Remember Friday afternoons. The bell rang and the buses lined up. It was the weekend. You were too young to drink or even go to the movies, but Fridays still meant something.
Before dinner you would meet your friends on a leafy field across from your house to play football. Within an hour there would be a few miraculous catches that rivaled the professionals, there’d be a few fights, and at least one minor injury.
Unlike my few years of little league and youth soccer games, my memories of two-hand touch football still remain intact. Freshly mowed grass, slightly full of morning dew is an instant reminder of neighborhood games of Wiffleball. Hot pavement, golf courses, and fallen snow all more reminders of pickup basketball, weekly rounds and haphazardly planned football, respectively.
Along with all these memories, I will also bring the lessons learned from these games into my adulthood. Without parents around, unorganized sports teaches children to resolve their own conflicts. Upon growing up arguments abound, but there will no longer be umpires. It’s important that children learn to compromise, something no league can provide.
Other social skills are developed when children participate in sports on their own. They learn decision-making and planning skills. Getting ten friends to the same field at the same time is much more challenging than having mommy or daddy pay two hundred dollars to join a team.
Most importantly no one sits on a bench in unorganized sports. Everyone constantly plays, exercises, and learns the skill of the sport. Today organized sports are corrupt. Coaches don’t worry about playing time and are too concerned about their ego. As reported by Greg Bach’s journal article in Parks and Recreation, according to a Sports Illustrated for Kids survey of three-thousand youth sports participants, 74% have seen inappropriate behavior by parents at their games. It also cited Miste Adams, the recreation supervisor for the National Trail Parks and Recreation District in Springfield, Ohio, preaching about the epidemic, "Too often small groups run their youth sports [so that] it is convenient for the adults, and not what is best for the kids.”
Most research on this topic, however, praises the structure and coaching these leagues offer our youth. In 2001, the Journal of Pediatrics reports a long list of studied benefits: “smaller playing fields, shorter contest times, pitch counts for Little League pitchers, softer baseballs, matching opponents by weight in youth football, and adjusting play for extreme climatic conditions.”
I disagree with all of them. Limiting the length of the field and amount children play only hinders their ability to gain valuable exercise. Children stop playing when they’re tired. And children will stop pitching when their arm is tired, only unless they have a coach screaming at them. Again another supposed benefit is matching weights in football, which only matters when you have armed little warriors with pads, helmets, and strategies to tackle aggressively.
Children’s lives should not be overly structured. Some kids have no chance to rest, playing five different sports a season during the school year. They hardly have time for fun. Many teams aren’t even in the community requiring up to an hour of travel.
During the Little League World Series, I recall reports of teams practicing six hours a day. Then during the finals in Williamsport, Pennsylvania they play in front of television cameras reaching millions of homes. There have also been rumors of heavy gambling on these games. This is not normal for children. They are missing out on their childhood.
I worry about today’s youth and their reliance on instant messenger and Wal-Mart, television and organized sports. Maybe these are just the grumblings of an already old man. Or maybe our children will accelerate the destruction of our crumbling social world.
In the meantime, you will find me at Mercer County Park playing ultimate Frisbee with my brother or at St. Jude grade school with my friends playing Judeball, a combination of baseball and Wiffleball. Undoubtedly, we’ll be getting good exercise, having fun, and arguing about if I was safe at first.
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Copyright 2004, Kevin Semanick