Book Notes: Game On

Tom Farrey, Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children (ESPN Books, 2008)

Sorry for the inattention, blog readers, but a recent motorcycle accident knocked out a few weeks I'll never get back. (I performed an aerial maneuver while my bike stayed on the ground.) One good aspect of suffering broken bones: a family-sized prescription to percocet, supplied by a doctor indifferent to my volatile addiction profile! Thanks doc. The other upside is a little extra time to read, even in the middle of a busy semester. (Of course I can only cover about one page per hour with my eyes dancing over the words.)

There's so much to like about this book that I hesitate to criticize. Tom Farrey looks at all aspects of youth sports. And I mean all aspects: his reportage at times careens around from topic to topic. Obviously a discussion of such breadth is going to be difficult to organize. Farrey settled on arranging each chapter by the athlete's age: except for chapter one (discussion of sperm banks) and chapter twelve (discussion of Little League World Series), the age thing doesn't quite work. The result produces a narrative a bit hard to track (especially if one is loaded up on painkillers and has to close one eye to find the next line of text).

Nevertheless, the book is absolutely an essential read for anyone who cares about youth and amateur sports. Farrey is insightful and diligent, and makes an overwhelming case that the biggest mistake in American youth sports is our collective insistence on winnowing out the weaker players in favor of the stronger. Farrey also delivers several criticisms of the easy target, the ultra-competitive youth coach who overemphasizes victory at the expense of development.

One of those criticisms is frighteningly true. The other is so wrong it threatens to undo whatever benefit the first criticism may produce.

1. The heart of the problem is the mirage of the early developing child athlete. We see this mirage all the time. We see the twelve-year-old, larger and more muscular than his peers, throwing a baseball at sixty miles per hour and project him right into the Mariners' starting rotation. It's ridiculous, obviously, but something about human perception or psychology (it's either the "salience effect" or the "recency effect," I can't figure out which) makes us draw the ineluctable, yet utterly erroneous, conclusion about future performance. It's the same mistake Malthus made. The past is not prologue, friends. The kid's not going to play pro ball. He's not even going to get the college scholarship. He's just developed early, and in many cases, his development may be close to done. The peak of his athletic career may be now.

2. The early developer may not even make the high school varsity. At least may not if the competition were on a level playing field. But it turns out it's not. The youth sports system effectively guarantees the early developer a varsity spot. For at the same time as we fawn over the early developing athlete, praising and promoting him, we dismiss the late bloomer. The smaller, slower kid is discouraged in a thousand ways: on average, he plays less important postions, sits more on the bench, gets cut from the team, is channeled to less competitive sports, and by and large quits most sports by the age of fourteen. Frustrated with his apparent lack of athleticism, he quits just as he starts his growth spurt and begins to develop adult musculature and coordination. As a result, when our children reach the age of maximum athleticism, probably in their early twenties, the late blooming child and probably even the normal developer are both long gone. We stupidly push the great majority of our potential athletic stars away from sports. With so many athletes cast aside, those early developers who remain form the entire pool eligible for our national teams and professional sports.

No other nation in the world so determinedly and inexplicably discourages the large majority of its young athletes from playing. It's no wonder that even some of America's great professional leagues suffer from perceived dilutions of player talent. As Farrey writes, if the U.S. ever kept all its athletes involved in sports, as do other nations, and picked national teams from the entire pool of available athletic talent, then given America's vast sports-minded and athletic population, we'd never lose another international competition. We shoot ourselves in the foot, repeatedly.

3. The main culprits in this sad story are three, as best I could count. (You try counting on drugs, even to three.) First is the indefensible latitude most states give to parents to hold their children back in school in order to gain academic and athletic advantages. I've written about this here. It's nothing short of cheating. At a time when even a single year's difference can mean a lot in terms of size, musculature and athletic performance, these overage children literally drive the younger ones off the playing field and out of competitive sports. A few states have laws precluding nineteen-year-olds from playing high school sports. This simple rule tells parents of newborns that they can't manipulate their little boy or girl into high school stardom and collegiate scholarships. Every state high school association should adopt it, just to put an end to the grade terror that is destroying youth sports.

4. The second guilty party is the schools themselves. Young athletes at about age thirteen typically graduate from broad-based, participatory, quasi-recreational sports leagues (think Little League, but don't think of the Little League World Series) to middle school sports. In this day of consolidated, overcrowded classrooms, schools still cling to the antiquated "one school = one team" tradition. It's cheaper to boot. Consequentially, dozens of athletes from the youth leagues now have to compete for a comparatively very few spots on the school team. Even if they make the team, they must compete again for scarce playing time and coveted positions. Left behind are committed and talented young players. They are eliminated not just from the team, but essentially from the entire sport, as non-scholastic opportunities to play are hard to find and typically not very serious. Similar in effect to the school teams are the youth "travel teams," which can reach down to even elementary school age groups. By selecting some players and excluding others, the travel teams basically decide which players get to continue in that sport and which don't. Even worse, once the travel team takes away the best players from a sport, in most cases the leftovers are insufficiently numerous (or interested) to form a team to carry on. The travel team destroys the recreational league and kicks most of its players to the curb.

5. According to Farrey, the final main culprit (and there are many lesser ones) are the youth coaches who focus excessively on winning games. Here I think Farrey's argument falters. Farrey is a fan of an outfit called the Positive Coaching Alliance. (You can check out their web site here.) These people obviously mean well. But I am leery of any efforts to minimize the competitiveness of sports, youth or otherwise. I like the coaches of my sons to be competitive and try to win. I cringe when the coach says he wants to teach a "life lesson" as the PCA group describes, meaning some lesson or goal other than trying to win. Sports is about trying to win; that's the point of it and the only reason to play.

One of my boys once had a basketball coach who wanted to make sure everyone on the team got to score. So after a while during a game, the team essentially (in my view) stopped playing basketball. Whoever's turn it was to score had to take the next shot. The team would come down the court on offense and players would pass up wide open shots to feed the ball to the kid whose turn it was to score. My kid once sat down on the court in the middle of this nonsense, bored. He wanted to play a competitive sport; it wasn't "sharing time." I've seen another coach order something similar in soccer, with his team forced to not take wide open shots in favor of additional passes to under-served teammates. Now one might say those coaches went "too far" or something like that, but really, if one is going to be non-competitive and egalitarian then isn't the approach of those coaches simply a frank and honest attempt at being noncompetitive? If the aim of the contest is not to win then why pretend otherwise?

The egalitarians in sports always want to temper competition, whether it be youth coaches instructing players not to shoot or national columnists castigating professional or college teams for running up the score. (Gregg Easterbrook of Tuesday Morning Quarterback fame is particularly zealous in his egalitarian efforts to take the competition out of sports. See here and here, for my particularly unzealous reactions.) But sports is about unalloyed competition. If the score gets out of hand, turn off the scoreboard. If a youth team is overmatched, change a couple of players over to the other team. Don't stop trying to score. Competition is fun. I want my sons to play sports to learn a life lesson, but just a single life lesson, the lesson of trying as hard as you can to win at something, then winning with grace or losing with dignity. Learning how to compete and, yes, how to win is an important life skill and life lesson. Youth sports is one of the very few socially sanctioned opportunities left to today's children to actually try to win at something, to prevail over another person or another team. It's the last remaining outlet for competitive children. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

6. The supposed lack of positive coaching has nothing to do with the current crisis in youth sports. Limit children to playing organized sports with others of the same age, and require large schools to field sufficient varsity teams to accommodate all interested athletes. These simple reforms would create ample room to maintain widespread participation in youth sports. High schools have to provide enough language or math classes to meet student needs; similarly they should have to meet student interests in athletic endeavors, except where costs are prohibitive. Maybe one football team per school is the financial limit. But basketball teams could more easily be multiplied. One of the main costs, transportation, could be mitigated by more intra-school games. Further, with multiple teams per school, the rigid classification system that groups schools by size (and hence creates travel nightmares) would be unnecessary. So what if high school sports takes on some of the attributes of intramurals? I played intramural basketball in college. Those games were some of the most intense, competitive and fun sports, ever. Guys wiped away the blood and kept playing. Middle and high school athletes would enjoy such games just as much. Even more, they would keep playing the sport, so that, when sports get serious at the college, Olympic and professional levels, they'd still be around to try out for the team.