Rasing Little Pro's

I recently came across the following quote “My goal isn’t to raise a champion…It’s to raise a child that believes they can become one.” I think this is the most realistic quote of any that I have seen since I have been writing this blog.  Instead of trying to raise little “professional” athletes we need to be raising fine citizens who will use their youth sports experiences to become our future leaders in business, government and yes sports.  Too many times, I see youth sports being used to push children to do things they are not capable of doing, like becoming little professionals.  This is the main reason we have a 70% dropout rate in youth sports by the time a child reaches the age of 13.

            In the past, I have written about the European youth sports model where actual competition does not start until the children reach their teen years.  In the early years under the European model, the youth are taught the skills necessary to play the sport that they participate in, as opposed to the American model where we are ranking Under 6 travel baseball teams….really, ranking six-year-old baseball teams.  My main question is who the heck is ranking Under 6-year-old travel baseball teams?  I would venture to say there are probably a few thousand Under 6 baseball teams in the United States and the thought that ANYONE could see enough games to actually rank these teams is mind boggling.  I am a HUGE college football fan, and I hardly agree with the AP/Coaches rankings every week and the teams in the rankings are well known teams that have national followings.

            I recently saw a video clip of Steve Nash discussing youth sports.  For those who do not know who Steve Nash is, he played professional basketball for the Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Lakers and coached the Brooklyn Nets.  In this video clip Mr. Nash discussed the reasons why youth sports are good for our youth and they included the ones I have mentioned in the past: learning teamwork, learning how to collaborate with others, learning how to succeed and fail and he mentioned one that I never thought of and that was growing up at the appropriate time.  Now let us think about that one for a minute, letting children grow up at the appropriate time is extremely important in a child’s life.  I have many friends with younger children who are attending junior and senior proms and graduating middle school, high school, and college and invariably in their Facebook posts I see the comment “where has the time gone” or “I cannot believe that he/she/my baby is graduating.”  Now, graduating middle/high school/college is a normal progression in our children’s lives, yet when it comes to youth sports we want our youth to be little professionals as young as 4 and 5 years old. We will send them to camps, specialized training, one-on-one trainings and have them specialize in one sport at younger and younger ages.  So, my question is why do allow our children to grow up at the appropriate time in everything but their youth sports participation?   

            In my opinion, the only people becoming “champions” now are the thousands of organizations out there that are preying on the youth sports parents to who they are selling the need for “specialized” training and conning parents into believing their child has to play only one sport from the time they are 5 or 6 years old or they will be left behind and they are being told this by people running these specialized programs in a $19 billion industry that has NO regulation what so ever.  Parents and youth sports organizations/administrators need to start thinking about adopting the European Model when it comes to youth sports in America.  We need to stop thinking that we are raising little professionals who are “champions” in sport and start raising “champions” in LIFE, which in my opinion is more important.  As I have said many times before, parents need to start doing research and learn what their children getting into when they decide to pay youth sports beyond the recreational level and more importantly the need to ensure that their children are, as Mr. Nash stated in his interview, learning teamwork, learning how to collaborate with others, learning how to succeed and fail and that they are growing up at the appropriate time.