Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
But the trend now is to specialize. Many
parents and club coaches will tell you the multisport athlete is a
thing of the past. I bet your niece's prowess in basketball was helped
by her development in those other sports.<<<<<

I'll bet you're right. There are a lot of factors that play a part in
her superior basketball skills. Jesse is in superb anaerobic condition
from swimming and track, can jump like a gazelle from volley ball, but
I think it was the years of family ping pong playing that honed her
reflexes to a fine point.    Every time I ever visited everyone in the
house would end up in the garage in the midst of a massive ping-pong
tourney. The competition was fierce and fun -- I always got knocked out
by the first round.
  

    
Excellent conversation.

Something I've wondered about is the long-term effect the club-team
environment will have on childrens' enthusiasm for sports. Today's kids
are tomorrow's potential season-ticket holders.

What I mean is, the kids I grew up with in our neighborhood developed
our love for baseball, especially, as well as other sports naturally.
We went down to the high-school diamond on our own to throw the ball
around and hit a few. When we had a quorum we played a game called
"work ups," which most American men, at least, of a certain age will be
familiar with. We let our imaginations run free: my best pal was Sandy
Koufax; I was Willie Mays.

This was long ago. I don't remember the last time I saw kids playing
baseball on a diamond when a parent or adult wasn't also present. These
kids who are run around all over hell and gone by their parents to
participate in club sports: I wonder how many of them actually love the
sports they're involved in? I wonder, too, how many of them will care
much about those sports when they're grown adults?
  

    
Regan, thanks for this book. It was eye-opening, and reaffirming as well. I
have 2 kids that both love to play and do sports. Graham has played soccer
and basketball on rec teams for a single season each. He swims, did some
diving, and currently is taking Tae Kwon Do.  Emma did gymnastics, swimming
and diving, and a very little tennis. Now she does TKD, too.  They both want
to play soccer again next time it's at the rec center.

I was astonished to read about the money spent for kids sports in an effort
to get a scholarship. I kept thinking, "Put that money in a 529 and your kid
can go anywhere he/she wants!"

(I'm on the road, traveling for fun, with my family. A lost art, I know.
I'll check back in later.)
  

    
re Where's the pushing to join travel teams coming from, parents,
coaches or peer pressure? 

Often a kid goes up to a higher level of competition simply because
his or her freinds are doing it. They don't know much about the 
commitment it entails, but they're friends are going to the tryout so
they go to. Or their friends have moved up to a club team and they miss
their friend and want to rejoin him, so they tell their parents they
want to try out for that kid's team. 

Most parents don't fully uindestand the life-changing commitment or
the financial investment at the outset, either.  I asked every parent
of a club player who I interviewed for my book, "When you signed up for
the club team, did you know what you were getting into?" And to a
person, each one said no. 

Often it's adult peer pressure that's driving it. A parent of a club
player will see your kid at a game and say, "Why haven't you signed her
up for the travel team? She's good enough to be picked at a tryout?"
As one woman says in my book about such a conversation she had about
her kid who was enjoying playing soccer at the rec level, the friend (a
dad coach of an elite club team) clearly thought the only
consideration regarding this big decsion was if the girl was good
enough to play on a club team, she should be playing on one. The fact
that the 11-year-old was happy on her current team, where she had many
freinds and was content with the level of play and the number of games
and practices and the length of a discrete season (as opposed to
playing virtually all year round in club) didn't matter to him. 

The mom also  considered teh effect of that kind of schedule on her
family of four. Giving up her Saturday mornings for the length of a
soccer season was what she felt they could handle. She did not relish
the idea of giving up most of her weekends for the whole year,
especially when her daughter was not asking her to and soccer was not
the be all and end all of her life. 

Sometimes a kid is so talented, they need a higher level of play or
they'll be bored. So in that kind of a case, the parent is taking the
lead from the kid, which is appropriate.  

Sometimes the pressure comes from the parents because they have a
dream of a college scholarship years down the line, or because they
want to encourage their child to be the best they can be, so they want
to give them every opportunity and get them the best training. But
sometimes the parents' heavy financial investment can be a factor taht
prevents a kid from quitting when he or she has lost their love of the
game, are tired of the demanding schedule or want to do other things
with their time, like try a new sport or drop out of sports and do
music or art or hang out with their friends.

 I interviewed a girl for my book who had been a top soccer player in
middle school and was in the Olympic Development Program, how many
people on her Class I soccer team in eighth grade were there because
they wanted to be there, and how many were there because  their parents
wanted them to be there. And she said out of 15 girls, at least five
or six wanted to quit but felt they couldn't because their parents
would be upset with them. 

Some of the kids who make this intense comitment all through grade
shcool and middle school may burnout by the time they get to high
school or cllege and drop the sport altogether, which disappoints the
parents. I talked to a mom of to athletic high school boys who said she
was seeing it more and more -- that her sons' friends who'd devoted
all those years to elite soccer got to high school and informed their
parents they were switching to lacross or football. And the parents
said, "What? After all we've invested in soccer???"

I've heard the same thing from kids who make that kind of choice when
they go to college. One club and high school soccer star told me his
parents didn't expect him to get an atheletic scholarship, but they
were absolutely dumbfounded when he didn't go to tryouts as a walk-on
in his freshman year. His attitude was: I've been doing nothing but
soccer my whole life. I'm done. I want to just be a student and see
what that's like. I want to know what it's like to have a social life
and be a regular kid and not have to go to practice every day after my
classes.

The men's soccer coach at Lehigh University, a D-I school, in
Pennsylvania told me that every year since he's been there, which is
about 15 years, as I recall, at least one of his freshman recruits will
come to him and say, "Coach, I have to quit the team. I've been doing
this since I was 5 and I'm burned out. I've lost my love of the game.
I'll be no good to you or the team if I stay." 

So I think there are costs to this intense sports life that parents
need to consider along with the gains. And one of the coasts can be
burnout. 
  

    
Good point up there about there being many more academic scholarships than 
sports scholarships. Anyone have some hard data on this easily at hand? 

My feeling is that math is so poorly taught in most schools, public and
private, that going heavy on the math (we're home-schoolers) is the most
effective (and for us, clearly the easiest) route to a good scholarship
offer. FOrtunately he seems to like it.
  

    
Here's one quote for you: In 2005, Tim Welter, executive director of
the Oregon School Activities Association, a nonprofit that oversees
high school sports, told O'Brian Meehan, a reporter for the Oregonian,
"There is 30 times the money available for academic scholarships than
for academic scholarships." 
  

    
Forgive my typo-- that sentence shoud read: "... 30 times the money
available for academic scholarships than for athletic scholarships."
(It's been a long day at the computer!) 
  

    
Lets talk about injuries and young bodies. Now I haven't experienced
with my boy any repetitive stress injuries, What I've begun to notice
(he's just about to turn 12) is the onset of growing pains and how the
stress of skating hard is effecting his knee and ankles pain-wise.  I
experience the same thing from Basketball when I was the same age. I
remember from age 12 to around 15 having days so bad I it hurt to walk
but still getting pressure from my high school coach and my father to
come to practice and at least shoot free throws when I knees were too
inflamed to run or jump. 

I don't want Ethan to go through this. I think this has got to be bad
for his growing body. The problem is if he stops playing hockey at 12
and then wants to start again at 15 he'll be so far behind in
skill-sets and experience that he won't be able to compete -- in fact
it would be dangerous for him to be on the ice with kids that can skate
twice as fast and check twice as hard. And this not being Ottawa,
there are not rec leagues for causal hockey or just pick up games on
the frozen streets. If he was playing soccer, I'd ask him to try
something different while his growth spurts are taking place. Like
chess club or drama (which he's doing now anyway).  he's not the only
kid on his team I've noticed complaining about sore knees and ankles
from the 2 hour practices a couple times a week.

So part of me really wants to revolt. However as I found out last
weekend when he was doing a stick time/scrimmage at Yerba Buena Center
Ice Rink in the city (a really beautiful place to skate on a sunny
Sunday morning, btw)and he skated to the boards to tell me his knees
was really hurting, then got mad at me when I told him it was time to
get off the ice and rest it. It's complicated. I'm afraid that next
time he won't tell me it hurts so he won't have to stop playing with
his pals. Mean old dad worrying about protecting his knees. I'm torn
between making him sit out from something he's grown to really love
(he's been playing with the same boys for 5 years, has formed really,
really strong friendships and call his team his extended family and
everyone who plays hockey a member of his tribe).  It's kind of the
opposite of what I described above about having a pushy father who made
me play the sport HE liked rather than letting me find my own path. 
This raising kid stuff is hard sometimes.
  

    
There are so many unique factors when it comes to hockey, some of
which you cite, especially there not being a casual alternative or
abundant places to do it. I would talk to a sports medicine
professional -- an otheopedist or even a physical therapist about how
to address the specific problem of training while going through growth
spurts and get suggestions about how many hours of play is safe, and
try to deal with limits and restrictions that will actually extend the
young athelete's ability to play longterm. If his knees get damaged
permanently when he's 12, he risks not being able to play hockey or
other sports at all. 

The treament for overuse injuries generally is time off to rest and
heal. This is hard for coaches, parents and athletes to accept. But
it's really a simple concept. And I'm told it's more often the parent
who resists than the child. When the doctor says, "He'll have to be off
for 5 weeks," the parent quicky says, "How about three?" 

There has been a dramatic rise in overuse injuries that has
corresponed to the rise and dominance of the club system, which 
ushered in year-round play in one sport as opposed to seasonal play in
different sports, where kids use different muscle groups and get breaks
between seasons. Kids in youth sports are training harder and longer
than many college and professional athletes. The NCAA sets limits on
hours gymnasts can train for example, but youth gymnasts typically
train more hours than that. One doctor in my book said no professional
would ever play six games in a weekend, the way club soccer kids do
routinely at tournaments. 

So I think we parents need to look at the excesses and ask is this
really the best thing for growing kids. It's always been our job to
protect our kids from harm and to concedrn ourselves with their
physical well-being. So why should we give up that mandate when it
comes to youth sports? To prevent overuse injuries, the American
Academy of Pedatrics recommends that kids not specialize in one sport
until puberty, because before that their growth plates haven't fully
formed, and that kids doing just one sport should take two to three
months off from that sprt to give thier bodies (and minds) a rest.
That's what used to happen: We called it summer vacation, when kids
flopped around in a pool or went to the beach or paddled a canoe at
summer camp for exercise. But that's been wiped out too, by year-round
training and competition. 

it's worth noting that the state of Utah decided to address the issue
by madating that in each high school sport, there must be a 10-week
break after the season ends when there can be no trainng or coaching in
that sport. That way the kids and the coaches get a break. Maybe we
should listen to Utah. We should at least listen to the pediatricians
and the orthopedic surgeons who see these broken young bodies in their
offices all year long. We should also list to Major League Baseball,
who I'm told are now wary of pitchers form the West who, because of our
mild climate, have trained year roung all their lives, and the scouts
wonder how long it wil be before their arm gives out. 

One of the most significant positive recent developments has been the
adoption this year of pitch counts in Little League. This policy, which
limits the number of pitches a player can throw, is designed to help
protect young arms. Dr. James Andrews of Brimingham. Ala., the
orthopedic suregon who pioneered the Tommy John surgery for pitchers,
lobbied Little League for five years (!) before they would agree to
creating the limits. 

I have to say I'm ballfed that parents are not more activist about
protecting children's health when it comes to sports. 
  

    
That leads me to ask if there are some sports in which the overall level of
brutality and potential injury are so great that they simply should not be
tolerated. I'm thinking in particular of American football, which seems to
kill a handful of high school and college players every year, and which does
serious damage to many others.

I have often thought that if professional football did not have the
tradition and money surrounding it, OSHA would not allow it.
  

    
Football isn't going anywhere, since there's too much money involved.
It's a big revenue source for high schools and colleges, and of course
there's the opportunity of a lucrative pro career. 

Parents are leading movements to make youth baseball safer, out of
concern for injuries and death caused by metal bats. There's a movement
to use softer balls (which already exist), and to have face shields on
 batter's helmets to prevent eye and face injuries. 

It's interesting to see when equipment innovations are adopted in
resonse to injuries. if you look at football films from the 1920s, you
see that the players are wearing almost no padding and slim leather
helmets. That's a far cry from the enormous armor-like getups of
today's players. And as I recall from my childhood, major leaguers only
wore their batting helmets while batting and runnign to first. Now the
players wear them as long as their on base.  So changes occur. It just
takes a while for everyone to agree that the problem is serious enough
to take measures and do things differently than your parents or
grandparents did them. 

Tradition is such a big part of sports, there's always resistence when
people suggest change. But when our kids' young bodies are at stake,
some things should be worth fighting for. 
  

    
I would hazard a guess that youth baseball has the greatest potential
for repetitive stress injuries due to the repeated violent stress of
the action of throwing. I'm glad to hear that pitching counts are
becoming common for youth teams. 

Weirdly enough, I've known 2 guys who were pitching phenoms who got
pro-contracts -- one fresh out of college and the other fresh out of
high school. Both of them had pretty much done nothing but play
baseball from the time they could stand and do a wind-up. Both of them
came up with shoulder problems in their first season of triple A and
subsequently got dropped by their team as not a safe bet for pro
development.  Shoulder problems at that young an age was a wildly
waving red flag of over-use and a sure sign of no future.  So putting
your kind on multiple baseball teams, getting advanced coaching to
teach them multiple pitches and playing year round could actually be
hurting their pro chances. 
  

    
Yup. That's why the medical community is leading the charge to inform
parents that more is not always better. Parents need to consider the
ramifications of all this training and overuse that they've promoted
for a good reason -- out of love, to support their kids and do what
they thought was heloing them to be happy and successful. But now they
need to consider the new information and abundant evidence that's come
out. It's time to take a step back and look at the consequences of this
path. There are risks as well as benefits. The approach needs to be
more measured and rational. We should want our kids to be healthy for
the long run.

 So many athletes are having serious mulitple surgeries and are left
with debilitated muscles and bones. And many are told by doctors that
they will get artritis early. What a thing to hear when you're in high
school!  And the orthopedists say nearly all overuse injuries are
preventable. 
  

    
I wonder about the kids at the other end of the spectrum -- whose athletic 
gifts are limited (or nonexistent). They just want to play, and their 
parents want them to have the team experience and get some exercise, but 
the system focuses more on winning.

My son Mark was essentially fired from soccer in second grade after we 
signed up for a postseason tournament weekend. The coach called me to say 
that they didn't want Mark to play -- they intended to use that roster 
spot for a player with some skills. He told me he didn't understand why 
Mark was playing at all, since he was so weak. (One of the other dads, not 
realizing who he was speaking to I hope, told me "Mark is worthless" on 
the sidelines of a game one day.)

It was baaaad.
  

    
Regan, you might be interested in an essay that Jose Ortega y Gasset
wrote on the sportive origins of the state.  

I'll try to find a web reference to cite.
  

    
Man, Lisa's story is awful. A mom I know told me a story about her
daughter who told her after her kindergarten season in soccer that she
was done with soccer because the coach favored more talented players
and kept her on the bench too much -- in kindergarten!  The irony is
that the girl's older brother and sister are sports starts who both got
college scholarships. So that coach might one day have wished he'd
hung onto that player, who may grow up to be good at whatever she
tries, as long as her coach doesn't give up pn her too early. 

i feel like my kids have learned a lot of life lessons when they've
had to deal with a variety of skill levels on their rec team. Sure
you'd like everybody to be great and win all the time. But the thrill
of seeing a weak batter finally connect or a weak outfielder finally
come through and catch the fly ball that kept the other team from
scoring -- those moments are some of the highest sports moments we've
had. And seeing  a soccer player we might have privately written off as
hopeless show up the next year with a totally different level of
athleticism because they've grown or they've finally developed the
skill and finesse or strength they needed-- it's exciting. "She's
really good this year!" we'll hear on the way home...    
  

    
I remember in the 70's when concerned mothers began pushing their
young sons and daughters to play soccer instead of American football
because it was believed to be so much safer.  In college I was a
student coordinator for several sports--flag football, soccer,
basketball, softball, volleyball.  By far, the sport where the most
injuries occured was in soccer: broken legs, severely twisted knees,
ankles.  Someone compared it to karate where the black belts rarely
hurt one another, but the white belts, with poor body control,
routinely injured one another.  American football has its share of
injuries, but soccer is not some benevolent meditation on goal-seeking.
  

    
i feel like my kids have learned a lot of life lessons when they've
had to deal with a variety of skill levels on their rec team.<<<

Ethan was a first year pee wee hockey dude last season. Pee Wee is the
first year you can check and Ethan being young and inexperienced was
getting knocked around pretty regularly at the beginning of the season.
Two of the older kids, guys who really knew the score and were
standouts took it upon them themselves to take Ethan under their wing
and show him how to hit and more importantly show him how to take or
avoid a hit. I'll never forget the first time he put it all together in
a tourney down in San Jose and really put the hit on an opposing
player. A clean check that knocked the guy clearly off the puck and
really rattled the glass. Ethan's whole team stood up and cheered for
him -- much back-slapping happened when he came off his shift. That one
corner of the whole season contained so many positives: camaraderie,
facing up to challenge and exceeding one's own expectations ( he was a
big discouraged by his lack of checking skills at the beginning of the
season) friendship and peer approval, teamwork and learning about
taking on leadership roles. 

His team had a lousy year win/loss wise but it was the most fun he's
had on a team because of the way the kids played together and treated
each other -- on and off the ice. 
  

    
I've learned that the kid's experience of a game or even a whole
season can be very different from the adults' view, especially when  it
comes to wining and losing. Someone outside the experience might look
at the win-loss record and think it was a bad season, but your  example
shows your son had a great experience regardless of that.

 At one of my son's Little League games at the season this year, it
was a miserably cold, foggy, windy day, and his team was having a tough
time scoring and fielding and my husband and I were thinking our son
would be in a bad mood after the game, which his side did ultimately
lose. But, much to our surprise, he was in a great mood. He got in the
car excaliming, "I love this team, It's such a great bunch of guys. It
think we're gonna be realy good this year." We were stunned. There had
been positive interplay in the dugout and on the field that we had no
awareness of. I asked, "So you weren't too cold?" remembering how we
had been forced to run to the car to see what extra clothing there
might be there for us to layer on, and we  even had to pass him a
longsleeved shirt in one of the early innings to put on under his
hjersey, but he answered simply, "No. Was it that cold?" He had been
having so much fun he'd barely noticed. I shook my head and thought
this was just a another reminder that it's his experience that counts.

 That's why Jim Thompson so the Positive Coaching Alliance stresses
the importance of using the right words in a postgame chat. It's best
to say something open-ended like, "So how did you feel about the game?"
Rather than picking a kid up and saying, "Did you win?" or, if you had
been there, making some statement about whether it was a good game or
a bad game. 

We've blown it when from our point of view we thought it was a great
game cause our son's side won. But it turned out he didn't have a good
time at all because he hadn't hit well and he'd made errors. So it can
work both ways. The key is holding back to hear how he felt about it
first. 
  

    
That really is the key, remembering that it isn't about us, it's about
the kids experience. It's not about us reliving our successes  and/or
failures through our kids. The first words out of my mouth after every
game and practice or scrimmage is , "Did you have fun?"  That is my
mantra.  

The new season is starting in a couple of weeks for the NorCal hockey
season but to tell you the truth, I'm more excited by the fact that
Ethan is going to a clinic to get certified as a linesman/referee. I'm
really looking forward to him getting to officiate games --and not just
because he'll make his own dough and can buy his own new $110
sticks....  heh   One thing his studying for the class and exam has
done is really highlight how difficult all the split second decision
the refs have to make. It's given us all a better understanding and
respect for the refs.  i.e. it's easy to make a mistake with the speed
of the game and all the subtleties and judgment calls. We've all been
studying the hockey rules bible. 

My only experience with understanding what training officials (coaches
 also have to attend yearly certification training) get has been with
our sport. Do other sports referees, judges, coaches, etc have to be
certified? I mean, like everywhere, you find father that coach teams
that their sons are on but they still have to go though the
certification courses for multiple levels. Even just to help out on the
bench and be a door opener for shift changes, you have to attend a
coaching seminar.
  

    
   >Do other sports referees, judges, coaches, 
   >etc have to be certified?

Competitive sailing is relatively anarchic in many ways, but for major
events they want a "judge" certified by U.S. Sailing (the IOC-approved
national authority for sailboat racing) The judge is in charge of protests 
and penalties, and sometimes also acts ad an on-the-race course referee. 

After years of officiating at local sailboat races I became a USS
certified judge just this year, and the process was surprisingly
non-trivial. There's a weekend of instruction from senior judges, a fairly
hard written test, and requirements for a fair amount of race management
and protest hearing experience.

Coincidentally I spent the last three days as judge for the Laser class
Pacific Coast Championships held here in San Francisco Bay. This involved
about 75 boats, many of them sailed by teenagers, racing in some fairly
rigorous wind and wave conditions. My job was to buzz around the fleet in
a small powerboat and call "Rule 42" infractions. That is, catch people
using body kinetics in illegal ways to make their boats go faster. It
might seem that body movements should be part of sailing a small boat, but
sailboats are supposed to be propelled by the wind, and if you pump the
sail controls in and out and rock the boat like crazy you can make it go
faster, sometimes much faster, which isn't how most sailors want the game
played.

The first two days it was so windy that everyone spent more time in the
water than on their boats, and if they pumped to catch a wave (one pump
per wave is allowed when there's a chance of surfing, but two or more is
an infraction) then the surfing run was more likely to end in a
spectacular crash than a gain in position.

Today was a little more mild, so instead of playing rescue boat I called
three racers on infractions and made them do penalty turns.

Normally there would be four judges for a fleet this size, but since this
was only a regional event, we only had one. It was a job for Mad-Eye
Moody. No complaints about inconsistency, though, so I think I gave the
illusion of fairness.

One thing about the win-loss success-failure dynamics of sailboat racing,
though: Only one boat wins, everyone else has to settle for something less.  
For a lot of us, coming in second can feel like accomplishing less than 
placing 2/3 down the fleet.

I don't know if this is better or worse than team sports, where in theory
your team wins half the time. New sailors can go many years before their
first actual win in open competition. 
  

    
I uploaded a photo from one of the races on Friday:
http://www.well.com/user/pk/photos/
  

    
nice photo, paul.
  

    
I'm sure every sports has a training/certification process for coaches
and referees. I know soccer, baseball, softball, basektball and
volleyball do. When you register your kid, the league lets you know
that vlunteers are needed for these positions, and if you'd like to
volunteer, here's what involved in terms of training classes etc. 
  

    
I want to swing around to one point of the book where I didn't agree
with you, Regan. that is, where you come down squarely against holiday
tournaments and advocate parents revolting against the system of
clusteering  travel tourneys around holidays from school like the
Christmas break or mlk day.  If the tourney's happened during non
holiday, not time off from work weekends, It would be a hardship for
most people not to mention we don't all want to pull our kid out of
school just for some games.  Traveling with your kid can be fun and
bonding -- having lots of time for family time in the hotel rooms and
dining out and squeezing in other activities on off days or days when
you have an early game with nothing to do for the rest of the day and
night.  But most of all the kids love the tournaments and the
opportunity to play a bunch of games back to back. This is fun for them
and fun is the mission.

If a parent doesn't want to have this level of experience then they
need to re-evaluate the level they allow their kid to play at. There
are always school teams.