Division I
and professional sports on television have a tremendous influence on youth
sports and high school athletes. They also have a remarkable effect on coaches
coaching youth and high school sports. This influence can be seen in every game
and many practices.
Now to be fair and clear, this influence has
been reflected in youth and high school sports since sports first appeared on
television. Heck, you can even go before that when most of a fan’s exposure to
pro and Division I sports was from actually going to watch a game in person.
But today’s
influence has been ramped up and super sized to the extent to where I have seen
performances that make me shake my head in disbelief and wonder if this phenomenon
can be slowed down and put back in perspective.
First let me
go through an example of two sports: soccer and basketball. Now I could go through
the others but you will see the picture clearly, I hope, from just these two
examples.
Soccer: I went to a varsity soccer game. The winning
team was up by 4 goals with ten minutes remaining in the game. There was no way
the losing team was going to catch up. So what happened when the winning coach
starting to substitute his “bench” players? (I despise that terminology.) The
losing coach saw the substitution, how could he miss it, it happened right next
to him, and decided NOT to substitute. With THREE minutes left in the game he
had five of his subs start to warm up by doing what I believe to be the most
ridiculous “preparation” to enter a game in all of youth and high school
sports. With one minute left he subbed them in. I asked the coach after the
game about this and he said, “They don’t play hard in practice so why should I
worry about their playing time in a game.” So, I said, “They won’t practice
hard if they don’t think they can get into a game; and I don’t mean a couple of
minutes at the end of the game! He said,”They only sub three guys in a game in
the pros!”
This coach
is limiting competition. This is just another form of entitlement. I went to
four of his games and for the 320 minutes of soccer I watched, I saw them
complete four passes in a row ONCE! He did not sub more than three kids in a
half, and only subbed more than six once. Does he really think that the other
guys sitting on the bench needlessly could not do this poorly? Oh, by the way they scored 6 goals in those
four games.
You want to
know why kids are quitting youth and
high school sports. Here it is. It is no fun when you don’t get to play. NO ONE
gets better sitting on the bench.
If I could I
would have “on the fly” substitutions in youth and high school soccer, just
like hockey. I would have a 5x10 foot box in front of the bench and have kids
hand off a “pinney” to each other as they came in and out of the game.
Basketball:
I followed a varsity high school basketball team for four games. I really only
needed one game to figure things out, but I wanted to be sure, and I like
watching sports. The coach was constantly calling out plays, just like in DI
and the pros. (To be clear I have seen this done as low as sixth graders). He
would yell Georgetown, Kentucky, and other major Division I colleges as a code
for them to run a play. So I started charting these plays to see how often they
were successful. I also wondered why each play was called. After all, in DI and
the pros there is a reason for who plays with whom and what play is called.
I started to watch the players on the bench.
By the second half they were totally disinterested. Why should they care, they
were not going to get to play. The coach told me they were “role” players and
they were satisfied with their roles to “help the starters get better.” So I
talked to the players and asked them. They were not happy.
As I asked
one player, “What do you think of having to know math to participate at the varsity
level of high school basketball?” He smiled and nodded. You see he knew exactly
what I was talking about. These kids that sit on the bench know that he had
subtracted or added the score of the game by either how much they were ahead or
behind. Then he had to divide that by the coaches’ ego, the amount of subs
sitting next to him, and the time left on the clock to figure out what were his
chances of getting into the game.
The solution
is simple. It’s just not easy to implement. It takes a true commitment by
adults to give youth and high school sports back to the kids.
There is
absolutely NO correlation between DI, pro sports, and high school and youth
sports for 99% of the children, organizations, schools.
Make the healthy choice. Equal play pre
puberty and play by performance post puberty, Junior Varsity and up.
Sweden which
sends more professional athletes per capita than any country in the world does
not make cuts until the children are 17
Play a lot
of kids, and keep playing a lot of kids. Inter team competition is the best way
to coach. Every one runs faster when they are being chased.
There is not
that big of difference in the guy who you think is your best player and the
last guy on the roster. The more you play one child and the less you play the
other child, the less chance you have of your team building the competitive
chemistry needed to be a really good team and the removal of entitlement as a
coaching tool.
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