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Attitude Adjustment

January 12, 2016

As an everyday, every hour observer of what’s happening to school sports and within school sports, I can get into a negative rut.

But if I step back, and then step out to a local school event – especially at the subvarsity level – my attitude changes. This is where I get a “fix.” This is where I discover the antidote for creeping cynicism.

Here I see coaches teaching, more than screaming. Here is where I watch an official not only make a call but explain it to the participant. Here is where I see athletes smile. And I do too.

Many years ago my son told me how much more he liked coaching at the middle school level than at the high school level. At the younger level, appreciative parents saw him as the one tapping into new talents. At the higher level, overbearing parents said he was missing or misusing their child’s talent.

The subvarsity level – the arena of discovery and development – is underappreciated. In fact, it is often where the best of what we call “educational athletics” occurs.

The Fun Factor

November 14, 2014

My experience with school-age young people is that what they seek most from sports participation is fun and friends. More sophisticated research from many sources consistently has affirmed my less formal findings.
The Journal of Physical Activity & Health added a July study to the body of research. This work was conducted by George Washington University in Washington, DC, and focused on organized soccer.
What was so surprising about this study is not that winning was not at the top of the list of what makes sports enjoyable for youth, but that winning ranked 48th of 81 factors measured. Winning didn’t even make it in the top half!
The lead author of the study, Associate Professor of Sports Psychology Amanda Visek, was quoted by the Chicago Tribune to say “the fun experience is not determined by the result of a game but rather by the process of physically engaging in the game.”
Tribune writer Danielle Braff quotes this research and other expert commentary that coalesces around the consensus that it is parents, not athletes or coaches, who are most hung up on the outcome of the game, as well as the issues that create the pressure on young people that ruins the pleasure of play: position, playing time and prospects of making an elite team or earning a college scholarship.
That’s the stuff parents worry about much more than their kids. And, according to a growing body of research, some of which we've cited in this space before, that’s the stuff that causes many kids to quit organized sports. It’s not fun anymore.