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Little League Lessons

September 12, 2014

Little League Baseball turned 75 years of age this year, and the anniversary had shone a media spotlight on the organization even before a hard-throwing female pitcher stole the show at the Little League World Series last month.
Little League’s veteran CEO Steve Keener gave Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal (Aug. 4-10) the same words we’ve said often to ourselves about school-sponsored sports. He said:  “... our mission today is the same as it was 75 years ago. We just have to find different ways to tell the story ...”
One of Little League’s responses to this challenge parallels our own. In the words of Sports Business Journal, Little League “has turned its website into a vast resource” for league administrators’ tools, for coaches education and for parents.
Like school sports, Little League has different parents today than years ago. “For them, the youth sports fields aren’t so much a destination as a path;” and they need help navigating the pressures from instructors selling lessons, travel leagues promising exposure to college recruiters and professional scouts, and coaches of other sports who threaten that without year-round specialization, the “next level” will be beyond their child’s reach.
Like school sports, Little League still preaches the benefits and encourages multi-sport participation; but Little League has succumbed to pressure and now offers a fall program in addition to its late spring and summer program. Keener explained to Sports Business Journal: “... leagues were going to offer a program in the fall with Little League or without it, so he’d prefer they be subject to the same oversight as they are in the traditional season. ‘We offer it because we can’t stop it,’ Keener said. ‘We can’t make it go away. So we have to live with it and manage it.’ ”
We have often talked about taking a similar approach to summer basketball, 7-on-7 football and other programming that is currently outside the quality control that some school administrators and coaches think is needed.

Mission Control

May 5, 2015

As we survey all that might be done in the future to improve the health and safety of student-athletes, it is good discipline to look to the past and recall when hype or hysteria caused well-intentioned people, and some not-so-well-intentioned people, to campaign for solutions to problems that either did not exist or could not be effectively addressed through mandates on school sports.

Over the years, school sports has been asked to address much more than what occurs on the practice or playing field. We’ve been asked to address drunk and then distracted driving; bulimia and bullying; texting and sexting; hazing and homelessness; seat belt use and steroids, which provides a perfect example of the limitations of fixing societal problems through mandates on school sports programs.

After more than a decade of voluntary educational efforts and just about the time when steroid use in schools began to trend downward, state legislatures caught wind of the “problem” and perhaps of potential political gain.

The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research reports that steroid use has been declining since 2005, which was just before the first state – New Jersey – enacted a law requiring schools to test high school athletes. Undaunted, the Texas legislature followed suit three years later. Undeterred, the Florida legislature followed the next year, and then Illinois lawmakers acted.

Florida discontinued its mandated drug testing program after just one year, and Texas is about to end its program, after spending nearly $10 million. Florida conducted 600 tests. Texas ran more than 60,000. Florida had one positive test. Texas reported less than one percent positive tests.

Because leaders of school sports have the statistics to link sports participation with improved attendance, achievement and attitude at school, we make our programs vulnerable to assault by passionate people who want our good programs to fix their bad problems. We have to be careful to avoid a situation where, in trying to address so many of society’s problems, we actually solve none; and worse, become distracted from our core chore of conducting safe, fair and sportsmanlike programs that make schools a happier, healthier place for student academic achievement.