The Introduction to my book Stop The tsunami in youth sports

INTRODUCTION:

“What happened?”

What if I told you that . . .?

*balanced excellence, not specialization, is the key to athletic success and life?

*athletes only get better playing in games, not sitting on the bench?

*nothing a child does before puberty is a solid indicator of future athletic success?

*health is the leading indicator of future success for an athlete?  (that includes structured rest)

*playing for fun can help teams win way more than playing a sport just to win?

*just because you specialize in one sport, doesn’t mean your talent is special?

Let the journey through this book, just like your journey through youth sports and life, reveal to you the extrinsic message that will trigger the internal, intrinsic change in your own journey through youth sports and life.

Are you frustrated and tired of paying fees and footing the bill for your child’s participation in youth sports? Is the time you spend year-round going to practices and attending games wearing you down? Does your son or daughter find playing youth sports to be a chore, a job? Does it seem that the farther the player goes “up the ladder” in competition, the more problems arise and the less fun the player has?  Are the bulk of your financial contributions to your child’s participation in youth sports being used to support the development of one or two “star” players (not your child) on the team?  Do you and your family feel left out, alone? Do you feel the need to look at other options, but can’t figure out what they are and how to find them?

Are you thinking of volunteering to coach a team, but are unsure of what you’re getting into? Are you presently a coach who finds things just aren’t going the way you thought they would? Are you finding it difficult to get objective advice from people, worried they may have a hidden agenda?

Whether a parent or a coach, would you like some pointers and tips that will give a better feeling about what you’re doing? Are you just plain confused about the whole “youth sports” thing and would like to know what happened to the “fun” you experienced when you were young and part of a team?

Families and players are leaving youth sports en masse because of adverse treatment by coaches, players, and parents. Fun has been replaced by angst, bewilderment, and sometimes anger.

Why is all this happening? What are the short- and long-term consequences of people feeling this way?

One of my goals in writing this book is for people to understand how important balance is in achieving happiness and contentment in youth sports and life.  I’m really trying to help calm the angst and tense atmosphere so prevalent in today’s youth sports world.

***

Youth sports are supposed to be fun. The number one goal is for the young athletes to enjoy playing their chosen sport or sports. But, how can they do this given the current state of things?

There is a way. It’s called “balanced excellence.”  Balanced excellence is a mindset that allows everyone, including but not exclusively players, coaches, and parents, to benefit from the desire to excel in all areas of life in a balanced manner. We should strive for the qualities of excellence pertaining to and including humility, sportsmanship, and accountability. There is no ulterior motive or long-term financial goal. It’s all about fun. Enjoyment and learning life skills are the only real goals of the experience of playing youth sports. Everything else, winning, getting better, scholarships, will take care of itself, but only when this essential base is established.

Children want to be able to trust that the people and the teams they are with will include them in play. Trust is a huge part of youth sports and life that has been somewhat devalued. In life, how does trust, or the lack thereof, affect us on a daily basis at work, in school, and in relationships?  Children should benefit from this trust placed in coaches, parents, and teammates. Life lessons ought to be positive in nature. Children want to be happy. So, what happened to playing youth sports for fun?

Why has a primary goal of youth sports become a vehicle for Division I athletic scholarships? What are the consequences of this transformation? Why is the journey through a child’s playing youth sports now mostly for the reward, the glory? Athletes, coaches, and parents think that the more you win the better you are, and that is not necessarily the case.

College coaches want to see athletes in team sports working hard and playing well with others, not just winning. Why are youth sports so “goal-orientated?” Youth sports have morphed into a Tsunami, a wave of epic proportions, crashing over children and their families, leaving a swath of destruction in its wake. The allure of athletes playing for Division I schools and, possibly professionally, has become so enticing that for reasons we will explain in this book, we can’t see how unrealistic a goal that allure is to most children’s dreams. How did this happen? When did this wave begin to take over our lives, creating an undertow pulling our children, us, coaches, schools and businesses in its wake?

Will adults pass on to their families, and those generations to come, the stress-related environment created by the time and money spent on their children’s participation in youth sports? Will parents rationalize the manipulation of rules to justify their behavior? Will they fall into the undertow of “the rules apply to everyone but their children?” In turn, will the children then embrace that same attitude in their lives and the lives of their children? What consequences will, though unintentional but inevitable, come from this?  Will young players’ reputations carry through and adversely affect them and other players’ ability to improve?  What will be the fallout?

When looked at cumulatively, “pay for play” can run into the thousands of dollars per year. Does the cost of participation on a higher level of a sport give people the excuse to use the rationalization as a way to bend the rules in the name of entitlement? Could this phenomenon affect the judgment and decisions of most everyone involved now and in the future?

The answer is, “Yes!” That is, until we collectively agree to stop it.

***

The erosion of youth sports can be linked directly to the decision to have our children play one sport year-round and to the increased monetary commitment to the “pay-for-play” concept.  When did it become acceptable to have personal coaches, surgery before an injury, and rehabilitation as a way to get back on the playing field instead of just getting healthy?  The atmosphere surrounding youth sports programs has changed dramatically and negatively over the years since this concept was created. Good kids, good athletes, are telling their parents that they do not want to play anymore. The truth is that they are not having fun. Seventy percent of all youth sports participants at the age of ten stop playing by age thirteen. There are those children who love playing their sports so much they want to play year-round.

My daughter loves chocolate, but I don’t let her have it all the time. It would make her sick!

It used to be a normal occurrence for children to play multiple sports. They played one sport for a season, putting away the equipment until the next season. They then went on to the next sport. Kids enjoyed going to practice and playing in games with their teammates. The enjoyment and improvement in skills were enhanced by having balance and diversity. This approach helped to develop the mind and body, together, through years of playing youth sports.  “Specialization” referred to the particular ice-cream or snack the player preferred to eat after each contest.

It used to be that children had fun playing sports just for the enjoyment of playing with friends.  Between sports, they could have active rest by playing pickup games in different sports or some other unrelated activity.  They could do school work or community service. These all helped to achieve “balanced excellence.”

Now, children are told by organizations, parents, and coaches to pick a sport and stay with it year-round.  Few people want to talk about where this is leading, as well as what the long-term consequences are if playing year-round doesn’t work out as planned.   There is too much ego and money involved for those close to youth sports to think clearly for the good of the children. No one wants to talk about the children, families, and coaches who have been consumed by this recent phenomenon of specialization. Many have ended up breaking down mentally, physically and emotionally by the journey and results.  They are quietly being pushed aside and their discontent is silenced as a new generation of hopefuls takes their place.  How did this transformation evolve?  Is there something going on in society that helps fuel this change?

We live in a time of “instant” gratification, information, contact, reward, and success.  Long-term goals are being overrun by short-term gratification, leading to the justification of selfish behavior.  Youth sports have enveloped good people, families, coaches, and school districts like a Tsunami, repeatedly knocking them down until they are too tired to resist.  They just “go with the flow.”  Some fear retribution; others feel they will fall behind or be ostracized by the athletic community in which they socialize and participate.

Why isn’t the idea of children having fun playing sports good enough anymore?  Why are playing multiple sports discouraged?  What happened to the enjoyment and the importance of the journey?  The value of the process itself has been, at the very least, diminished through year-round playing.  Youth sports have taken on a life of their own in importance and status in our culture.  When did having quality family time, or taking a family vacation become an interruption to the participation in year-round youth sports?  Time away from youth sports should not need an excuse and justification for an absence.  We must get back to the fundamentals of playing for fun, learning life skills, and “balanced excellence.”

Recently, questions have begun surfacing regarding what is really going on in youth sports.  The long-term ramifications of playing year-round are beginning to emerge.  The idea that children enjoy sports and learn from the experience, taking the journey, has been replaced with short-term gratification and the hope of long-term financial rewards.  Most spend more than they will ever get back.

Glory, false rewards, and debilitating spending have overwhelmed youth sports. Parents and coaches are led to believe that the way to get to the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” can only come from playing one sport year-round. The short term reward of course, is winning. The long term reward is either a scholarship or professional contract.

This simply is not true.

My book is available from my website, frozenshorts.com in e book form now for $9.95 and the book will be out in paperback by the end of November 2012 for $15. You can follow me on twitter @VJJStanley, on Facebook at frozenshorts.com, you can reach me by email vj@frozenshorts.com

Food For Thought; Tomaotoes and youth sports

Tomatoes and Youth Sports

                It is impossible to know which tomato is going to be the best tomato when you buy a pack of tomato seeds at the store. There are so many choices and many experts who will want to tell you which tomatoes are going to be the best. Most will recommend their seeds.

                 They will tell you where to buy your tomatoes and seeds and will tell you the proper way to grow them. Some will even tell you that hanging them upside down is the best way to grow great tomatoes. People will even say that buying the more expensive seeds and putting them in one specific area, with what is perceived to be the best growing environment, will be the only way to grow great tomatoes.

                 The so called “experts” will say that you have to do it their way if you want to get great tomatoes, but they really can’t prove it. They will tell you that over the years they have grown some of the best tomatoes around, but what they don’t tell you and they don’t want you to know is how many failures they have had with this recipe of theirs.

                 What they also don’t want to tell you is how mass production leaches valuable nutrients out of the soil. They espouse growing the same tomatoes year round every year.

                 There is an alternative to their way. You need to grow a different kind of crop for a season to balance out the soil for future generations of tomatoes. So by not planting tomatoes for one season you will actually get a better tomato the season after.

                 They also don’t tell you that for the most part they work in an environment that gets them the best possible equipment, the best possible resources, and still doesn’t necessarily mean they will have the best tomatoes.

                They have produced a lot of tomatoes over time and are pretty proud of the exceptional ones they have produced and will relish in that paradigm all the while denying the real truth. Their way is not necessarily the best way to grow tomatoes. They are just defending their turf and want to be considered great tomato growers, but they really aren’t. They just have produced the most tomatoes and probably the most consistent ones .

                 Even a farm that specializes in growing tomatoes may or may not produce a great tomato.          Specialized fertilizer, specialized ridged standards, specialized packing and shipping instructions will produce, over the long haul, a very consistent tomato that most people will buy. They will throw out the weaker tomatoes and not think a thing of it. They are of no use to the mass production of specialized tomatoes for this farm or organization.

                Surely the farm with all its extras like specialized growers whose only job is to research and grow great tomatoes based on a specialized formula must know that continuing to do the same thing season after season will get boring. They will not be able to produce the highest quality of tomatoes because they won’t be as sharp mentally and physically.

                What fun is that?

                And how much are these tomatoes costing each and every year to try and get the best tomato?

               

                 So, do we really know which way is going to provide the best tomato? Could it be, and isn’t it possible, that the most unlikely seed, grown by a little old lady in her small garden, will produce just as good a tomato as anyone else. She has a secret little way, gleaned over years of caring for her garden , and experimenting with new ways, being a little creative, and adjusting to the crop that she has, that when added with love and positive reinforcement, will produce a truly great tomato.

                 But if you ask her, she will tell you that she loves her garden and the vegetables she grows and treats them all the same and loves them all the same. She will say everyone wants to be loved, needed, and appreciated, so why should her garden be any different?

                She will spend a lot more time caring for the tomatoes in a nurturing way than she will never scold the tomatoes or those helping her grow the tomatoes for not being ripe on time or not being the best tomato. She will rarely take credit and brag about her tomatoes. She knows the tomatoes are the real story, she was just the nurturer. She stays humble, trustworthy and loved.

                 Her joy is in watching others eat the tomatoes and feel good about doing something for others. She cares for ALL the tomatoes equally knowing full well that her efforts in this area may or may not produce a great tomato. She will look on with pride at her tomato garden and be pleased with the effort she put in as much as, if not more than, the results.

                 You must nurture them ALL over a long period of time to help them grow and in the end when they are fully grown you will find out which tomato is the best. Even then it is not the fact that you have one great tomato. It is more that you have grown a lot of tomatoes that when put together make a great sauce, salad,  juice, or even just a snack to be enjoyed and thankful for. However, even when you may think you have a great tomato growing, and you see the potential for that tomato to be the best, another tomato may turn out to be better than that one.

                 If you eat the tomato before it is ripe because you can’t wait any longer, the tomato won’t taste as good as it will if you let it ripen more, will it? It may be the best tomato at the time, but by picking it, and saying it is the best tomato, you have given the tomato a status that it has not truly earned because it really isn’t better than all the other tomatoes, it just got a head start and is better now than the others.

                 Even if you do have the best tomato, you still must grow other tomatoes if you want to keep having good tomatoes to eat.

                A smaller tomato may turn out over the long haul to be a better tasting tomato than the one big one.

                 Even if you are in a tomato growing contest you can’t judge who has the best tomatoes from the seeds. You have to wait a long time to find out. But even then, don’t you have to have other tomatoes to judge who has the best?

                Now let’s talk about the tomato contest. Let’s say your town is competing against other towns in a tomato growing contest. Could it be that even your third best tomato is better than the other towns best tomato? Or are all of their tomatoes better than yours? Does it really matter? Isn’t it fun just to compete? Even if we don’t win the contest wasn’t it fun just to try our best and enjoy the journey. Does winning or losing the contest really determine how good the tomato is and how much we enjoy it? Can anyone but you determine how much you like the tomato and how good it tastes?

                What may taste good to you may not taste as good for the other person. After all, they are just tomatoes and this is about enjoying the tomatoes, not your ability or ego in growing them, isn’t it?

                 Wouldn’t it be fun after the contest was over to exchange recipes and talk about growing tomatoes with the other contestants? Wouldn’t it be fun to get together with them at their garden or yours and just talk about how much fun it is to grow tomatoes?

                Could it be that you need a whole lot of tomatoes, and need to keep experimenting with the growing technique to find out how to grow the best tomato? Does it really matter if you grow the best tomato? Haven’t we learned how subjective that can be? Even then what may work for growing one tomato may not work for others. However, there is a base of growth for all tomatoes.

                What is it? You need to nourish them. They need watering and plant food. Sunlight and proper temperatures are essential for long term growth and well being. You can’t water them too much, or give them too much sun or too little sun without consequences. You need balance. But most of all isn’t it better for you and the tomatoes if you just enjoy the journey and process of growing tomatoes?

                It’s why I wrote my book, Stop the Tsunami in Youth Sports, and have a website frozenshorts.com and tweet @VJJStanley and speak to groups and train coaches and organizations

Violence in Youth Sports On and Off the the Field

            Have you ever purchased something and been unhappy or dissatisfied with the product? Your frustration grows until it becomes anger. You need to lash out at something or somebody.     If you are going to be screwed over someone is going to have to pay. It doesn’t have to be the person or company that you think screwed you. It could be something or someone totally unrelated to what got you upset in the first place.

             It could’ve even been something small, which over time continued to grow and fester until it became a big problem to you all the while staying under the surface of your day to day existence.

             No matter what you do you just can’t seem to catch a break. Things keep piling up and you are continually faced with making decisions under stress. Most of the time you are not even aware of something bothering you until someone close to you asks if everything is alright. Your usual response is; “Everything’s fine.” And I can tell you from experience, after being married to my wonderful wife for 20 years, when she says “everything’s fine” the you-know-what is about to hit the fan.

            Think how quickly you get upset when someone cuts you off in traffic, or how a seemingly simple malfunction such as not being able to find your keys causes you to stress out more so than you normally would.

You don’t think about it much as events continue to happen and the stress inside you builds up and finally explodes. After, you wonder how it happened, or you try to justify what you did.

            Last night at a high school sports event I watched a parent pace the sideline. Even with strict rules in place about staying on you your own team’s cheering section, this guy went up and down the sidelines, yelling instructions to his son and harassing the referees. After the game, as he was leaving, he told one of the other parents that “He did not know how much more of this he could take.” One of the parents responded with “I know exactly how you feel.” Really?

            During the game, while I was talking with another person, someone who, like myself did not have a child playing on either team, one of the players on the field made a very reckless play that injured both him and his opponent. Now some may say he was being competitive. No, he was not. It was a cheap play. Here is what is happening. The players on the field think that there is a chance for them to get an athletic scholarship so they are bound and determined to get ahead of the next player. Pushed on by parents and coaches who do not stress the importance of community, sportsmanship, and humility, they model the very behavior the parents and coaches are seen doing during a sporting event.

            The reaction in the stands was telling. A couple of parents cheered the play as it almost scored a goal. Another parent admonished the most vocal parent, and then turned to me and said “I guess that’s how fights start in the stands.”

            The parent who was yelling at the referees was admonished by the Supervisor at the game. So what was his response after the supervisor left? He started to cheer exponentially louder for his son’s team. His daughter who could not have been more than 10 years old put her hand on his shoulder and asked him to sit down and to calm down.

            Parents are paying thousands of dollars to have their children belong to a particular team or organization in youth sports. They want to get a return on their investment. The angst meter is already ramped up by the very fact that their child is playing in the “pay for play” sports arena. Inherently people want to belong to something. As the family unit dynamics have changed over the years people still have the need to belong to a group or organization to help with their identity. In prison they use solitary confinement as a way to take away that feeling of belonging. It is one of the most severe punishments.

Youth sports used to be the place where you could put your everyday worries and troubles behind you and just enjoy watching your children play and have fun. Sure there was always one whackadoodle in the stands but everyone avoided him and he was really left out to be by himself. What people don’t understand is that by watching the person yell and make a fool out of themselves, and I know the children certainly don’t want their parents behaving that way, they begin to subconsciously identify with  the yelling parent, or by not saying anything to them, endorse that behavior. Now I am not saying that you should go and confront that person. You do not want to get in to a fight over a youth sports game, but what I do want you to be aware of is the effect it has on you and those around you. Ever been in a room where it starts out with a group of people talking. Then as time continues, the room grows louder and louder and no one really seems to notice. They just keep raising their own voice so they can be heard. Go to a school cafeteria at lunch time and you will see exactly what I mean.

Now there is a thing called tacit community in which people will knowingly say or do the wrong thing when influenced by others with status. My generation called it mob mentality. It also seems that how educated the person is has no effect on how he or she will react to these situations.

             Let us take this classroom study done by Soloman Asch at Swathmore College and transfer it onto to the youth sport playing field. Heck, let’s transfer this paradigm to everyday life while we are at it. People have been sucked in by the belief that college scholarships are out there and are attainable by following this “pay for play” model. I recently had a young man tell me about John Wall and how he was discovered at a Reebok summer camp that cost $1000 to attend.  Two things from that statement. One, do you really think that John Wall would not have played DI basketball and be in the NBA if he not gone to that camp? Second, he proves the rule. Thousands of kids have gone to these camps and what became of them. Kids, coaches, organizations, and parents, use the exception to try and disprove our paradigm. They say he did it, why not my kid. Because the facts say the odds are incredibly small that your child will play in the NBA. 1 out of 100,000 kids between the ages of 19-23 make it to the NBA.

That’s why I wrote my book, Stop the Tsunami in Youth sports, available soon on my website in paperback form.

guest blog by mike arace

There are approximately 45 million children between the ages of 5 and 18 playing youth sports in America. Around 3 percent of them will play in college. A smaller percentage will make it to the professional ranks.
To all of them, we should say: Expand your horizons.
Focusing on just one sport is about the worst thing a young athlete can do. It mitigates the developmental benefits that come from playing, it is physically dangerous and, for the vast majority, it is actually a hindrance to their primary athletic pursuit.
• A summary of studies that appeared in the January 2012 edition of Psychology Today asserts that intensity, continuity and balance are the most important developmental aspects of youth-sports participation. The article, written by Marilyn Price-Mitchell goes on to say that balance — between sports and other activities — is probably the most important of the three. Children who vary their experiences rather than focus on one sport make for healthier adults because their world is wider than winning and losing.
• A Dispatch series on youth sports (printed in 2010 and still available at Dispatch.com) highlighted many concerns about a burgeoning, unregulated youth-sports industry. Among the biggest concerns is the rising number of injuries. The sports-medicine clinics run by Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Ohio State have seen an exponential increase in patients over the past decade. These local trends align with national trends.
According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, the number of children treated for sports injuries in 2010 was 3.5 million, up from 1.9 million in 2002. Nearly half the injuries are “ overuse” injuries to children who place stress on the same muscles and tendons in year-round, single-sport pursuits. A 2011 study out of Loyola University-Chicago concluded that single-sport athletes are almost twice as likely to be injured as multisport athletes.
Those who have concentrated on reducing sports injuries in children — such as Dr. James Andrews, the famed Tommy John surgeon — are unanimous in their belief that playing more than one sport actually serves as a preventative measure. It is to an athlete’s benefit to work different muscle groups and joints, learn different skill sets, change scenery and teammates, and be afforded proper rest.
As more data concerning the potential psychological, developmental and physical dangers of single-sports specialists have accrued, a certain movement has begun to coalesce. It is being led by people like VJ Stanley, a former longtime college hockey coach, youth coach of multiple sports, stand-up comic and Zen philosopher, among other things.
“If winning is so important at an early age,” Stanley said, “why don’t elementary teachers with master’s degrees in education teach winning to the little kids?”
Stanley is founder and president of a foundation called Frozen Shorts, which is based in Rochester, N.Y. His mission is to shift the American youth-sports paradigm, as the title of his new book suggests: Stop the Tsunami in Youth Sports: Achieving Balanced Excellence and Health while Embracing the Value of Play for Fun.
Stanley’s view — and that of others, such as Douglas Abrams, a University of Missouri law professor, part-time hockey clinician and an early crusader for change in youth sports — is that we have created a system that is geared toward specialization, and that this system is a long-term disservice to our children. On some level, the kids know it.
The peak of participation is age 10. By 13, some 70 percent of kids quit. Why? A raft of recent studies indicate that the fun is sucked out of it by overzealous parents and undertrained coaches who place far too much emphasis on winning. Specialization breeds such an environment. When costs rise and time commitment increases, joy dissipates in proportion — for the kids, if not the parents. (Some researchers, by the way, are beginning to link quitting sports to the child-obesity epidemic.)
“Children are better at their chosen sport when they do not play it all the time, and we can quantify that,” Stanley said. “We have to remember, these are not mini-professionals — these are children. Their creativity is to be found in a spectrum of experiences. When we push them to specialize, they lose their balance, and they have a skewed view of everything.”
We push them, or allow them, to play basketball, soccer or volleyball 11 months a year, and we tell them how great they are. We should be telling them the odds are they’ll never even play at the Division III college level, so try everything — and have a good time.
On some level, the kids know it. As Stanley points out, in the U.S., the fastest-rising sport in terms of popularity is Wiffle Ball, and kickball is No. 2. Are they the only sandlot games left?
Michael Arace is a sports reporter for The Dispatch.
marace@dispatch.com
@MichaelArace1

soccernation

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