Linda Flanagan - Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports—and Why It Matters

The kid was on fire. He crisscrossed between opponents, dribbled left-handed, and snatched balls away from unsuspecting players. One minute he was knifing through a gang of defenders clumped awkwardly around the opposing basket and reaching up for a lefty layup; the next he was sending laser passes crosscourt to a teammate with good hands. Other boys seemed trapped in amber, while this kid danced circles around them.

Go, Paul! I yelled cheerfully. Paul, I should say, is my son, and I was thrilled to see him lighting up the court.

It was a Saturday morning in January, and my husband and I were perched on wooden bleachers in an elementary school gym watching our youngest child dominate another youth basketball game. The gym was stuffy and smelled vaguely of paste and dust, and Paul was drenched in sweat. Always an enthusiastic player, he dazzled that morning, darting around at warp speed and playing all roles on the team: racking up points, stealing lazy passes, grabbing rebounds, rallying his teammates.

That kid must have older siblings at home to play with, a man sitting behind us growled to his wife.

When the game ended, Paul loped over to us on the bleachers. Other kids heading toward their own parents called out to him, Great game, Paul! One of his teammates gave him a sturdy pat on the back along with the congratulations. Hey, nice game, a man said. As we all walked out of the gym together, adults and kids glanced over at us. I draped my arm around Pauls narrow damp shoulder and lifted my chin. My husband, Bob, did the same. Swooning with pride, we marched out to the car in the school parking lot and glanced around for others eager to congratulate us. (Us?)

For the next hour or so at home, we huddled around the kitchen table and rehashed the game, recounting Pauls star turns and quizzing him on what he was thinking at the time. While we were at it, I prepared a thick peanut butter and honey sandwich, no crusts, and handed him a tall glass of chocolate milk. Meanwhile, our two older kids, neither of whom would be caught dead watching their little brother play basketball, were splayed out on the soft brown couch in the family room, still in their pajamas, drunk on Full House. Except for the disenchanted siblings, that postgame powwow was an intoxicating, self-congratulatory lovefest.

Something had come over me as I observed my child shine on the court. It would come over me again, later, when Paul excelled on the baseball and soccer fields, too. It was pride, irrational happiness, self-satisfaction (self?), joya surprising, if unspoken, elevation of standing in the community.

Even then, I knew it was weirda tiny bit shameful (and possibly extremely lame). I recalled how my parents had engaged with my four siblings and me when I was growing up. While they had encouraged our athletic pursuits, carting us to practice and attending games when they could, they hadnt attached their psyches to our performance; their work, friendships, and other adult responsibilities took precedence. Our games were mindless diversions and an afterthought to their fuller and more complicated lives. But their indifference didnt feel like a deficit of love. Rather, it signaled that my games were my endeavor and that their affection for mefor all my siblingswas independent of what we achieved in sports.

Something had changed. I couldnt figure out why Pauls athleticism seemed to matter so much to me, and why kids sports animated everyone in my orbit. But I felt that pull from his earliest days. And by the look of the fields around town, all of them cluttered with children dressed in uniforms and ready to play, other parents felt that pull, too.

These motherly intuitions about sports inflated role were confirmed after I became a high school cross-country coach. When I stepped outside the gym that first morning, energized and wide-eyed about sharing my sport with the teenage girls gathered around me, I had no clue what was to come. It took about three weeks for the combustible nature of youth sports to reveal itself. All around me, parents and coaches began to squabbleover practice schedules, playing time, and who did or didnt make the team. The athletic director, God bless him, appeared to spend the first half of his day talking mothers and fathers off the ledge, and the second half advising coaches on how to break bad news to unhappy kids. In short order, my own inbox began to fill with requests from runners (or their parents) pleading for special dispensation: