Youth Sports Drive Adults Crazy

My family moved to Westchester, Illinois, in 1956, where I began fourth grade at High Ridge School. At the time, my athletic skills consisted of catching and throwing a baseball. The kids in my new neighborhood taught me everything else – the nuances of playing various positions, mostly – and I became a decent player. In warm weather, on non-school days, I was always able to find or organize a game.

These contests, mostly held on empty lots, began with the assembled selecting two captains who then “tossed the bat” to determine which won the coveted first pick. Once the teams were determined, the rules were adjusted in keeping with the fact that there were rarely enough players to constitute two nine-boy squads. “Pitchers’ hands” was out. One catcher did double-duty (and was allowed no bias). No one could advance on a ball hit to right field.

We picked our teams, determined the rules, judged fair and foul and strike and ball, and resolved, without adult assistance, any conflicts that arose. My parents showed up for one of these sandlot games once. I didn’t have to be told my responsibility. I walked over to them and said, “Um, you guys have to leave. No adults are allowed.” They looked at one another, shrugged, and left.

Because the teams were never fixed, we learned how to play fairly without overly-antagonizing one another. Oh, we jeered at one another all right. We made fun of one another. Defensive players would purposefully obstruct an offensive player who was rounding the bases toward home. Arguments arose and would occasionally escalate into shoving matches, which no one approved of. Overly-aggressive players were benched until they calmed down. Bullies learned the value of humility, or at least the advisability of feigning it. It was play, but we were dead serious.

No adults were allowed, but they eventually wormed their way in. I experienced that, first-hand. When I was twelve, I joined a Little League team. The only adults at our games were the coaches. That year, I led the League in home runs and won every game I started as pitcher, including the League championship. When the next Spring season came around, I tried out for the Majors, as it was called. Adults, including the father of my arch-rival, ran the tryouts. Without going into detail, he made sure I didn’t make the cut. I took up golf and never played baseball again.

When my son was ten, he decided he wanted to play organized soccer. Concealing my reluctance, I went to the first game. The stands were full of screaming parents, some of whom ran up and down the sidelines, yelling instructions to their kids. Some came out of the stands to confront coaches or umpires or both. Later in the season, the father of one of the players charged out onto the field and slugged the home-plate umpire in the face for some offense against his progeny, who was surely destined for the Olympics. As a psychologist, my professional opinion was that there was something about youth sports that caused otherwise reasonable adults to become flat-out crazy.

After confirming that the scenes I witnessed were not anomalies, I wrote a column in which I offered a series of “free” (travel expenses only) speaking engagements to any community that would abolish adult-organized, adult micro-managed youth sports and simply provide kids with safe places where they could run their own games. At the time, my syndicated column (which I recently retired) was running weekly in more than five hundred USA newspapers. Lots of folks communicated their support, but no parent-group accepted the challenge. Maybe twenty years later, I repeated the offer. Crickets. This is the third time I have tendered the proposal. We’ll see, and I shall report.

In 2021, my wife and I went to Italy for three weeks. We mostly rode trains that passed through small towns and villages on their way to places like Rome and Florence. In nearly every enclave, we saw kids playing soccer in fields that were contiguous to the tracks. Not once did we see as much as one adult on the sidelines. I thought back to my childhood baseball experience and grieved the loss of authentic childhood in America.

Copyright 2023, John K. Rosemond