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To be sure, plenty of kids still participate in sports through lower-intensity recreational leagues. But kids' sports, like other American institutions circa 1999, have succumbed to a cycle of rising expectations. More and more parents and kids want better coaching, more of a challenge and the prestige that comes from playing with the best. All of which fuels the growth in travel teams. Says Judy Young, executive director of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (a professional coaches' association) in Reston, Va.: "Nobody seems to want to play on a little neighborhood team for more than one season." Kids who want to make the big step up from "rec" sports to a travel team often take private instruction, at $70 an hour or more, or attend specialized summer sports camps and clinics, where attendance is booming. The governing body of Little League baseball, for example, has seen attendance more than double, to 2,900 kids, at its five summer-camp locations around the country. Kids' athletics today is not a pursuit for dilettantes--even among 13-year-olds, who used to be dilettantes by nature.
Coaches are recruiting talented children as young as eight, whose after-school hours, weekends and summer vacations are occupied by clinics, practices, tournaments and fight-to-the-death competition. The old childhood ideal of goofing off--what the grimmer parenting books term "nonstructured play"--isn't an option. As the kids get older, the more talented rise to ever more selective teams, perhaps representing an entire county, while their less gifted (or less committed) teammates drop away. Family holidays, including Christmas and Thanksgiving, dissolve into long treks to tournaments.
Coaches can get caught in bidding wars--recruited and signed to contracts drawn up by team managers and parents, for annual salaries as high as $60,000. If they don't perform according to expectations, they can be dumped with a dispatch that would make George Steinbrenner smile.
And waiting at the end of the young competitor's rainbow is more than a trophy, more than the thrill of victory, more even than the molding of good character that has been the traditional purpose of children's sports. Now the goal might be a scholarship to defray the stratospheric costs of college, or at least a record of athletic accomplishment that could provide the edge in gaining admission. The dream might be a berth on an Olympic team, or even a career in professional sports.
If all this sounds familiar, it probably should. Throughout the cold war, complacent Americans watched with disdain as promising youngsters behind the Iron Curtain were plucked from home and hearth and sent to spend their childhood in athletic camps where they would be ruthlessly forged into international competitors, exemplars of the totalitarian ideal.
But that was years ago. Watching the crazy culture of kids' sports in America today, a cynic might marvel at how the world has changed. The good news is that the cold war is over. The bad news is that the East Germans won.