By Henry Wyard | April 2017
The changing of the seasons means more than just a change in the weather. It means the start of another season of youth sports. Whether it’s another season of standing in the outfield for a season because mom is making you play yet another year of T‑ball, or counting down the days to lace up those cleats every year, youth sports is a rite of passage for a many American children. Playing on a team can help kids learn valuable lessons about practice, teamwork, winning and losing, while also making life-long friendships.
However,what kids and their parents can expect out of youth sports has changed drastically over the last few decades. Youth sports has changed in the last 10 years since we were children growing up, and neither are anything what it was like when our parents were growing up. What change has come in the modern day that has had such a significant impact on something as timeless as youth sports? All paths seem to lead to the growing impact of technological advancements as the common denominator for change.
Photo taken by Roman Lunin. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/135658087@N06/)
In a world where some children have played a sport on a computer screen, but never in real life, an interesting modern dilemma is presented — is technology a problem for youth sports? For the first time since youth sports have been prevalent, (around the turn of the 20th century) some kids have swung a virtual bat, but never a real one.
Parents have always encouraged their children to take part in youth sports, as a way to get involved and make friends, and while a majority of the rules of these games have remained constant for decades, the organization and style of the games has seen a drastic change in recent years. Nowadays, if you were to spend your Saturday morning at your towns local park, you would see scores of parents lining the sides of the a field, smart phones out, recording their son or daughter as they run up and down a field for an hour.
Parents have become a huge part of youth sports, according to an article by CNN.
Parents have a larger role than ever in the sports that their children partake in, and are oftentimes responsible for getting their children started in a sport, and getting them to continue it. Parents have become increasingly involved with posting their children’s athletic achievements on their Facebook pages, and finding any excuse possible to post pictures of their son’s or daughter’s in their sports uniform.
Youth sports today are growing larger than ever, according to an article published by ESPN. Upwards of 22 million children today are involved in some type of team sport.
This massive number does not even count account for children who enjoy playing sports, but not on an organized team. This style of youth sports, was almost entirely the way of the past, according to Leo Verrochi. The 51-year-old basketball fan, grew up playing sports his whole life, but not really in the way that is commonly seen today. Verrochi grew up right outside Boston, in a town called Quincy, and would spend his time after school playing outside with other kids on his street until it got dark.
Kids enjoying playing outside. Photo by Tom Taylor. https://www.flickr.com/photos/tommyt56/
“After school, I would meet up with the other kids in my neighborhood, and we would play whatever game everyone was interested in at the time, until my mother said it was time for dinner or it was dark out — I never was really on an organized sports team until high school,” Verrochi said.
Verrochi is not alone, 30 years ago the landscape for youth sports was considerably different. An article published by Championship Sports Network does a great job of showcasing the differences in youth sports in modern times and 30 years ago. Some of the biggest changes surrounding the two era’s seems to revolve around the organization. In a time without instant messaging on iPhones, or Facebook event notifications, it was not always easy to get a group of people on the same page to be somewhere at the same time.
Verrochi also said that a majority of the time in his neighborhood, kids of all ages would play games together on the street. The older kids generally decided what games were played and often times might decide the rules. Today, there is much more structure in the sports world of young children. In the same article by ESPN, it is reported that upwards of 60% of boys and 47% of girls are involved with some sports team by the time are 6 years old. Up to 30% of girls and 37% of boys are involved on a sports team in their high school.
While a competitive spirit has always been apart of the “American Spirit,” but has it been taken too far in recent times? According to an article published by The Atlantic, an omnipresent sense of competition has led to the extreme change in youth sports, as well as the lives of children and what is expected of them from a societal view. Historian Peter Sterns wrote in 1960 that a “growing competitive frenzy over college admission as a bade of parental fulfillment.” There was a growing sense of parental anxiety over the success of their children and how it labeled them as parents.
This Atlantic article points to this, as one of the reasons for the changes in youth sports.
“In The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, former Princeton University president William Bowen (along with administrator James Shulman) link this parental anxiety to an increased focus on athletics as a protection for kids against getting pushed out of colleges where they “deserved” to earn slots.”
