PARKER — Every time I play wiffle ball with my son, I can’t help but think about what youth sports have become.
On the wiffle ball field on our property, 10-year-old Jax’s love for the game radiates. His laugh, his swing, his Shohei Ohtani imitations. And long after we are done playing, he remains alone on the field until dusk, pantomiming home runs, circling the bases, acting out a phantom clutch play in front of an imaginary crowd.
Watching him from inside the house, I ponder what youth sports used to be and the multi-billion-dollar, pressure-packed industry it is today. I wonder how I can funnel that unadulterated joy I see from him in wiffle ball into his baseball. There, Jax is a talented player, but I can tell the stress of the pursuit has started to weigh on him as he advances, the game gets more serious and the competition gets stiffer.
How do I create the most fun youth sports experience for him in a rapidly changing and increasingly costly landscape, while also pushing him to become the best player he can be? It’s a fragile pendulum that many parents of youth athletes are dealing with right now, especially those whose kids are at the competitive and travel levels.
I have the same main question swirling in my mind when we hit in the cage or wrestle on the mat in our barn; when we play hoops in the driveway; when we go to the park and I throw the football to him until my elbow hurts. In those environments, he is free, unencumbered. When the lights come on, sometimes I get the sense he feels like he’s playing for a contract, and his entire athletic livelihood hangs in the balance of a particular at-bat, wrestling match or 3-point shot.
I’ve coached Jax in flag football, baseball and basketball since he was 4, and have also watched his evolution as a wrestler as a parent. This fall, he’s started tackle football, where I’m an assistant coach for his team.
His experiences in all sports are overwhelmingly positive, though I can’t help but blame myself for the tough moments. I am, like many dad coaches, hard on him, especially in a team setting. And there are times when I am too hard on my teams, and my expectations are too high. Yes, sometimes I forget they are 10.
While Jax navigates his own athletic identity, I wrestle with how to approach molding him as a coach/dad, as well as how to traverse a vastly different youth sports ecosystem than the one I grew up in during the 1990s and early aughts.
I look around as a coach and parent to both Jax and my 17-year-old daughter Bella — with whom I’ve experienced rec, club and travel basketball — and I see a youth sports landscape that is a money-making machine operating with a conflicting ethos.
The American ideal is that every kid gets to play, but the price tag of sports beyond the recreational level makes that impossible. We all want development, but what we often don’t say out loud is that many want to win just as badly, if not more. There are many well-intentioned people in the industry — club organizations and private trainers (myself included, as I run a baseball skills academy as a side job) who make money but are in it for the right reasons. But there are also bad actors, and it’s often hard to distinguish between the two.
The behavior of adults doesn’t always model the young adults we want our kids to become. We’ve all seen the at youth sporting events, and I’ve also witnessed this firsthand — a coach who refuses to shake hands in the postgame line, a mom who trash-talks my team and me from the stands as it takes everything within me to ignore her and not escalate the situation.
It seems true happiness in youth sports is harder to obtain than ever before. I’ve been fortunate to have mostly great parents on the many teams that I’ve coached over the last dozen years, but there are always some parents with unrealistic expectations for their kid, or the kid’s position on the field/court is not good enough, or there’s the issue of playing time, even if the kid hasn’t earned it via their skills.
These are age-old issues in youth sports, but they’ve been magnified and multiplied by the amount of money now involved. When parents pay a premium, they believe it gives them more say.
Living in this reality as a youth coach and as a parent, I feel myself caught between the past and the present.
In baseball, the old-school sports soul in me believes that Jax — and my younger son Bo, who is 4 and is just starting sports via flag football and lacrosse — can get as good as the kids playing travel ball simply through relentless sweat equity in cage sessions in our barn and endless hours grinding at an empty sandlot. It’s the part of me that believes that Jax, who has played in the for three seasons now, can continue at that level into middle school, and he will be just fine. There is no need to shell out 10 times as much money, and likely more, for travel ball.
But the pull of the present is there, too.
My wife and I paid around $10,000 for two summers in a row so Bella could play club basketball and travel to out-of-state tournaments, because we wanted her to have a shot at making her high school varsity team. At several of those out-of-state tournaments, her club team played multiple other Colorado teams, prompting us to question the necessity of the trip. We also paid for private lessons with a former WNBA player.
As for Jax’s travel wrestling tally, between club costs, tournament entrance fees, some private lessons and traveling to in-state tournaments outside the Denver metro, it’s easily a few thousand dollars each year for that, too. And as Jax grows as a baseball player, I cannot lie that the lure of joining a travel team and its corresponding promise of accelerated development has become stronger and stronger.
The two phrases I heard most often while reporting this series on the state of youth sports were “FOMO” and “keeping up with the Joneses.” The argument can be made that our family – and every family I know with kids who play competitive sports – has gotten sucked into both sentiments. The last thing a parent wants when your kid plays sports is for them to get left behind talent-wise, or to deny them athletic opportunities that other kids their age are getting.
In this way, the youth sports beast feeds itself and becomes perpetually self-sustaining.
There is no going back to the days of the neighborhood team, or the talent-laden local rec league — that train has left the station. There is no going back to the way youth sports once were: If you want in now at a high level, you’d better be prepared to open your wallet and clear your calendar. And to make it all work, you and your spouse had better have flexible jobs to shuttle your kid to practices and spend all weekend at games.
Weighing all these variables, I keep returning to the near-daily wiffle ball games my son and I play in the yard. Often it’s a family affair, with my wife, Bella and Bo all participating too. I ponder how to capture that childlike wonder in a competitive environment, considering Jax’s baseball team has some serious roster questions heading into next season.
We lost a few of our best players to higher-level and/or travel teams. I have no animosity toward the families that left, even as I hold on to a seemingly antiquated view of the importance of keeping a team together as kids grow up. Parents should leverage the free-market capitalism of youth sports to their advantage if they can afford it, and we shouldn’t hold it against kids and families if they want to pursue other opportunities or spend thousands of dollars annually on a sport of their choosing.
But as I daydream about the way things once were, I keep those wiffle ball emotions front and center.
As long as Jax is out there, trotting the bases in his Ohtani shirt while the sun sinks on another summer day, his love of sports will continue to grow and the life lessons will follow. He’ll keep coming back to the diamond after a day of tough strikeouts. He’ll keep coming back to the mat after getting pinned. He’ll keep putting up shots no matter how many he misses, and keep pulling on the shoulder pads even when he runs into a team that runs over his own.
Youth sports aren’t perfect. But the fact that more kids are playing sports than not — in the 55% of American youth played organized sports, including 65% in Colorado — is encouraging. And as long as that trend continues to hold, the kids, parents’ slimmed-down bank accounts be damned, are going to be all right.
