How aggressive competition is
ruining good old playtime.
On an uneven baseball field in a small South
Carolina town, a member of the “Gator Girls” is pitching
poorly, but with a “so what” shrug of her rounded
shoulders sends the clear message that she does
not care. It is the last game of the year and the team
has not won a single game. My daughter, Molly, had
pitched earlier in the game, but was removed from the
mound with her team leading 9-0. “Please, let me finish
the game,” she had begged the coach, but he said
no, and then waved his disinterested daughter onto
the field to pitch. Now the score is 9-8, but despite the
lead the game feels lost. Only two players in the field—
Molly, and a toothpick of a black girl playing centerfield,
Laquisha—have enough skills to catch a ball
for the last out. I am sitting next to Laquisha’s dad
and grandmother.
“I can’t take any more of this pressure!” Granny
mutters as she wipes her brow with a clean white handkerchief.
“It’s sort of like being in front of the judge!”
“That’s right,” her son, a brick mason says. “You
don’t know whether the judge will be in a good mood
or a bad mood. It’s the same with this game. It could
go one way or another.”
The batter smashes the easy pitch in a towering
arc that appears well beyond Laquisha’s reach.
“Laquisha, run like there’s a big dawg chasing you!
Catch the ball!” her dad screams.
“Oh, my Lord, oh my Lord,” Granny groans. “This
excitement may just do me in.”
We shout our encouragement as 14-year-old
Laquisha dashes to the spot where she hopes to catch
the ball. If she snags it she will be congratulated, if she
doesn’t, she will be told, “Nice try.” It is exactly the sort
of low-key organized game that Carl Stotz had in mind
in 1939, the year he created Little League baseball. But
16 years later, he left the organization, rather than be
associated with its plans to turn his
no-pressure neighborhood games
into a high-stakes national tournament
and the now famous Little
League World Series.
Today, Little League baseball
is big business. The playoffs and
World Series are televised on ESPN.
Children no longer play their sports
in cheap sneakers, or share a few
“team bats” like I did—the shoes are
Nike and each kid owns a sack full of
customized equipment. But let’s shove aside the outlandish
sums of money that we spend on training our
kids for sports, for those costs are dwarfed by this one:
American children, once the smartest on earth, are
striking out in the classroom. Three years after Laquisha
raced after the ball, I found myself in the middle
of this mindless, “sports at all cost” culture.
The warning signs about organized, adult supervised
youth sports appeared as far back as the 1930s,
the decade that Little League was founded. Then, as
Jack W. Berryman writes, academics issued “a steady
stream of proposals, guidelines, speeches, manuals,
and periodical articles warning against too much
competition for elementary school children.”
In 1964, the year I first played on a Little League
team, the Los Angeles Times published a four-part series
on the organization, examining everything from
dysfunctional, we-must-win-at-all-cost parents, to the
alarming incidence of pitcher’s elbow.
Steve Marshall, an assistant professor of epidemiology
and orthopedics at the Injury Prevention Research
Center at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, writes,
A big difference today is that kids involved
in sports play harder and younger than ever.
And with dreams of college scholarships and
multi-million dollar professional contracts, the
competition can get out of hand…Youth sports
have become about more than kids having fun.
Frankly it’s beginning to get out of control. It’s
almost a national obsession.
Today, among the world’s most developed
countries, America’s high school students now
rank 31st in math and 17th in reading. Even once
struggling kids from Poland score better than their American counterparts! Hmm—could this dramatic flip in world rankings be attributed to the fact that Poland eliminated their high school sports teams in order to better focus on academics? Journalist Amanda Ripley notes that
There’s mission confusion about what school is for. We need to consider the tradeoffs and the distraction when sports are given so much emphasis. Many schools let kids miss class for sports—for away games. It all sends a signal to kids about what school is for. Kids find out too late that it’s not about basketball.
During her high school years, Molly developed into an outstanding softball player and was invited to hone her skills on a “travel team.” I went along with “the program,” thinking there are quite a few things worse than having a teenage daughter who enjoys sports. It was one long, hot, summer.
On Thursday mornings, Molly would leave home to play in a four day “regional tournament” in some godforsaken small town. Thousands of parents, like me, are held hostage to watching four days of games in 100 degree heat, organized and run by hyperactive coaches and tournament organizers.
Oh, sorry, no, I wrote that poorly—the other parents were not like me—most looked forward to the games, most hauled their other children to these events, most cared if the team won the game.
If I made a comment about wishing the team would lose so we could go home, they’d look at me as if I needed counseling. Parents hoped that their daughters would improve their game, “make it to the next level”, earn a scholarship to play softball at some undetermined college. The Summer That Would Not End gave me a stunning insight into our sports culture, a world that had greatly changed since I was a kid in the 1960s. So what caused these seismic shifts?
Historian Peter Stearns writes that the 1960s saw, “a growing competitive frenzy over college admissions as a badge of parental fulfillment.” The demand to get into college—thanks to the huge number of Baby Boomers like me—exceeded the supply. Parents focused on athletics as a “differentiator,” something that set their children apart from others who also had good grades.
Our unhealthy preoccupation with children’s sports may also be attributed to the staggering amounts of money that a handful of top-notch athletes earn in their professions. In the 1950s and 1960s, many professional athletes held off-season jobs to help pay their bills. But in the 1970s, when the courts properly decided that players had bargaining rights and were no longer the exclusive property of the team owner, the bidding wars for top players began. In that same era, due to the increasing availability of cable television and its accompanying need for more programming, the demand for more games increased. The business of sports took over at the pro level, then college, then high school, and today, our elementary schools.
From the August 20th, 2014 edition of the New
York Times:
Mo’ne Davis, the ace of the Taney Dragons in the Little League World Series, spoke fluently about release points and the art of confronting batters who were uncomfortable hitting the ball to the opposite field. It was advanced stuff for any pitcher, let alone one who was 13 years old…Davis, having captured much of the nation’s attention in recent days with her blazing fastball and her waist-length braids, was preparing to take the mound Wednesday night for her Philadelphia-based team against a squad from Las Vegas.
I am happy for Mo’ne, and the success she had playing in the historically “boy’s only” Little League.
But is it really healthy for our children to play games on national television? Might it be healthier if we wrest the game away from ESPN and big business, and return it to the kids and local playgrounds?
A decade has passed since Laquisha raced after that ball, but I bet she still remembers her catch and the joy she felt when she was hugged by her teammates. Nor will I forget exchanging “high-fives” with her grinning dad, nor the memory of her granny sitting down, saying that game had just “done her in.” I sometimes wonder why we remember the things that we do, but in this case, no. I will not forget that imperfectly played game on a hot summer evening played by kids from all walks of life wearing sneakers, because it was the game that I used to play, and the game I used to love.
Americana is a monthly column highlighting
the cultural and historical nuances of this
land through the rich story-telling of columnist
Bill Fitzpatrick, author of the books, Bottoms Up, America and Destination: India,
Destiny: Unknown.