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If kids' sports is undergoing a kind of privatization, with the most talented kids forgoing high school play altogether in favor of the elite travel clubs, the future of high school athletics could be bleak indeed. Dean Crowley, commissioner of athletics at the California Interscholastic Federation, points to the precarious position that sports programs already hold in many cash-strapped schools. "Pretty soon they might say, 'Why do we need to spend all the money we do on sports? These kids are playing all year round anyway.'" And then? "Then you don't have high school athletics." And then too, the best coaching and the most challenging opportunities would be limited to the kids whose parents can afford private club sports. Which is not what anyone had in mind.
We Americans are a competitive bunch. It was probably inevitable that the striving impulse would sooner or later reshape kids' sports. But the trend has been abetted by other, less predictable changes in American life: the ascendancy of the automobile, the shrinking of open spaces, the ubiquity of the two-earner family and the pervasive fear of crime. Baby-boomer parents may look back wistfully at their own childhood, when playing sports was a matter of heading to the corner sandlot or the neighborhood park after school for a pick-up game. But the sandlot's been filled in by a four-bedroom Cape Cod with a two-story atrium. To pay for the Cape Cod, Mom and Dad are both working, and with Mom and Dad both working, the kids are signed up for extended-day sessions at school. And by the time extended-day is over, it's dusk. And even if Mom and Dad were home, they'd never let the kids wander alone to the neighborhood park. You never know who they'll find at the neighborhood park.
So what's a parent to do? We do what Americans have always done. This is, after all, a country that systematizes: we create seminars on how to make friends, teach classes in grieving and make pet walking a profession. In that light, Gregg Heinzmann's praise of unstructured play seems almost un-American. Any activity, no matter how innocent or trivial or spontaneous, can become specialized in America. So if our children are to have sports, we will make leagues and teams, write schedules and rule books, publish box scores and rankings, hire coaches and refs, buy uniforms and equipment to the limit of our means. We will kiss our weekends goodbye--and maybe more than our weekends.
To most parents involved in kids' sports, all the criticisms sound like the dreariest party-poopery. There are joys that can't be organized, pleasures that resist the rigors of systematization. And these remain unextinguished, even in the overwrought world of kids' sports today. In Morristown, N.J., at the Beard School gym, Kelly Donnelly is whiling away the last moments before a soccer clinic. Dad Pat has driven her there, of course. He watches as Kelly spends a minute or so keeping a soccer ball suspended by bouncing it lightly off her knees, in a kind of airborne dribble--a bit of magic that only the rarest adult could pull off.