Looking at Different Youth Sports Models

Over the past few weeks, I have written blog posts on a number of subjects including the treatment of game officials, parental spending on youth sports, the training of youth sports coaches, whether or not we are professionalizing youth sports and finally about two movies and how they related to youth sports. Now I am planning to go in a different slightly different direction and take a look at different youth sports models around the world to find out how they differ from what we do in the United States and can the different models used around the world be incorporated in the United States?

Over the past year or so I have been doing a lot of research into what is happening with youth sports in the United States and while doing this research I have done quite a bit of reading on youth sports around the world what I have learned is that other countries models are quite different from what we do in America. Most countries youth sports programs do not introduce “competition” or play for “championships” until the children reach their teen years. The early years of competition deal with actually training the children on how to play the game and working on skill sets while in America, “competition” and playing for “championships” starts as early as four or five years old, well before most children are developed enough to play a sport competitively and long before they have learned the necessary skills needed to play a sport. As I stated in an earlier post, The United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) actually ranks travel teams as young as four years old in baseball and six years old in softball. My question still remains how do you rank a four-year-old or six-year-old team?

Research seems to indicate that there is no American model when it comes to training our youth. Andy Smith states in the Rutledge Handbook of Youth Sport there is no connected youth sports system in the United States as youth sports programs that organize and promote youth sports are not covered by any national, state or local plan, a major difference from the rest of the world (please note that that I have no intention of supporting or suggesting governmental intervention in youth sports in America, but rather suggesting that youth sports organization’s themselves should be looking to change our youth sports model). Mr. Smith goes on to say that sports programs are sponsored by a variety of agencies ranging from private-for-profit businesses to local public agencies along with nonprofit organizations that include churches, regional and faith-based organizations, leading youth sports in the United States to resemble a disjointed collection of programs that reflect the goals of the adults in charge and not the needs of the children participating. An example of this is when I was on the board of my local youth soccer association. We were governed by both United States Youth Soccer and New Jersey Youth Soccer and while they would send us directives on what we should be doing as it related to the training of our children, no one ever checked with us to see if we were implementing any of the directives that were being recommended. Ultimately, in my opinion, this was a waste of their time as I assume they were not checking on any other youth soccer association’s either.

I’d like to ask how many times as a parent (or maybe even as a coach) you were at a youth sporting event and coach may have been yelling at a young boy or girl because they made a mistake or could not do a certain skill on the field only to find out later that the coach (or past coached) did not or could not teach the child the skill because the coach either could not do the skill themselves or were more concerned with “winning”? How did you feel when witnessing this and how do you think the child felt? Too many times we let a person coach who, while meaning well, does more harm than good and in my opinion it’s all because the league/organization has no plan in place short of “winning”.Now I don’t lump all coaches into “the win at all costs” category as I have personally coached with some great coaches who were focused on teaching skills, along with trying to win, but not at the expense of teaching.I would also like to note at this time that I do not want to come across as some sort of “perfect” coach who never made a mistake when coaching.I’ll admit that I while coaching I have gotten upset when a child did not/or could not do in a game what we had done in practice only to find out later that they did not understand what I was trying to teach meaning that the issue was mine and not the child’s. My goal in doing this research and writing these blogs is to look into these different models to see if it is possible to incorporate other models here and if they would be better for our children. Please stay tuned.