's soccer instructor that his screaming at the players during a game was inhibiting their play. "Well, you're the parent and I'm the coach," came the reply, "and I'm the one who knows how to play this game." Bradley walked away without mentioning that he had just coached the Chicago Fire to the championship of Major League Soccer.

Critics cite such unpleasantness to account for the 73% of kids who quit their childhood sports by age 13, according to studies. "They drop out because it ceases to be fun, and the pressures put on them by coaches and parents don't make it worthwhile," says Fred Engh of West Palm Beach, Fla. He's a professional coach, father of seven and author of the book Why Johnny Hates Sports.

Too often, says Engh, "we take Johnny and Mary and push them into sports without knowing whether they're physically or mentally ready. The travel teams, the all-stars, the championships--they're what the parents want. There's nothing wrong with competition. It makes people successful. But children under the age of 10 don't necessarily want competition. What they want is to have fun, to go out and swing on a swing and go down a sliding board."

Swings? Slides? How hopelessly retro. Nowadays, if a kid waits till she's 10 to decide she wants to compete at an advanced level, the travel team will have already left the station. Her peers will be making deft one-touch passes while she's still learning to dribble. That leaves as her only option the easygoing recreation league, where the coaching is desultory and players often go AWOL. While many parents of kids on "rec" teams equate "keeping it fun" with holding down the level of instruction and competition, the kids often see things differently. Young, of the professional coaches' association, observes, "It's not fun for them when they don't get better."

You can take the testimony of the kids themselves. "It's my life," says Aidan Wolfe, 10, of Portland, Ore., who plays in a recreational league. "I love soccer. If my parents told me I couldn't play anymore, I'd be devastated." During the school year, hockey player Jason George wedges homework into recess and lunch breaks to make the grueling Little Caps schedule, but, he says, "if that's what it takes for me to be good at hockey, I'll do whatever I have to do." His sister Sara, 9, also loves travel hockey because, on the road trips, "I get to spend a lot of time with my mom."

But other youngsters buckle under the load: whether it's that of a single, demanding club sport or a whole basketful of scheduled activities. Stephanie Mazzamaro, 10, of Ridgefield, Conn., complained that in addition to homework, piano lessons, Girl Scouts and religion classes, she had Monday soccer practices and Saturday games. "Mom, I don't want to do all of this anymore," she sobbed. "I don't have time to be a kid." Her mother Janice, 40, could only agree. "When you live in an area like this, you get caught up in it," Janice says. "If you don't do each step, you feel like you're doing an injustice to your child."

The intensity of today's kids' sports seems to be contributing to an increase in injuries. The Consumer Products Safety Commission reports that roughly 4 million children between the ages of 6 and 16 end up in hospital emergency rooms for sports-related injuries each year. Eight million more are treated for some form of medical problem traceable to athletics: for example, shin splints and stress fractures. Some sports physicians point to specialization--a child playing a single sport year round, which many club teams encourage--as one culprit in sports injuries. Kids who alternate different activities at different seasons are less likely to overuse the same set of muscles and joints.

"It's a very rare thing to see someone playing three sports in high school anymore because of the pressure these clubs put on kids to play in the off season," says Gary Thran, director of athletics at Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, Calif. Gregg Heinzmann, associate director of the Youth Sports Research Council at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., observes that these players often have become "specialists who face all the stress of a pro." Why the pressure? According to Thran, college coaches are telling ever younger kids to limit themselves to one sport year round, so they can make the elite traveling clubs.

The Darwinian struggle has gripped girls' sports with a special intensity. Some college recruiters are bypassing high schools and selecting players directly from the club teams. And some high school recruiters are moving even earlier. Charles Morris, 42, of Berkeley, Calif., a technician for Bay Area Rapid Transit, shakes his head as he recalls the coach who, after watching his daughter play basketball, asked what high school she plans to attend. To be sure, the girl, Casey, is a standout player. But she's eight years old.

If kids' sports is undergoing a kind of privatization, with the most talented kids forgoing high school play altogether in favor of the elite travel clubs, the future of high school athletics could be bleak indeed. Dean Crowley, commissioner of athletics at the California Interscholastic Federation, points to the precarious position that sports programs already hold in many cash-strapped schools. "Pretty soon they might say, 'Why do we need to spend all the money we do on sports? These kids are playing all year round anyway.'" And then? "Then you don't have high school athletics." And then too, the best coaching and the most challenging opportunities would be limited to the kids whose parents can afford private club sports. Which is not what anyone had in mind.

We Americans are a competitive bunch. It was probably inevitable that the striving impulse would sooner or later reshape kids' sports. But the trend has been abetted by other, less predictable changes in American life: the ascendancy of the automobile, the shrinking of open spaces, the ubiquity of the two-earner family and the pervasive fear of crime. Baby-boomer parents may look back wistfully at their own childhood, when playing sports was a matter of heading to the corner sandlot or the neighborhood park after school for a pick-up game. But the sandlot's been filled in by a four-bedroom Cape Cod with a two-story atrium. To pay for the Cape Cod, Mom and Dad are both working, and with Mom and Dad both working, the kids are signed up for extended-day sessions at school. And by the time extended-day is over, it's dusk. And even if Mom and Dad were home, they'd never let the kids wander alone to the neighborhood park. You never know who they'll find at the neighborhood park.

So what's a parent to do? We do what Americans have always done. This is, after all, a country that systematizes: we create seminars on how to make friends, teach classes in grieving and make pet walking a profession. In that light, Gregg Heinzmann's praise of unstructured play seems almost un-American. Any activity, no matter how innocent or trivial or spontaneous, can become specialized in America. So if our children are to have sports, we will make leagues and teams, write schedules and rule books, publish box scores and rankings, hire coaches and refs, buy uniforms and equipment to the limit of our means. We will kiss our weekends goodbye--and maybe more than our weekends.

To most parents involved in kids' sports, all the criticisms sound like the dreariest party-poopery. There are joys that can't be organized, pleasures that resist the rigors of systematization. And these remain unextinguished, even in the overwrought world of kids' sports today. In Morristown, N.J., at the Beard School gym, Kelly Donnelly is whiling away the last moments before a soccer clinic. Dad Pat has driven her there, of course. He watches as Kelly spends a minute or so keeping a soccer ball suspended by bouncing it lightly off her knees, in a kind of airborne dribble--a bit of magic that only the rarest adult could pull off.

"It's quite a commitment from the parents as well as the kids," Pat Donnelly is saying. Suddenly Kelly lets the ball fall to the polished wooden floor and with a deft kick sends it the length of the gym till it narrowly misses a basketball hoop at the far end. The kid's good. Donnelly beams and says, "I think I enjoy it almost as much as she does."

--Reported by William Dowell/New York, Tamala Drummond/ Orlando, Julie Grace/Chicago, Maureen Harrington/Denver, Sylvester Monroe/Oakland and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by William Dowell/New York, Tamala Drummond/ Orlando, Julie Grace/Chicago, Maureen Harrington/Denver, Sylvester Monroe/Oakland and Elaine Shannon/Washington